Mosaic Technology announced it has expanded and enhanced its virtualization and VMware professional service offerings in response to customer demand. The portfolio of services now includes free initial discovery sessions, packaged flat rate service packages, and customized engagements. The expanded service offerings facilitate the assessment, planning, and implementation of an integrated virtualization solution built around VMware.

VMware announced the availability of VMware Lifecycle Manager. The product provides control over the virtual environment, showing who owns a virtual machine, when it was requested, who approved it, where it is deployed, how long it has been in operation and when it is scheduled to be decommissioned. VMware Lifecycle Manager also gives IT managers the ability to measure and chargeback the use of virtual machines to individual department owners. The automation and control of the entire virtual machine lifecycle eliminates manual and repetitive tasks that often introduce errors, and it also enables the business to be in strict compliance with IT policies and standards.

NetApp announced that the deduplication adoption rate among its customers has tripled since November 2007, with more than 3,500 systems and 100 petabytes (PB) of raw storage capacity, solidifying NetApp's standing in deduplication technology. NetApp now has more than 1,000 customers who have deployed NetApp deduplication across all tiers of data, including primary, backup, and archival data, making it a vendor that offers end-to-end deduplication.

Virtutech announced Simics 4.0, the new release of the company's flagship VSD platform. Simics 4.0 embraces a new approach to delivering performance and scalability improvements to simulation capabilities as well as additional APIs to support more use cases and a repository that leverages the thousands of models accrued since Simics' first release. With Simics 4.0, Virtutech is providing widespread simulation adoption by delivering the speed and scalability necessary to enable software development not only well ahead of hardware availability but throughout the complete development cycle to realize quality, productivity and time-to-market advantages.

3Leaf announced that Intel Corporation has granted the company with a license to the Intel QuickPath Interconnect. 3Leaf will use Intel QuickPath Technology to enable advanced virtualization solutions for the growing x86 server market. The Intel QuickPath Interconnect license allows 3Leaf to support servers in a fully virtualized data center that allocates server resources on demand. The license is a major milestone in 3Leaf's strategy to enable the 'Dynamic Data Center,' allowing businesses to allocate resources on demand to meet business needs while at the same time reducing costs.

Mellanox announced that drivers for its ConnectX EN 10GigE NIC adapters are now included with Citrix XenServer 4.1, enabling plug-and-play integration of NIC adapters that boost I/O performance for virtual machines (VMs) while enabling I/O consolidation. ConnectX EN 10GigE NIC adapters offer I/O virtualization features such as support for hardware-assisted direct guest access, VM-to-VM switching, advanced memory management, filtering, QoS and receive side scaling. These features improve overall server utilization, especially in multi-core CPU environments.

Citrix Systems and NetApp announced a global, strategic partnership to deliver a complete server virtualization solution capable of leveraging the power of NetApp storage solutions. Citrix XenServer Adapter for NetApp Data ONTAP enables customers to unlock the power of virtualized storage in Citrix XenServer environments. This jointly developed certified solution simplifies virtual machine creation and management by allowing customers to centrally manage storage configuration and provisioning from a single console, making it one of the few virtualization solutions optimized for storage environments. Citrix and NetApp are building on their existing relationship and extending virtualized data management environment capabilities included in Citrix XenServer 4.1, which began shipping today.

NET Telcos leads the way for enterprise IT development with the installation of its first virtualized environments. Delivered with the support of industry enterprise partners and complimented by a beneficial economy of scale from its growing network footprint, NET Telcos offers virtualization and other progressive managed services that are designed and implemented to fit its customers' exact needs.

Crossbeam and Trend Micro launched the Next Generation Content Gateway Solution for Messaging Security. This solution couples the virtualization, consolidation and performance benefits of Crossbeam's X-Series Next Generation Security Platform with Trend Micro's gateway messaging security to provide a high performance email security solution for the market.

Wyse announced that its V10L thin client has been awarded Best New Green IT Product Award by an Established Vendor at the European Green IT Summit. The award recognizes the product's design in minimizing environmental impact through reduced energy consumption, demonstrable consideration of the environment in the product's design, and its cost effectiveness. Wyse was one of five finalists, which included Fujitsu Siemens, Active Power, Extreme Networks, and Juniper Networks, who were judged on credible green claims, environmental advantages over competitors, and the incorporation of environmental considerations in the design process.

HP is going to bundle VMware, Citrix XenServer and in due course Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization under an umbrella operation called ProLiant iVirtualization that's supposed to appeal to SMBs as well as the enterprise. When an iVirtualizated server is powered on, HP says it is automatically and immediately configured into a fully capable virtualization environment.

Parallels announced it has acquired ModernGigabyte, maker of the ModernBill automated billing system and other hosting automation solutions. ModernBill customers will benefit from Parallels Open Platform initiatives such as the Application Packaging Standard (APS), which will help them drive more revenue from their existing clients.

CiRBA announced that Gartner has named CiRBA to its 'Cool Vendors in Server Virtualization Management, 2008' report, published on March 17, 2008 and authored by analysts Cameron Haight, Ronni J. Colville and Milind Govekar. CiRBA was one of four technology vendors evaluated in this year's Cool Vendors report.

Akorri announced that Gartner has named Akorri in its 'Cool Vendors in Server Virtualization Management' report. The March 17, 2008 report was written by Cameron Haight, Ronni J. Colville and Milind Govekar.

Xsigo announced that it has formally partnered with IT services and solutions provider Computacenter. The partnership encompasses technical, marketing and professional services relationships and confirms Xsigo as an integral component of Computacenter's virtualization offering.

Wyse Technology announced that its thin clients based on Microsoft Windows XP Embedded, Wyse Thin OS and Linux will now ship with built-in support for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2, a component of VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Now, customers can more easily deploy and manage Wyse thin clients to leverage VMware VDI.

Parallels announced it is offering service providers an Application Packaging Standard (APS) Certification Service, which is administered by the independent firm Tier 1 Research. The certification recognizes SaaS (software as a service) application providers with either an APS Gold or APS Silver Certification, which designate that service providers offering APS-compliant applications have the highest quality service.

Marathon Technologies announced the completion of a distribution agreement with IQ Sys. IQ Sys will be working closely with Marathon and Citrix to drive the availability of end-to-end fault-tolerant virtualization environments through one solution provider. This agreement marked that a UK distributor has been able to offer a high availability desktop-to-datacenter solution to resellers.

Stoneware announced the integration of SalesForce.com's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) hosted applications into their virtual web desktop, webOS. Enterprises using Stoneware's webOS to provide employees with access to both Windows and web applications can now deliver hosted SalesForce.com applications within the same virtual web desktop.

LeftHand Networks announced that Anite has deployed LeftHand Networks' iSCSI SAN solution in two of its data centers using a VMware virtual server environment. Based in the United Kingdom, Anite is an international software and solutions company whose primary business is the provision of industry-specific solutions for wireless telecoms, public sector and travel markets.

McAfee unveiled a service designed to help organizations securely deploy virtualization technologies. As part of its strategy to provide the most complete solution for secure virtualization, McAfee Foundstone Professional Services also outlined a set of security guidelines covering people, processes and technology to educate enterprises adopting virtualization technologies.

FusionWare announced they have enhanced their virtualization offerings by signing partnership agreements with DataCore and Marathon Technologies. 'FusionWare has long had a strong offering of virtualization products and services. The agreements with DataCore and Marathon enable us to broaden the range of virtualization products we can deliver as demand for virtualization solutions increases. We're extremely excited about the opportunity to work with such quality companies,' said Paul Ikin, managing director of sales and marketing for FusionWare.

Co-Founders, Bob Darabant (CEO) and John Peterson (CTO) announced the launch of Montego Networks, a new company whose Montego HyperSwitch is an innovative virtual security networking solution that delivers policy enforcement, access control, and secure switching for virtual networks.

Netelligent is now an Enterprise level partner within VMware's VIP Partner Program. This achievement substantiates Netelligent's efforts to become a leader in helping companies understand, architect and implement virtual infrastructure. Over the past year, Netelligent has made substantial investments in people, training, software and hardware in order to add virtualization expertise and know-how to its services offering.

Parallels announced that it has selected IT products distributor Tech Data as its exclusive U.S. distributor for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers. The agreement strengthens Parallels' channel program by offering value-added resellers (VARs) easy access to the container-based server virtualization software. Distribution of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers will be managed by Tech Data's Advanced Infrastructure Solutions (AIS) Division, which provides VARs with specialized sales and technical support for virtualization solutions.

Dell is partnering with Egenera to deliver a fully integrated solution for employing dynamic data center environments. Together, the two companies intend to combine Dell's PowerEdge server line, a full suite of Dell's Infrastructure Consulting Services and Egenera's PAN Manager infrastructure virtualization software. The solution is designed to enable customers to simplify operations by creating and managing a single resource pool for both physical and virtualized servers.

Virtugo has introduced virtualSuite r6, a management platform for virtualized server and desktop environments. Designed to link IT services to business processes and reduce server and virtual machine sprawl, virtualSuite r6 combines the company's products into one integrated management platform to improve on new and existing VMware environments while helping data center managers to increase platform utilization and align resources with system demand.

VirtualLogix has been recognized as the leading embedded virtualization supplier, by a more than two to one margin, in a survey conducted by the industry publication eg3.com. Featured as part of eg3's 'Insiders' Guide: Embedded Opportunities,' VirtualLogix was recognized for spearheading the movement that is expanding virtualization out of the data center and into mobile devices and consumer electronics.

Ncomputing says that more than 1,000 manufacturing customers are now using its desktop virtualization software and hardware, with approximately 25,000 stations deployed. Stephen Dukker, chairman and CEO of Ncomputing, says that a massive increase in automation applications has been a key driver in uptake, with more computing devices being placed in harsh production environments. He also makes the point that virtual PCs deliver low cost computing access by sharing the power of a single PC among multiple simultaneous users.

The Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) business of Arrow Electronics launched 'V-PWR,' a program to help its North American NetApp reseller partners capitalize on increasing demand for virtualization, a solution which enables a single machine to do the work of many resources, reducing hardware and electricity costs.

VKernel announced that Gartner has named the company as a 'Cool Vendor in Server Virtualization Management, 2008.' The report issued on March 17, 2007 lists VKernel as one of the 'leading contenders attempting to address optimization of the virtual-server infrastructure.'

EMC announced accelerated adoption of its EMC Rainfinity Global File Virtualization and EMC Rainfinity File Management Appliance solutions. Meanwhile, a new study released by technology research firm TheInfoPro shows that EMC Rainfinity remains the #1 in use file virtualization technology.

With Information Technology being a key business driver for regional organizations, CIO's are constantly facing challenges when they are expected to cost effectively deliver better results for their current IT investment. These challenges were addressed at the 'Sun Virtualization Solution Day' recently held in Bahrain by Sun Microsystems and its partner Almoayyed Computers. The event highlighted Sun's leadership in energy efficient cool threads servers and virtualization solutions, and was attended by more than 50 Sun customers.

For many years, the mantra of the computer industry -- and computer users -- was 'more power!' Faster chips, faster hard drives, and as much memory as could possibly fit were the priorities. Only secondary attention -- if that -- was paid to the amount of energy consumed or a company's carbon footprint. Now with global climate change making itself very firmly felt, energy conservation has now become vital, and key technologies such as virtualization have come to the fore. And although you may not realize it, defragmentation can make a significant difference in the effectiveness of virtualization and the amount of energy consumed.

Microsoft has reached a virtualization milestone, with the release of its Hyper-VFeature-complete version of Windows Server 2008 virtualization technology. The new feature-complete release candidate of Microsoft Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization software available with various versions of Windows Server 2008, is now available. A beta of Hyper-V was included with Windows Server 2008 when it launched last month, and this release candidate provides updated, near-final code.

Configuresoft announced it has enhanced visibility into VMware virtualized environments with its new Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) virtualization solution. The Configuresoft Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) for Virtualization solution now includes new reporting capabilities that complement the management capabilities of VMware virtualization software for license compliance, security and operational efficiency. This reporting functionality provides IT organizations end-to-end, at-a-glance visibility for VMware environments.

VMware says it's going to put $100 million into India in the next two years and double its local engineering staff to more than a thousand people, cultivating India as a market as well as a cheap source of talent. Along with waiting for Microsoft to mount what will be VMware's fiercest challenge, the virtualization leader is facing the increasing commoditization of the hypervisor - to the point the widgetry will probably be given away in a few years - and needs to pull up its stocks on the virtualization management side.

Surgient announced that its Surgient Lab Management Platform will support Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor-based virtualization software available with Windows Server 2008. Hyper-V is expected to ship by August 2008. With Microsoft's news regarding its feature-complete release candidate of the Hyper-V hypervisor, Surgient becomes one of the first companies to announce a product roadmap that includes Hyper-V, demonstrating its continued commitment to delivering heterogeneous lab solutions that can manage the latest virtualization offerings.

Through strategic alliances like this one, as well as its acquisition of Acopia Networks, F5 continues to add benefits for customers leveraging virtualization technologies. As IT organizations focus more and more on virtualized infrastructures, F5 encourages customers deploying Application Delivery Networks to leverage virtualization in providing secure, optimized, and highly available applications.

B2net announced its partnership with Xsigo Systems to offer complete virtualization solutions to customers in the UK market. 'The partnership with Xsigo fits in perfectly with our growth strategy as the innovative data center I/O virtualization technology further strengthens our service offering,' said Jason Clark, managing director at B2net. 'Xsigo's technology increases our ability to provide unique, tailored solutions, and as one of the few resellers in the UK with a Xsigo demonstration unit, our customers will be among the first to realize the benefits.'