We would like to thank you for joining us at OSCON this year. We hope you enjoyed the sessions, exhibitors, swag and maybe even enjoyed talking to us at the Parallels booth. We’d like to announce that Jose Ramos from UBICON is the lucky winner of the iPad. He is one of the many people that stopped by the Parallels booth to watch the Parallels Elastic IT video that we played during the event. See you at OSCON 2011! Manuel Espino Virtualization marketing Manager, Parallels Continue reading

The latest update to our Parallels Server for Mac product line is now available. We are very excited about this release. The underlying virtualization engine has been significantly upgraded and more than a dozen new features have been added. In addition, you can now use Parallels Virtual Automation to simplify and streamline administration tasks, add user self service capabilities and much more. For a complete list of what has been added in this release please visit the What’s New page http://www.parallels.com/products/server/mac/whats-new/ Please note that Parallels Server for Mac 4.0 requires a new license key. If you are an existing user... Continue reading

Have you ever wondered if you can install Active Directory (AD) in a container? You certainly can. But…what happens if the other containers that depend on AD, boot before the AD container is ready? Shouldn’t there be a way to set boot priority for containers so that some containers boot before others? Yes there should, and there is. To check the boot priority of containers on the same node run the following command: C:\Users\administrator.MYDOMAIN>vzlist -a -o ctid,bootorder CTID BOOTORDER 101 -- 11334 -- 12366 -- 18140 1 20734 -- 24024 -- 29460 -- 31989 2 50 3 8223 4 Notice... Continue reading

There are many different tools you can use to benchmark under Linux and today I want to mention Stream, that still seem to be popular among Parallels customers to compare baremetal metric vs Containers or VMs. Stream (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/) is a synthetic benchmark that was designed in single CPU core days and it measures the memory bandwidth while performing arithmetic operations over an array. The default array size and number of repetitions is too small for the modern hardware and needs to be increased, so before you compile the test, edit stream.c and make sure the following values are there: define... Continue reading

In my last post, I promised some examples of how to leverage the API to enable custom business processes in your private cloud. So, I put together a sample web application with ties to the Parallels Virtuozzo Containers and Parallels Server XML APIs. elasticITy: https://sourceforge.net/projects/elasticity/ I've seen a lot of our customers building their own web applications lately -- especially for their Development and QA organizations so that employees can request, manage, and destroy temporarily needed virtual servers without burdening system administrators. While elasticITy is not a web application you can use "out of the box" today, it's an excellent... Continue reading

About a month and a half ago I was challenged by my team to come up with a one minute pitch on the Parallels Elastic IT solution. If you have ever met me or you read my blogs, you know that this is a difficult challenge because I typically can’t do anything with brevity. I didn’t want the short story to be filled with marketing buzzwords and chatter so I decided to take a more direct approach. I started the effort by calling several of our customers. Yes that’s right, I used a telephone and talked to humans! It was... Continue reading

We are pleased to announce the winners of the Twitter contest. The response from the community was great and we’d like to thank everyone who participated. Even if you did not win, we’ll still be very happy to see you in Portland this summer. The winners of the full pass to attendOSCON 2010 are: Andrew Ettinger @andru Moonwyrd @moonwyrd The winners of the $50 Visa Card are: Nikola Novakovic @dreamerns Dreamerns @anngd Jennifer Cloer @jennifercloer *Winners must contact us by 06/10/2010 via direct messages on Twitter to claim your prize. Congratulations to the winners and see you at OSCON 2010!! Continue reading

In order to create a relevant performance metric for your environment as was discussed in the previous blog post , it is important to understand the performance of individual hardware subsystems: CPU, Memory, Disk, Network. Today I want to review some of the tools you can use for this job. For Disk performance metric I recommend bonnie++ (http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/). What I like about the tool is that it's easy to install, to use and to understand the results. Try downloading the rpm version for your Linux distribution from Dag Wieer's repository: http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/bonnie++/, installation can be as simple as: # rpm -ivh... Continue reading

One question that comes up time and time again is "what are some of the benefits of containers when compared to virtual machines?". And while the answer is somewhat subjective since for each project you should always use right the technology for the job, the following benefits remain consistent for OS virtualization. This is by no means an exhaustive list but it should help summarize why containers almost always win over virtual machines when you consider price, performance, and flexibility. Assuming you can achieve better performance for a given workload with a container than a virtual machine, which in turn... Continue reading

As of late, I've had a lot of customers asking me "Can Parallels do [blank] automatically for me?". Of course, "[blank]" is typically some very specific business process such as automating the provisioning of specific software packaged on a new end user request or enabling a self-service provisioning panel for their development team. The exact workflow required will vary from organization to organization, based on anything from the software their end users need to internal business and security policies. In my last post, I blogged about our new Parallels Virtual Automation management tool. And, while it's a fantastic web-based management... Continue reading

OS virtualization AKA “containers” have been a key to hosted web services for over a decade. The technology enables a company to efficiently utilize hardware and extract maximum value. With the shift in the enterprise to cloud computing and the desire to providing infrastructure as a service, containers are quickly gaining adoption. Here are the top five reasons why OS virtualization/containers are the best virtualization solution for your SaaS enablement efforts: 5. Containers can be cloned and running in seconds Software as a Service requires a rapid response to scalability. With containers the administrator (or an automated application) can bring... Continue reading

It's Easy! Follow Parallels Business Solutions on Twitter for a chance to Win a FULL PASS to OSCON 2010. To Enter, Participants Must: 1. Follow Parallels Business Solutions @parallelsbiz 2. Re-tweet the following sentence: Follow @parallelsbiz 4 a chance 2 win a full pass to OSCON 2010! 3. Followers and tweets must be posted between May 1, 2010 at 10:00 AM PST and May 20th, 2010 at midnight PST. Contest Details: • Two OSCON FULL PASS winners will be selected randomly • Three other winners will received a $50 Visa card (Also selected randomly) • Contest will end on May... Continue reading

With the Apple iPad http://www.apple.com/ipad/,administrators using the Parallels Elastic IT solution have a new device to manage their in-house private cloud services. Swipe a finger and an administrator can launch fully configured servers, approve workflow requests, monitor the comprehensive environment and instantly modify workload performance from nearly anywhere the iPad has connectivity. And this connectivity is getting even better in just a few short days when the iPad with Wi-Fi & 3G http://www.apple.com/ipad/3g/ ships on May 7th. An administrator with a iPad configured with 3G and a data plan can basically have anywhere/anytime access to their private cloud services platform.... Continue reading

It's no secret that hardware becomes faster and faster, with more cores and terabits every day. But putting aside the buzz - how do you measure the benefits of all the new hardware and software gear for your environment? It's also well known that Intel's Nehalem architecture delivers better performance, but the question remains: how this "silicon" performance increases benefits in a given datacenter, cloud, online store or your Development/QA lab? I'd like to review best practices that we have learned when it comes to measuring the performance and creating performance baseline for a company or a project. As an... Continue reading

Architects and developers have been working hard to get their brains wrapped around virtualization. So far, the widely adopted method is the hypervisor. It’s easy to understand and it works nearly the same as a standalone physical machine. Unfortunately with every hypervisor comes the tax you must pay. All of that translation and emulation takes its toll on the speed of the OS and the ability to quickly process transactions and I/O. This is a bit contrary to one of the major advantages of Linux – its speed in execution. This flaw err I mean challenge in the hypervisor architecture... Continue reading

One of the most commonly asked questions about Parallels Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is how is it different from good ol' Terminal Services. That's a fair question since on the surface it might appear that using a single operating system (as containers technology does) means also using a single instance of Terminal Server, shared by all virtual desktop users on a given server. However this is actually not the case. Parallels VDI is built atop a unique containers based virtualization technology that combines many of the same benefits provided by hypervisor-based desktop virtualization such as complete application isolation and the... Continue reading

This week we attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit held at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. This was a purposely small event hosting around 300 people with the design goal of accelerating collaboration and problem solving for the Linux platform.Wednesday started out with a rather interesting discussion from Dr. Daniel Frye of IBM. He told the tale of how Linux was adopted at IBM over the past decade and how it has risen in stature to be part of the heartbeat of corporate business. Dr. Frye also shared with the audience the do’s and don’ts of working with the... Continue reading

Today we released an updated SuSE Linux based kernel for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers. This update utilizes a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 3 kernel (2.6.16.60-0.59.1). With this kernel update, IT organizations are able to install Parallels Virtuozzo Containers on their SUSE Enterprise Linux servers and rest assured that the stability & security enhancements of the kernel are supported. This release also addresses optimization and enhancements for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers on the SUSE platform. We highly recommend that all Parallels Virtuozzo 4.0 customers running a SLES-based kernel update to this latest version. The knowledge base article on how to... Continue reading

A virtualization platform can hardly cut down on your organization's support and maintenance costs without a proper set of management tools. These tools can allow you to optimize the way you create virtual environments, deploy applications, perform backups and otherwise control your infrastructure. If you're a Parallels Virtuozzo Containers or Parallels Server Bare Metal Advanced Edition customer and using the included Parallels Management Console or Parallels Infrastructure Manager tools, you might benefit from a free upgrade to our latest management tools: Parallels Virtual Automation 4.5. Key improvements have been made in all areas of the management tools. You now have... Continue reading

Change is never easy, but when the economics are right it is tough to resist. For one of our clients the economics of continually maintaining and growing a Solaris deployment for IBM Lotus Domino hit the tipping point late last year. The client determined that it was time to move away from the proprietary version of Unix running on SUN hardware and take advantage of an infrastructure using Parallels Virtuozzo Containers and Novell SLES running on commodity Intel based hardware. Anecdotally the client told me in a meeting that they are expecting a $50,000 cost savings per year by moving... Continue reading

If you have been around the Parallels business solutions for a while you notice that we are now focusing on Elastic IT . You think to yourself, Elastic IT – is that made from rubber bands? Well not exactly, but you are on the right track. An Elastic IT solution is the foundation to a private cloud in your own environment. Now before I go on to explain the details around the solution or how it applies to the definition of cloud computing I wanted to share with you how we go to this point. I think it is an interesting story worth sharing. Continue reading