The open source version of ConVirt has been available for more than three years and is broadly deployed and well-tested in real-world data centers — having been downloaded more than 30,000 times. In fact, ConVirt1.x is included in most major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Open SUSE, Debian and others.

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise extends ConVirt Open Source with the advanced automation and scalability features necessary for running large-scale or mission-critical virtualized environments. By delivering high availability, backup and recovery, storage and network automation, and enterprise-grade security, ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise enables IT managers to meet and exceed service levels while using infrastructure in the most efficient way.

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is also the go-to tool for enterprises ready to move beyond virtualized infrastructure management towards a hosted or private cloud model. With an extensive cloud management feature set, which includes multi-tenant security, delegated control, scheduled provisioning, resource limiting, and many more, ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise enables IT organizations to offer infrastructure-as-a-service, while ensuring full isolation and compliance with corporate policies.

“We’ve implemented a variety of virtualization platforms over the years and managing them all – especially the open source hypervisors – has always been the single biggest pain point,” said Steven Scoleri, Principal Architect at GSI Commerce, a leading provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing services. “Our beta test of ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise has gone very well and we think it just may be the game-changer we’ve been looking for. We no longer need experts on hand at all times to complete simple virtualization tasks. We look forward to further exploring ConVirt’s capabilities and using it to manage our entire open source-based virtual data center.”

“Until now, any organization that wanted a complete solution for managing and automating a virtual data center was locked into expensive and proprietary solutions like VMware vCenter,”,” said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. “That changes today as ConVirt 2.0′s advanced automation, private cloud management, enterprise scalability and datacenter integration features now meet or exceed what’s available from proprietary platform vendors. With ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise, organizations considering Xen or KVM as open source alternatives to commercial virtualization platforms are no longer forced to compromise on manageability. ”

About ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise supports all of the features available with the ConVirt 2.0 Open Source product including:

• Server pool-based management
• Templates-based provisioning
• Monitoring and configuration management
• Comprehensive virtual machine administration
• Highly scalable, 3-tier, standards-based architecture

In addition, ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise delivers scalability, automation, and private cloud management features that were previously available only for proprietary virtualization platforms, including:

• High availability: ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise ensures that mission-critical applications are always up and running by delivering a comprehensive high availability feature set, including virtual and physical machine failover;
• Backup and recovery: A full backup and recovery feature set ensures successful recovery from planned and unplanned outages. Scheduled and on-demand backups are supported. Restore modes can be for the most recent state or any earlier backup. Both virtual machine state and storage are captured, so virtual machines are brought up in a consistent state.
• Private Cloud Management: A data center that has been virtualized can be turned into a private, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud in a scalable and secure way, with support for full multi-tenant security, delegated control, scheduled provisioning, resource limiting and the ability to create virtual appliances that comply with corporate standards and publish them effortlessly to cloud users.
• Storage and network automation with ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise significantly streamlines the error-prone and time-consuming tasks of configuring network and storage in a virtualized environment. Storage configuration standardizes storage across a server pool by automating configuration of all storage types, including NFS, iSCSi, AOE, Fiber Channel and LVM. Network integration provides a centralized interface for managing virtual networks.
• Enterprise Integration: ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise provides a full suite of integration capabilities, including an open repository, command line interface, and programmatic APIs.

Pricing and Availability

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is available immediately direct from Convirture. Pricing starts at $1,495 per host for up to 10 hosts, with volume pricing available for larger environments. A “per virtual machine” pricing package is also available for ISP’s and hosting providers. More information is available at http://www.convirture.com/contact.html

About Convirture

Convirture was founded in 2006 to help organizations effectively manage open source virtualization platforms. More information is available at www.convirture.com.

Session Topic Sneak Peek and Early Bird Pricing Available at CitrixSynergy.com

12/17/2009 » Fort Lauderdale » Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), today announced registration for Citrix Synergy™ 2010 is now open. Citrix Synergy – where virtualization, networking and cloud computing meet – has evolved into a global event offered in two key geographic locations: Synergy San Francisco will take place May 12 to 14, 2010, at the Moscone West Convention Center, and Synergy Berlin will be held Oct. 6 to 7, 2010, at the Estrel Hotel and Convention Center.

Synergy offers an open, expansive array of technical and business breakout sessions, as well as hands-on learning labs, presented by leading technical experts. Presenters will examine key issues impacting IT, such as breaking away from the costs and complexities of the distributed computing status quo; building a simpler, more cost-effective computing environment to position organizations at the forefront of the on-demand IT services era and utilizing available technologies to achieve and exceed business goals.

Synergy will feature timely virtualization, networking and cloud computing content, including sessions such as:

• Need a simpler, low-risk path to Windows 7? Desktop virtualization makes it a snap!
• Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) is ready for prime time: How Citrix did it and what we learned.
• Dear CFO, I know how we can save big bucks with desktop virtualization…
• Virtualization and application networking. Learn how one plus one equals three.
• HDX, the user experience “champ,” takes on the contenders.

Synergy is the industry’s premier conference focused on the growing convergence between virtualization, networking and cloud computing. Session content will address how these technologies can solve real IT business problems in an open and dynamic atmosphere and will be divided into the following three tracks:
Desktop Virtualization
This track provides a comprehensive examination of desktop virtualization, covering the full breadth of desktop virtualization technologies, including client virtualization (local virtual desktops), desktop streaming, VDI (hosted virtual desktops), self-service on-demand applications, application virtualization and user profile management. You’ll get case studies of successful implementations, best practices, technical sessions and a roadmap to help you reduce costs, simplify desktop management and deliver high-definition desktops to all users now.

Datacenter-Cloud
Server virtualization, networking and cloud technologies are converging to enable dramatic improvements in datacenter efficiency, flexibility and reliability at an affordable cost. You’ll learn about the latest innovations in server virtualization, datacenter infrastructure management, and networking and application delivery controllers. This fast-paced technical track will examine all three areas with special attention to options and merits of private and public cloud solutions.

IT Business and Strategy
Senior IT management face unprecedented challenges, needing to reduce costs, while simultaneously delivering innovation to drive efficiencies for their users and effectiveness for their business. This track is designed for senior IT leaders, providing new sources of IT-led innovation and competitive advantage to position their business for success today and in the future. Insightful, interactive sessions will feature prominent industry executives who have produced impressive bottom-line improvements for their businesses.

Synergy will also feature hands-on training. The instructor-led, hands-on learning labs provide the in-depth experience required to master new Citrix technologies. These high-value, unique labs are designed for administrators and architects responsible for managing or designing an environment that consists of Citrix technologies including XenDesktop, XenApp, XenServer and NetScaler.

Citrix Summit 2010, the premier training conference designed for members of the Citrix Partner Network, will be combined with Synergy – both in San Francisco and Berlin. Summit, which begins two days prior to Synergy, is the main event where the company’s partners can learn about the latest trends in virtualization, network optimization and cloud computing solutions. Summit provides intense educational sessions and offers valuable technical knowledge, selling skills and competitive strategies for attendees.

Registration for Synergy and Summit San Francisco, as well as Synergy and Summit Berlin is now available at www.citrixsynergy.com. A discounted, early bird registration is available for Synergy San Francisco through Feb. 2, which provides a $400 savings off of the normal conference fee.

About Citrix Synergy 2010
Born as a user conference more than 10 years ago, Citrix SynergyTM is the only event where virtualization, networking and cloud computing meet. Interoperability and openness are central to the event. Its sessions will focus on the coming convergence of these critical technologies and how they can be used today to address real world IT business challenges. Synergy addresses topics that have simply become too critical and widespread for one event on one continent. IT professionals now have two opportunities each year to attend this important industry conference. Citrix Synergy San Francisco will take place May 12 to 14, 2010, at Moscone West Convention Center. Citrix Synergy Berlin will be held at the Estrel Hotel and Convention Center, Oct. 6 to 7, 2010. More information is available on the Citrix Synergy web site at http://www.citrixsynergy.com.

About Citrix
Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is a leading provider of virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions for more than 230,000 organizations worldwide. Its Citrix Delivery Center™, Citrix Cloud Center™ (C3) and Citrix Online product families radically simplify computing for millions of users, delivering desktops and applications as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device. Citrix customers include the world’s largest Internet companies, 99 percent of Fortune Global 500 enterprises, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers worldwide. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies worldwide in more than 100 countries. Founded in 1989, annual revenue in 2008 was $1.6 billion.

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Host Color web hosting provider , a well-known  firm in VPS Web Hosting community announced to hosting media its changes in VPS hosting plans. They increased the resources of their best selling plans in virtual private servers – “VPS Advance” and “VPS Start”.

Managing Director of Host Color LLC, Alexander Avramov said “The new upgraded Virtual Private Servers provide more resources and support our customers to reach their growth targets. We are now offering load-balanced VPS hosting plans from two different data centers – one in Indiana, U.S. and the other in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I can say that now Host Color ranks among the most reliable and technologically advanced providers in VPS hosting industry”.

“VPS Start” new  features are 384 MB of memory, 15 GB of web space and 150 GB of monthly bandwidth. The cost of this virtual server plan did not changed and stays at $19.95/mo. The previous features of this plan was  256 MB of memory, 10 GB of web space and 100 GB of monthly bandwidth.

“VPS Advance” new features are  768 MB memory, 30 GB of web space and 300 GB of monthly bandwidth. There is also a $10 per month decrease in hosting price if customers decide to pay on a yearly bases with an annual contract.

The above VPS plans uses Virtuozzo virtualization a product from Parallels. Host Color gives the clients  of the above VPS hosting plans a way to use Parallels Plesk Control Panel with an affordable cost of $5/mo. This is a $10 less than the average monthly license price of Plesk control panel of $15/mo. They also offer CPanel control panel with a price of $15/mo.

AvaHost web hosting is a shared and reseller web hosting provider and now they have expanded to offer VPS (Virtual Private Server) web hosting. This can help many users to get a low cost alternatives to shared web hosting, the VPS product line offers four levels of VPS web hosting to meet client’s needs.

AvaHost clients may choose now from the four plans which begin at 256MB to 1024 Mb and a disk space of 10 GB up to 40 GB with bandwidth that start at 300 GB up to 1200 GB.

All four plans offer clients SSH root access, development tools, unlimited domain, the power of installing your own software, dedicated IPs, free DNS hosting, having your own DSN servers, reload and reimage OS, shutdown and reboot commands, boot, and to install and compile custom software. VPS hosting  also provide custom MIME settings, support for .htaccess, website access statistics, sendmail support, Cron job support, customizable error pages and access to both error logs and raw logs.

Clients who chooses VPS hosting will get a webmasters bonus package that worth more than $1300.00. This package includes graphics, templates, banner templates and a quality eBooks.

AvaHost web hosting provider has established a strong presence in the hosting industry, offering high end products with excellent customer support.

HostColor has a large variety of web hosting plans that fits nearly every one starting from shared web hosting  which are ready for blogs like wordpress, B2evolution and CMS hosting, their shared hosting can host up to 30 website, e-commerce websites and social web hosting.

They also offer a variety of VPS plan that can fit a lot of sizes of websites starting from the VPS start with 256 MB of Memory priced $17.34/m to the custom VPS with 1792 MB of memory and priced $119.95/m.

They also offer an advance range of web hosting using dedicated servers, ranges from $99 to $399 per month. they also offer other web hosting related products like unique IP’s and SSL sertificates.

Host Color established in 2000. They started business in Europe and expanded to the United States in August 2003. They  incorporated in Delaware, USA, they owned a number of website service brands and successful web hosting.

Quad Xeon Dedicated Servers with 2.65 GHz, 4 GB memory, 500 GB of hard drive space with only 149.95 per month.

All the physical servers that host these virtual servers are located in their premium Data center located in the heart of Montreal downtown, Canada connected to VEXXHOST premium redundant network which is connected to the Internet by four global Internet providers for perfect redundancy also they are using the best network hardware possible such as Cisco routers and switched for 100% network availability.

The physical servers that host the VPS’s also use hardware RAID 10 for data performance and redundancy. Quad core Xeon processors and a minimum of 16 GB RAM.

All VPS physical servers are equipped with dual power supply, datacenter has a redundant electric power supply systems using UPS’s, electric power generators and the national power grid which make the availability of power supply approach to 100%.

The benefit of using Xen VPS web hosting is that all clients are having their own dedicated RAM, disk space & bandwidth. Also Xen VPS web hosting is different than any other method of virtualization as it gives customers complete access with full resources, also Xen VPS isolate every individual VPS and has its own kernel which protect VPS’s from crashes if one of the VPS’s in the same server  crashes .

All the VPS servers are connected to VEXXHOST premium redundant network by using four global Internet providers and the best network hardware possible like Cisco routers and switched that makes the network reaches 100% availability.

The servers also uses a hardware RAID 10 technology that bring two advantages to VEXXHOST clients, First is data redundancy as all hard drives are mirrored for data protection which keeps two copies of client data and makes the data recoverable even with a hard drive failure. Second is splitting each file into small parts and copy them into different hard drives which make an excellent read/write performance through hard drives and highly increase server performance. That means for redundancy and performance clients data are saved on four hard drives instead of one in the normal case.

Clients of VEXXHOST are assured also that power is not an issue for online availability as all Xen VPS servers are equipped with two power supplies for redundancy and connected with power lines that are secured by four huge generators and UPS’s system array.

By using Xen VPS hosting all customers will have their own real dedicated disk space, RAM & bandwidth. And also Xen VPS is unlike any other methods; it gives clients their complete access to their resources, also full isolation by using individual kernels for every Xen VPS and not using a shared kernel like other virtualization methods, which protect VPS’s from crashing if other VPS on the main server crashes.

On last Tuesday, VMware announced its second-quarter profit and showed that it’s jumped 53 % which matching Wall Street’s expectations. But the forecast of the third-quarter sales which is between $462 million and $468 million was way below the $497.3 million that was projected.

VMware became public last August and raised more than one billion dollars in its initial offering; its shares were about $57.71 at that time, then it reached its peak on October 31, 2007 to reach $124.83 to see them now at a price of about $35.00.

Second quarter U.S. revenues grew 43% to $240 million from the second quarter of 2007.  International revenues grew 68% to $216 million from the second quarter of 2007 driven by strength in Europe and Australia.

Software license revenue grew 39% to $284 million from second quarter of 2007.  Service revenues, which include support, subscription and professional services, were $172 million, an increase of 85% from the second quarter of 2007.

“VMware had another solid quarter, proving that the quality of our products and the immediate return on investment that they yield is delivering high value to customers,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware.  “I am personally excited to become part of a company that has the potential to become one of the truly important and enduring companies in the software industry.”

“Our mission is to help customers run datacenters that use powerful, cost-effective, modern hardware to deliver dramatically higher levels of flexibility, manageability and efficiency.  Today, much of our growth comes from customers expanding from basic server consolidation, yet increasingly more customers are seeking to virtualize their entire datacenter and desktop environments with VMware Infrastructure. We are also on the threshold of a major new opportunity – as customers begin to leverage VMware as both the on-ramp to the Cloud and for key elements of the Cloud itself.  We are well-positioned to become a truly strategic platform for businesses of all sizes.”

The Best of Tech Ed 2008 IT Professional Awards recognize companies who offer the most innovative products in the industry and who are leading the charge in their category. Entrants were judged based on strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage, and value to customers. The judges reviewed more than 220 products and services submitted for the contest and chose 29 finalists, from which one winner was selected for each of the 10 categories.

“Choosing from such a wide variety of outstanding entries is a challenge every year, and the quality of this year’s entries was particularly high,” said Karen Forster, group editorial and strategy director for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine. “The winners clearly reflect our judging criteria:  innovation, strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage and exceptional value to customers.”

VMware Infrastructure 3 provides the capability for automatic load balancing, business continuity and power management and the ability to move a virtual machine across physical machines to minimize service interruption. With more than 200 industry and technology awards, VMware is the only vendor delivering the full spectrum of virtualization products — from a base hypervisor platform to a bundle of application and infrastructure management solutions to full suites of desktop and datacenter virtualization solutions.

“We are thrilled to be honored by the Windows IT Pro Best of Tech Ed Awards,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president, product and solutions, VMware. “This award underscores our industry leadership in providing virtualization solutions that drive customer benefits. It also validates why thousands of companies rely on VMware Infrastructure to optimize their datacenters, streamline management, improve application performance, and maximize ROI. We look forward to raising the bar even further to bring our customers game-changing IT solutions.”

More information about Windows IT Pro Best of Tech Ed Awards is available at http://windowsitpro.com/awards/.

More information about VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 is available at http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/overview.html.

About Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro
Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro, the largest independent Windows IT community in the world, has Windows IT Pro as its flagship print publication. Windows IT Pro also includes SQL Server Magazine and Office SharePoint Pro. The Windows IT Pro network has 2.5 million unique visitors to its Web sites each month, and more than one million subscribers who opt-in to one or more email newsletters. Windows IT Pro is the world’s leading producer of custom road shows, paid conferences, and paid workshops for Windows and SQL Server IT and developer professionals. For more information visit: www.windowsitpro.com.

About VMware
VMware (NYSE: VMW) is the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter.  Customers of all sizes rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2007 revenues of $1.3 billion, more than 100,000 customers and nearly 14,000 partners, VMware is one of the fastest growing public software companies. Based in Palo Alto, California, VMware is majority-owned by EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) and on the web at www.vmware.com.