Survey: SMBs are Getting Serious about Information Protection

SpeechBridge for Switchvox:

Adding SpeechBridge speech recognition and text-to-speech solutions to Switchvox empowers customers and employees to gain access to important information and company resources using simple spoken commands. Learn how SpeechBridge can benefit your customers and help your organization sell more Switchvox!

Benefits:

• Improve customer service
• Comply with “hands free” cell phone laws
• Reduce operating costs

SpeechBridge Solutions:

• Custom speech-enabled IVRs
• Speech-enabled Auto-attendants and Directories
• 100% safe hands free access to email and calendar during “windshield” time

Incendonet’s SpeechBridge is a SIP-based, enterprise-grade, complete speech solution that we believe will be of substantial interest to businesses using Asterisk. It’s fast to deploy, easy to use and gives cost-effective Asterisk deployments the feel of much more expensive systems.” Said Rod Montgomery, Director of Product Management at Digium.

For more information go to http://www.coretekservices.com/?page_id=54

Source: Switchvox

Why You Need User Virtualization

User virtualization offers IT shops more control, makes remote management easier and improves the overall experience for end-users.

Think about how you treat your users’ workspaces. When a problem occurs with their desktops or laptops, what do you do? Do you “rebuild” the computer to return it to a base configuration? When you’re forced to do that rebuild, do you save their personal items? Is that preservation a painful process, involving manually locating their personal data and uploading it to a remote file server?

Expand this situation beyond just the simple desktop. Do users’ workspaces automatically transfer to their laptops when they go out on the road? Are they present when users connect to a RemoteApp or a published desktop via Remote Desktop Services? Do the workspaces synchronize themselves into their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)-hosted virtual desktops?

For most of us, the unfortunate answer is no. Today’s technologies with Windows profiles give IT environments a limited set of tools for maintaining a user’s access mechanisms on roaming workspaces. Users find themselves repeatedly wasting productive time simply getting their workspaces arranged to their liking.

Personality and Control
The primary problem here is that the combination of local and roaming profiles no longer serves the needs of today’s business climate.

That’s why third-party companies are creating solutions for managing user states. Different than Windows profiles, these tools take a vastly different approach to delivering the users’ workspaces to whatever access mechanism they need. With buzzwords like “user state management,” “user workspace management” and “user virtualization,” among others, these add-on solution sets make sure users are always presented with their comfortable workspaces no matter how they connect.

User virtualization solutions often leverage an external database for storing workspace characteristics. By eliminating the transfer-the-entire-folder approach of Windows profiles in favor of a database-driven architecture, it’s possible to compose each workspace on-demand. Individual personality settings are delivered to the users’ connections as they’re demanded, as opposed to users waiting on profiles to download. Further, because the user state is virtualized outside the desktop, the solution can manage personality customizations across all simultaneous connections at once. Should a user make a desktop change in one session, that change can be seamlessly synchronized to every other session to maintain the comfortable workspace.

The ubiquity of user virtualization solutions also gives IT an incredible amount of control. When such a solution is always present at every user connection, you can centrally enforce IT and business policies at those connections. Access to applications can be limited, operating system functions can be locked down and network connections can be filtered. A user virtualization solution lets you control the workspace and, at the same time, enable a subset of settings to remain personalized — and, thus, comfortable — for each user.

Finally, user virtualization supports rapid desktop refresh. If you’ve ever been faced with replacing a user’s desktop, you know the pain of manually locating and storing the user’s personal data. With a user virtualization solution in place, refreshing that desktop requires little more than rebuilding it and asking the user to log in again.

You can find user virtualization solutions from a number of vendors today. AppSense, RES Software, Atlantis Computing, Tranxition and RingCube, among others, are all vendors with products in this space. While their services come at a cost, their productivity benefits and enhanced control often greatly outweigh their prices. And who wouldn’t mind a little extra comfort as they sit down to do their jobs?

• By Greg Shields
  • 06/01/2010

 

Source: Redmondmag.com

Citrix Extends Client Virtualization

Virtualization software maker Citrix Systems last week unveiled the word’s first bare-metal client hypervisor, announced a new version of its server virtualization platform and welcomed news from several partners.

Citrix used its annual Synergy show, held this year in San Francisco, to let partners and customers know that it is aiming to extend its ecosystem.

The new XenClient product is a “super fast, 64-bit, bad-to-the bone hypervisor — a true Type 1 hypervisor that bonds to the laptop and delivers a bare metal experience to the apps, OS and things that run on top of it,” said Citrix CEO Mark Templeton, speaking in his keynote address. The company made an “express kit” trial version available for download and promised general availability later this year.

“Desktop virtualization is going mainstream,” Templeton said. “It’s becoming more and more of the fabric of enterprise computing.” Computer makers Dell and Hewlett-Packard disclosed plans at the show to roll out new laptops designed to support the new XenClient hypervisor. The bare-metal client hypervisor is essentially the same technology used on servers, but designed for a client machine.

Although it’s possible to use a server hypervisor on a client machine, it’s not made for that hardware, hence it lacks support for USB devices, graphics accelerators and other features essential to the client. Templeton declared that XenClient would “change the game” by adding a local hypervisor to the laptop, allowing a single-client box to run multiple VMs.

The advantages of running multiple VMs on a single corporate laptop are myriad: A user can, for example, keep personal computing files and apps on a corporate laptop securely isolated in a separate VM. IT can provide a temporary employee or contractor with VM loaded with corporate apps.

And client-side hypervisors make provisioning to mobile client machines much simpler. “People forget that last [point],” said Ovum senior analyst Tim Stammers. “But if you talk to IT departments, they’ll tell you making images for machines is a real pain. The local hypervisor solves that problem.”

Both Citrix and rival virtualization company VMware promised in 2008 to deliver a client-side hypervisor in 2009. “The fact that they were both late shows that this is very hard stuff,” Stammers said.

Native Bare Metal Hypervisor

XenClient is a Type 1 hypervisor, a native hypervisor that runs on bare metal. Existing Type 2 hypervisors, which have been around for a long time and allow users to do things like run Windows on a Mac (such as Player and Parallels), aren’t as secure as the native versions, Stammers said. Type 2s run on an operating system that can be hacked.

The XenClient was developed in collaboration with chip maker Intel, and optimized for Intel Core 2 desktops and laptops with its vPro technology. The hypervisor serves as “a foundation for centrally managed OS/user environments to be streamed, cached and executed locally on desktop/laptop devices, including off-network mobility,” the two companies said in a statement.

According to sources close to the company, VMware is concentrating on refining its Type 2 virtualization technology, rather than pursing a bare-metal client strategy. VMware had not returned calls for comment at press time. But Stammers believes that VMware will probably come out with a native client hypervisor later this year.

Conference attendee Larry Cohen, a systems administrator for a Silicon Valley manufacturer he preferred not to name, was impressed by the XenClient technology, but said he wished the company would focus more on XenCenter, the company’s XenServer management console. In particular, he’d like to see a better event viewer and logging capabilities. “It would make troubleshooting issues on the physical hardware a lot easier,” Cohen said.

Server Upgrade

Citrix also launched XenServer 5.6 at the show. The latest version of its server virtualization platform mainly fills in some gaps in the previous version, Stammer said. Memory management was one of the key enhancements, he said, but also pointed to new features in the Enterprise and Platinum editions, including automatic work-load balancing, power management and storage integration with StorageLink, Citrix’s platform for providing linking server virtualization to storage resources.

“This market has become a constant race to add tools,” Stammer said. “I often say that server virtualization gives you great flexibility, but flexibility can tie you in knots. So we do need these tools, and different shops need different tools.”

XenServer 5.6 comes in four editions: Free, Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum. Each edition provides additional features.

The free version of XenServer has become an “entryway for new virtualization customers” for Citrix, said IDC analayst Al Gillen. IDC is seeing a growing number of infrastructure vendors using the “free-plus-premium”offering strategy (sometimes called “freemium”) to build market share, Gillen said. 

Stammer applauded both Citrix releases, but said that the future of XenServer is uncertain. Increasingly, this market looks like it’s going to come down to Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware ESX, he said. He points to statements by Citrix executives, who as recently as 18 months ago, said that in the future most of Citrix’s business will come from the sale of tools used to manage Hyper-V.

HP Readies XenClient Notebooks

HP made a splash at the show with demos of the industry’s first Citrix-ready XenClient platforms. “Using a local hypervisor, the ability to bring the virtual machine down and run it locally, allows you to be productive whether you’re connected or not,” said Jeff Groudan, director of thin client solutions for HP’s person systems group. “So you have the mobility, but also a lot of the management capabilities inherent of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), such as being able to manage the image centrally.”

HP also gave a nod to Adobe’s recently beleaguered Flash technology with an enhancement of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 6. RDP 6 is one of the most common VDI protocols used by VMware View and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services environments, but it doesn’t Flash natively. The RDP Enhancements for Flash is a component that runs on the thin client machine and allows the server to redirect the Flash content down to the client, which also decompresses the file.

“One of the challenges of client virtualization, whether it’s Citrix or someone else’s VDI environment, is they don’t handle Flash very elegantly,” Groudan said. “The experience may not be very good, or it may overly load down the server when they do the decompression for the thin client. The RDP Enhancements fix that problem.

“It was clear to us that complexity of client virtualization has been an inhibitor of growth in this area, Groudan added. “So we have a laser focus on simplifying the process, but also on optimizing the end-user experience.”

HP also unveiled VDI reference architectures for XenDesktop and XenServer at the Synergy event. Joseph George, client virtualization business lead for HP’s infrastructure software and blades division, said the reference architectures are the fruit of his company’s ongoing strategy of “converged infrastructure.” HP believes that that strategy can accelerate the delivery of client virtualization.

“We’ve got the best portfolio out there when it comes to converged infrastructure and client virtualization,” he said. “And the expertise we have in our ranks has allowed us to put together these new reference architectures.”

The new HP and Citrix VDI reference architectures provide the functionality of a stand-alone desktop, George said, while enabling unified management of both physical and virtual infrastructures from the same centralized console.

The HP/Citrix VDI solution supports more than 1,000 users of XenDesktop 4.0, XenServer 5.5 or Provisioning Server 5.1, George said. It leverages HP BladeSystem’s c-Class or HP ProLiant servers with HP Flex-10 technology, HP storage and networking and a choice of HP t5740 or HP t5325 thin client machines.

The big gadget news at the event came from Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell, who surprised conference attendees by officially unveiling his company’s new mini-tablet PC during his keynote. It was actually more of a teaser than an unveiling of the device a MID (mobile Internet device) dubbed The Streak, which Dell casually pulled from his pocket while onstage.

“The device we use to access our information shouldn’t matter anymore,” Dell said. “Whether it’s a phone, or a notebook, a netbook or a desktop PC, your client image can follow you everywhere.” Dell then took the wraps off The Streak, which was loaded with the Android OS and Citrix’s virtual desktop software. Dell said The Streak would be available first in Europe in June, with a U.S. launched planned for later this summer. The carrier will be AT&T.

• By John K. Waters
  • 05/17/2010

 

Source: Redmondmag.com

CIO100 – Genesys Health System – 2009 Winner

Project Description: Genesys Regional Medical Center deployed virtual clinical workstations so clinicians can access information within seconds. Rather than logging in and out of several applications during a session, a clinician simply needs his security badge and a single password to log in and commence or continue a session. Logging off takes one keystroke, which suspends work into a virtual session that can be resumed remotely at any time. The virtual workstation has freed up to two hours a day for patient care, as well as saved the group an estimated $50,000 a year in IT costs and $30,000 a year in electrical consumption. (Source: CIO.com)

VDI Performance Acceleration – Atlantis Computing’s ILIO

VDI platforms use shared storage located centrally for VDI desktop images. However, Windows operating systems were designed to operate with a low latency dedicated local disk for every desktop. The Microsoft Windows family of operating systems is dependent on performing input/output (IO) intensive tasks such as file layout optimization, background defragmentation, antivirus scanning and virtual memory paging. However, in a VDI environment, these tasks result in placing a heavy tax on shared storage infrastructure as each user, application and desktop compete for limited IO capacity (measured in input/output per second-IOPS). Without adequate storage IOPS, applications and virtual machines take longer to boot and applications respond sluggishly, leaving users frustrated.

Atlantis ILIO is a revolutionary approach to deploying VDI that makes the Windows operating system perform well without massive investments in storage infrastructure. Atlantis ILIO boosts VDI desktop performance by transparently offloading IO intensive Windows operations from VDI shared storage. ILIO terminates operating system and application traffic on the same rack as the VDI servers before traffic hits the storage fabric. The result is a 10x performance increase for VDI desktops, which translates into faster VM boot times, logon, and overall application performance. Atlantis ILIO also eliminates VDI IO bottlenecks caused by boot storms, logon storms and antivirus scanning.

Source: Atlantis Computing

VMware Workstation 7 – What’s New

Introducing VMware Workstation 7

Winner of more than 50 industry awards, VMware Workstation transforms the way technical professionals develop, test, demo, and deploy software. Innovative features help software developers, QA engineers, sales professionals, and IT administrators to reduce hardware cost, save time, minimize risk, and streamline tasks that save time and improve productivity.

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15 Reasons to Consider Virtualization

Virtualization is a computer environment, which allows multiple “virtual machines” to reside and run concurrently on a single computer hardware platform.

A virtual machine is similar to a server, but instead of additional hardware it is software. In essence, it is the ability to separate hardware from a single operating system, thus providing better IT resource utilization, greater application flexibility and hardware independence.

By allowing several virtual machines with multiple operating systems to run in isolation — basically adjacent to each other on the same physical hardware — each individual “virtual machine” has in essence its own set of virtual hardware. The virtual operating system detects a controlled, normal, consistent group of hardware regardless of the tangible hardware components.

In addition, virtualization will control the CPU usage, memory and storage of the “virtual machines” and allow one operating system to migrate from one machine to another. These “virtual machines” are encompassed into files; these files are quickly saved, copied and migrated to another “virtual machine” thus providing zero downtime maintenance and controlled workload consolidation.

Saving Time and Cutting Down Costs Are Just the Beginning

Horizontal scaling or decentralization of data centers over the past several years have been mission intensive because centralized servers were viewed as too expensive to acquire and maintain. Subsequently, applications were moved from a large shared server to their own individual machine.

Although, decentralization aided in the constant maintenance of each application and improved security by isolating one system from another on the network, it also increased the expense of power consumption, large footprint requirements and higher management efforts.

According to xensource.com “… these areas have been known to account for up to $10,000 in annual maintenance cost per machine and decrease the efficiency of each machine by 85% due to idle time.”

The long and the short of it is: virtualization is a mid-point between centralized and decentralized environments. You no longer need to purchase a separate piece of hardware for one application. If each application is provided its own operating environment on a single piece of hardware you reap the benefits of security and stability, while taking advantage of the hardware resource.

Also, virtual machines are isolated from the host; so if one virtual machine crashes, all the other environments remain unaffected. Data does not leak across virtual machines and applications can communicate, provided there is a configured network connection. The virtual machine is saved as a single entity or file, which provides easy backup, copies and moves.

Why Use Virtualization? Let Me Count The Ways …

Since virtualization detangles the operating system from the hardware, there are several important reasons to take into account as to why you would want to use virtualization:

1. Data center consolidation and decreased power consumption

 

2. Simplified disaster recovery solutions

 

3. The ability to run Windows, Solaris, Linux and Netware operating systems and applications concurrently on the same server

 

4. Increased CPU utilization from 5-15% to 60-80%

 

5. The ability to move a “virtual machine” from one physical server to another without reconfiguring, which is beneficial when migrating to new hardware when the existing hardware is out-of-date or just fails

 

6. The isolation of each “virtual machine” provides better security by isolating one system from another on the network; if one “virtual machine” crashes it does not affect the other environments

 

7. The ability to capture (take a snapshot) the entire state of a “virtual machine” and rollback to that configuration, this is ideal for testing and training environments

 

8. The ability to obtain centralized management of IT infrastructure

 

9. A “virtual machine” can run on any x86 server

 

10. It can access all physical host hardware

 

11. Re-host legacy operating systems, Windows NT server 4.0 and Windows 2000 on new hardware and operating system

 

12. The ability to designate multiple “virtual machines” as a team where administrators can power on and off, suspend or resume as a single object

 

13. Provides the ability to simulate hardware; it can mount an ISO file as a CD-ROM and .vmdk files as hard disks

 

14. It can configure network adaptor drivers to use NAT through the host machine as opposed to bridging which would require an IP address for each machine on the network

 

15. Allow the testing of live CD’s without first burning them onto disks or having to reboot the computer

The time for virtualization has come and the possibilities are endless.

From server consolidation and containment, minimized downtime, ease of recovery, elegant solutions to many security problems — in a testing and development environment each developer can have their own virtual machine, isolated from other developers’ codes and production environments.

For the new age data centers virtualization is definitely to be the way to go.

Source: trainsignaltraining.com

Server Virtualization- Under the Hood

In today’s complex IT environments, server virtualization simply makes sense. Redundant server hardware can rapidly fill enterprise datacenters to capacity; each new purchase drives up power and cooling costs even as it saps the bottom line. Dividing physical servers into virtual servers is one way to restore sanity and keep IT expenditures under control.

With virtualization, you can dynamically fire up and take down virtual servers (also known as virtual machines), each of which basically fools an operating system (and any applications that run on top of it) into thinking the virtual machine is actual hardware. Running multiple virtual machines can fully exploit a physical server’s compute potential — and provide a rapid response to shifting datacenter demands.

The concept of virtualization is not new. As far back as the 1970s, mainframe computers have been running multiple instances of an operating system at the same time, each independent of the others. It’s only recently, however, that software and hardware advances have made virtualization possible on industry-standard, commodity servers.

In fact, today’s datacenter managers have a dizzying array of virtualization solutions to choose from. Some are proprietary, others are open source. For the most part, each will be based on one of three fundamental technologies; which one will produce the best results depends on the specific workloads to be virtualized and their operational priorities.

Full virtualization
The most popular method of virtualization uses software called a hypervisor to create a layer of abstraction between virtual servers and the underlying hardware. VMware and Microsoft Virtual PC are two commercial examples of this approach, whereas KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) is an open source offering for Linux.

The hypervisor traps CPU instructions and mediates access to hardware controllers and peripherals. As a result, full virtualization allows practically any OS to be installed on a virtual server without modification, and without being aware that it is running in a virtualized environment. The main drawback is the processor overhead imposed by the hypervisor, which is small but significant.

In a fully virtualized environment, the hypervisor runs on the bare hardware and serves as the host OS. Virtual servers that are managed by the hypervisor are said to be running guest OSes.

Para-virtualization
Full virtualization is processor-intensive because of the demands placed on the hypervisor to manage the various virtual servers and keep them independent of one another. One way to reduce this burden is to modify each guest OS so that it is aware it is running in a virtualized environment and can cooperate with the hypervisor. This approach is known as para-virtualization.

Xen is one example of an open source para-virtualization technology. Before an OS can run as a virtual server on the Xen hypervisor, it must incorporate specific changes at the kernel level. Because of this, Xen works well for BSD, Linux, Solaris, and other open source operating systems, but is unsuitable for virtualizing proprietary systems, such as Windows, which cannot be modified.

The advantage of para-virtualization is performance. Para-virtualized servers, working in conjunction with the hypervisor, are nearly as responsive as unvirtualized servers. The gains over full virtualization are attractive enough that both Microsoft and VMware are working on para-virtualization technologies to complement their offerings.

OS-level virtualization
Still another way to achieve virtualization is to build in the capability for virtual servers at the OS level. Solaris Containers are an example of this, and Virtuozzo/OpenVZ does something similar for Linux.

With OS-level virtualization, there is no separate hypervisor layer. Instead, the host OS itself is responsible for dividing hardware resources among multiple virtual servers and keeping the servers independent of one another. The obvious distinction is that with OS-level virtualization all the virtual servers must run the same OS (though each instance has its own applications and user accounts).

What OS-level virtualization loses in terms of flexibility, it gains in native-speed performance. In addition, an architecture that uses a single, standard OS across all the virtual servers can be easier to manage than a more heterogeneous environment.

Easier but harder
Unlike mainframes, PC hardware wasn’t designed with virtualization in mind — software alone had to shoulder the burden, until recently. With the latest generation of x86 processors, AMD and Intel have added support for virtualization at the CPU level for the first time.

Unfortunately, the two companies’ technologies were developed independently, which means they are not code-compatible, although they offer similar benefits. By taking responsibility for managing virtual server access to I/O channels and hardware resources, hardware virtualization support relieves the hypervisor of its most demanding babysitting chores. In addition to improving performance, operating systems can run unmodified in para-virtualized environments, including Windows.

CPU-level virtualization doesn’t kick in automatically. Virtualization software has to be written to specifically support it. Because the benefits of these technologies are so compelling, however, virtualization software of all types is expected to support them as a matter of course.

A virtual toolbox
Each method of virtualization has its advantages, depending on the situation. A group of servers all based on the same operating platform would be a good candidate for consolidation via OS-level virtualization, but the other technologies have benefits as well.

Para-virtualization represents the best of both worlds, especially when deployed in conjunction with virtualization-aware processors. It offers good performance coupled with the capability of running a heterogeneous mix of guest operating systems.

Full virtualization takes the greatest performance hit of the three methods, but it offers the advantage of completely isolating the guest OSes from each other and from the host OS. It is a good candidate for software quality assurance and testing, in addition to supporting the widest possible variety of guest OSes.

Full virtualization solutions offer other unique capabilities. For example, they can take “snapshots” of virtual servers to preserve their state and aid disaster recovery. These virtual server images can be used to provision new server instances quickly, and a growing number of software companies have even begun to offer evaluation versions of their products as downloadable, prepackaged virtual server images.

It’s important to remember that virtual servers require ongoing support and maintenance, just like physical ones. The increasing popularity of server virtualization has fostered a burgeoning market of third-party tools ranging from physical-to-virtual migration utilities to virtualization-oriented versions of major systems management consoles, all aimed at easing the transition from a traditional IT environment to an efficient, cost-effective virtualized one.

Source: Infoworld.com

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