PUBLIC MARKS with tags management & vmware

Virtualization offers advantages that include server consolidation, isolation, rapid provisioning, and improved change management processes. Since virtualization breaks the hardware dependency and isolates virtual machines from details about the physical servers on which they are hosted, virtual images can be moved from one hosting platform to another. They can also be cloned to create more virtual machines, as desired. One of the challenges with cloning virtual images is handling operating system, network, and application specific customization. This article provides a sample framework for automating virtual image activation on new host platforms. This article, along with a previous article on Using virtual image templates to deploy WebSphere Application Server, demonstrates an automated approach for quickly and easily provisioning new WebSphere Application Server environments. The sample deployment and activation code included with this article is independent of WebSphere Application Server and can be used in conjunction with other software inside a virtual image. The specific example provided here is for WebSphere Application Server V6 in VMware or XEN virtual images, using SUSE V10 as the guest operating system. The activation techniques described in this article can be used in conjunction with IBM Tivoli® Provisioning Manager as described in Using Tivoli Provisioning Manager to deploy composite virtual appliances.

Software development & QA teams are mandated to deliver feature-packed, high quality products with small teams, tight budgets and compressed timelines. Development of enterprise software requires the setup of varied and complex environments, which is a tedious, time consuming and often unreliable process. Yet, enterprises are faced with the challenge of ensuring fast, repeatable and consistent dev & test environment setups while also trying to improve resource utilization and employee productivity. LabManager is a revolutionary software product that automates this entire process.

ToutVirtual’s VirtualIQ 525 is a free solution which monitors and manages up to 5 CPUs or 25 virtual machines. ToutVirtual’s VirtualIQ 525 provides a web-based virtual server management portal for IT administrators. The portal provides a VirtualIQ dashboard which provides unique visibility into the virtual platform operations. VirtualIQ 525 manages and allows matching of available IT resource supply with your virtual infrastructure needs. The VirtualIQ dashboard allows you to easily identify which hosts and virtual machines are running at high utilization levels. In addition, it provides visibility into where excess capacity for real-time changes. The portal navigation system provides virtualization aware drill-down capabilities to provide the necessary virtual server context needed for problem diagnosis. IT administrators can also generate historical reports on resource utilization via the portal.

BixData is a system, application, and network monitoring tool which allows you to easily monitor nearly every aspect of your servers. The newly released version 2.6 is the only application that has the ability to control both Xen and VMWare virtual machines. You can control both VM Hosts (the computer that's running the VM software) and VM Guests (the virtual machines running on the hosts).