High Time For Virtualization Vendors

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Software virtualization, which allows customers to run multiple versions of software on a single computer to save space and cut costs, is getting a big dust-up this week.

VMware, Cassatt and Surgient announced new products or partnerships to fortify their positions in this multi-billion-dollar market.

VMware said today it has combined two core virtualization tools into one product to help customers create virtual machines from physical machines, other VMware virtual machine formats and third-party formats such as Windows.

The software, VMware Converter 3, is a combination of the company’s P2V Assistant and Virtual Machine Importer, said Bogomil Balkansky, director of product marketing at VMware.

VMware P2V Assistant takes a snapshot of a physical system and changes it into a virtual machine so that administrators don’t have to reinstall and reconfigure applications.

VMware Virtual Machine Importer is a free tool that takes virtual machines from different sources and converts them into destinations for VMware software.

Balkansky said it just made sense for VMware to combine the highly complementary transformation products and offer them with its Virtual Infrastructure software going forward.

Now bound together and offered with VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure packages, the software creates VMware virtual machines from physical machines running Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista, Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4 SP4+.

The software performs these tasks while the source machine continues to operate so as not to disrupt computer services. Remote cloning features allow machines to be cloned from a remote console without manually using a boot CD.

The offering also transforms VMware virtual machines from Microsoft Virtual Server and Virtual PC and Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery formats.

VMware will provide a free version of the product, which allows conversions one at a time, and an enterprise edition that will perform multiple conversions at the same time.

This product will be offered at no additional cost to customers who have current licenses for VirtualCenter Management Server. Converter 3 will hit the market within the next six months.

Balkansky also said VMware launched ESX Server 3.0.1 and VMware VirtualCenter 2.0.1.

Both refresh support for Windows, Red Hat, SUSE and Sun Solaris 64-bit operating systems, and work with more servers and storage arrays.

Support for multiple 64-bit operating systems is a major step forward, because customers are increasingly tuning to the expanded memory and processing capacity of 64-bit systems to handle large data workloads.

In other virtualization news today, server automation startup Cassatt partnered with XenSource, which virtualizes servers based on the Xen open source hypervisor.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cassatt agreed to sell XenEnterprise virtualization software alongside its software for automating physical and virtual servers.

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