Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

virtual appliance

Startup Intro: SoftNAS

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Last week I had a chat with Rick Braddy from SoftNAS. Some of you might know Rick from when he was the CTO of a hosted virtul desktop company called Virtual-Q and others from when he was the CTO of Citrix for XenApp and XenDesktop. Today Rick is the CTO for SoftNAS, a software and appliance based storage solution. Rick gave me an introduction to what it is SoftNAS (Professional) does and offers and I figured I would do a short write-up as an introduction to SoftNAS.

Ultimately SoftNAS is a virtual appliance that offers up local storage as shared storage. SoftNAS is build on top of CentOS and leverages ZFS. It is deployed as a virtual machine, which means that it takes a couple of minutes to set up. SoftNAS has a nice looking user interface which allows you to quickly create shared storage for your virtual environment. When I say quickly I mean in a matter of minutes you have shared storage to your disposal: select your volumes –> create a storage pool –> create a volume –> use it. For those who care, besides VMware vSphere SoftNAS also supports Hyper-V and Amazon EC2. [Read more…] about Startup Intro: SoftNAS

Calling all virtual appliance vendors!

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Lately I have been playing around in my Lab a lot. I tried many virtual appliances as I wanted to use a variety of workloads. I downloaded many appliances and hoped to have all of them up and running in a bare minimum amount of time. Apparently I miscalculated / underestimated the amount of work to get a virtual appliance up and running. Yes of course there are a whole bunch that will work out of the box, and all of these have one thing in common:

OVF

Yes, deploying virtual appliances is a lot easier when they are packaged as an OVF or even an OVA for that matter. Packaging a virtual appliance which is “tarred” and “gzipped” using an old version of VMware Workstation with a sparse disk format doesn’t cut it any more in the age of automation and transportability. Although that works great on the workstation you developed it on it doesn’t really make it easy for your customer to deploy it.

I am not saying this to make my life easier, but I truly believe that the adoption of a standard like OVF will also increase the adoption of your product. Instead of jumping through hoops to get the appliance running people can focus on what it really is about, your product.

It is time to start adopting OVF.

VMware Studio 2.0 GA’ed

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about VMware Studio 2.0. VMware Studio 2.0 has just officially been released.

Source:
VMware Studio 2.0 helps author, configure, deploy and customize vApps and virtual appliances. vApps support the industry standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF). vApps can be deployed on VMware vSphere 4.0 or in the cloud. vCenter Server 4.0 now supports creating and running vApps, as well as importing and exporting them in compliance with OVF 1.0 standard.

Studio 2.0 is designed to be used by ISVs, developers, IT professionals and members of the virtualization community. It is a free product and is available as a virtual appliance.

The following new features have been added:

  • Ability to create multiple-VM appliances, or vApps, to run on VMware vSphere.
  • More provisioning engines including ESX/ESXi 3.5 and 4, VMware Workstation 6.5.1, and VMware Server 2.0.
  • Build support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit) virtual appliances.
  • Build support for 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES).
  • Build support new Linux distributions RHEL 5.3, CentOS 5.3, and Ubuntu 8.04.1.
  • Extensible management services allow you to customize an interface into a new tab.
  • An Eclipse™ plug-in helps you package applications and create management services.
  • Automatic dependency resolution for application packages installed on Linux-based virtual appliances.
  • Existing VM build (input-as-VM) for Linux virtual appliances.
  • DMTF standard OVF 1.0 and open virtual appliance (OVA) packaging. VMware Studio 1.0 supported OVF 0.9.
  • Eclipse usability improvements.
  • Appliance updates from CDROM.
  • Web console footer customization in the appliance VM.
  • EULA first-boot display control in the appliance VM.
  • Host name editing in the Web console of the appliance VM.
  • Security fix for VMware Studio when uploading management services. See CVE-2009-2968.

Just download it and try it out!

HyTrust Appliance 1.5

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HyTrust just published info on their latest and greatest version of their appliance which will be released on the 24th of August and will carry version number 1.5. Hytrust sits between your virtual environment and the admin and enforces granular authorization of all virtual infrastructure management operations, according to user role, object, label, protocol and IP address. If you will attend VMworld I suggest you  head over to their booth and ask for a demo.

Additional New Features:

  • Support for VMware vSphere (ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0)
  • Support for VMware ESXi (all versions)
  • Two‐factor authentication including RSA SecureID
  • Label‐based policy enforcement
  • VM‐to‐host and VM‐to‐network segment control
  • VM tag policy import
  • XACML policy import/export
  • AD policy import for virtual machine management

VMware Studio 2.0

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There’s a brand new version of VMware Studio coming up. For those who aren’t familiar with VMware Studio it basically comes down to this: with VMware Studio you can create your own virtual appliances.

Or as VMware puts it:

VMware Studio provides mechanisms for authoring, on-site management, distributing and deployment of production-ready virtual appliances. ISVs, hardware appliance vendors, and developers use VMware Studio to configure and package their solutions in a standards-based Open Virtualization Format (OVF). VMware Studio also enables software providers and developers to leverage the industry’s leading virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure, and offers built appliances all the great management services that VMware Infrastructure delivers.

New features:

  • Windows Support (32 bit and 64 bit) 2003 & 2008 Server
  • Create multi-VM vApp and multi-VM VA
  • 64 bit support for SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 & 5.3, CentOS 5.2 & 5.3
  • Extensible in-guest Management Framework
  • OVF 1.0 support
  • Eclipse Plugin
  • Enable ESX, ESXi, VC, Server 2.0 and Workstation as provisioning engine
  • Automatic Dependency Resolution (Static)
  • Publish OVF to VC
  • Infrastructure enhancements – GUI and Builds
  • Studio-created VM as Input

VMware Studio 2.0 will be available on Monday! Better make sure to get it while it’s hot… even vStu is excited!

There’s more info to be found here.