Posts Tagged ‘VMware’

Don’t miss the most important virtualisation event of 2010

Novosco and VMware would like to invite you to join us at the Vitualisation Forum 2010.

Whether you are just starting your virtualisation program or have an advanced deployment, this event will show how you can maximise the benefits of virtualisation to your organisation for:

• Desktop Virtualisation
• Application Virtualisation
• Security
• Remote Office Management
• Reduced capital and operational costs
• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Cloud computing

This free one day event is packed with educational tracks, customer presentations, live demos and networking opportunities. With over 20 virtualisation product and service providers participating you will receive a broad view of how the virtualisation industry can benefit your organisation.

The VMware genius bar will give you access to key VMware staff to discuss how to drive your virtualisation program forward and how the recent major enhancements to infrastructure, desktop management solutions can benefit you.

Find out how more than 150,000 companies are saving up to 50 percent in data center and other IT costs with virtualisation. Understand why over 60 percent of VMware customers rely on virtualisation for their disaster recovery. Leave with the information and resources you need to move forward with your own virtualisation strategy.

Posted in: Events, Novosco, Uncategorized, Workshops, business Tags: Cloud Computing, datacentre, Novosco, virtualisation, VMware

Novosco wins three-year IT hosted services contract

Pictured from left:Mike Tesar, Chief Technical Officer, ezetop with Eddie O'Rourke, Sales Director, Novosco and David Shackleton, Chief Operating Officer, ezetop

Dublin, 6th Oct, 2009 — Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual and cloud IT infrastructure and services, today announced that ezetop, the Irish-headquartered international mobile top-up group, have chosen them to host their key line of business applications.  The hosted applications service will provide ezetop with dramatically improved levels of application availability and resilience. ezetop enables people living or working abroad to instantly top-up mobile phones of family and friends back home. Services are available from retail stores across North America, Europe and the Middle East region as well as from a significant online website, www.ezetop.com.

Providing the service for over 80 mobile operators , ezetop services are available online via the ezetop e-commerce website or at over 80,000 retail stores that rely on ezetop’s large global network.   Due to the critical and real-time nature of ezetop’s e-commerce business, ezetop required a highly available application system which would also allow it to grow globally, without infrastructure constraints.

To deploy a new virtual infrastructure to support ezetop’s platform, Novosco was the chosen provider to first host their critical ‘business to consumer’ (B2C) applications, in particular their key e-commerce website applications supporting hundreds of thousands of consumers across the globe.  In addition, Novosco were also selected to host and fully manage ezetop’s internal user applications, which include various Microsoft tools.

David Shackleton, Chief Operating Officer at ezetop said, “The performance and stability of our online platform is of paramount importance. Novosco demonstrated their understanding of our commercial and technical requirements and came up with a robust solution, to cost effectively meet our requirements as well as most importantly, being able to scale to meet our future growth”.

Eddie O’Rourke, Novosco Sales Director for Ireland said,  “Instead of ezetop buying traditional infrastructure to support the internal company services, which were not core to their service offering, they availed of Novosco’s existing cloud platform which allowed greater operational and financial benefits”.

Mike Tesar, Chief Technical Officer with ezetop was impressed with Novosco’s integration skills: “What was important to us was having our applications tailored to work the way we need to use them.  This meant that Novosco had to understand our requirements in detail.  The transition was made easier by the fact that Novosco had such strong experience in systems integration, meaning that they could help with all aspects of the changes.”

About Novosco

Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual & cloud based IT infrastructure and network services.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions.  The Novosco CloudStream™ range of solutions is leading the industry with Cloud networks and hosted Cloud servers / applications.

Novosco was recently recognised at the annual ICT Excellence awards as ‘Best System Integration Company, for 2009. For more information visit www.novosco.com.

About ezetop

ezetop enables people living or working abroad to instantly top-up mobile phones of family and friends back home. Services are available from over 80,000 retail stores across North America, Europe and the Middle East region as well as from a significant online website, www.ezetop.com.

ezetop’s services benefit mobile operators as they generate additional revenue outside their domestic market.  ezetop currently offers services in over 80 mobile operators/countries across Asia Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and Eastern Europe and is adding operators on a regular basis.  Existing operators include Airtel, Claro, C&W, Dialog Telecom, Digicel, Globe Telecom, MTN, Orascom, Singtel, Telefonica, Telenor, Tigo, Ufone, Vodafone, Warid and others.

ezetop’s global headquarters is in Dublin, Ireland with regional headquarters in Miami, USA and Dubai, UAE.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: Citrix, Cloud Computing, EMC, Microsoft, virtualisation, VMware

Ireland’s largest car dealer group selects Novosco to virtualise their entire server infrastructure

Eddie O'Rourke, Novosco Sales Director & Enda Martin, Group IT Manager, Windsor Motors

This new dynamic computing environment, implemented by Novosco, provides Windsor Motors with a flexible and resilient back-end infrastructure, which will allow the car industry leader to enjoy the benefits of a virtualised environment, providing ease of management, increased server utilisation, increased availability, as well as simple and effective disaster recovery. 

“While we continue to trade strongly through the economic downturn, every aspect of the business needs to look at how we can operate more efficiently”, said Enda Martin, Group IT Manager for Windsor Motors.   “By virtualising our production server environment, we were able to reduce the costs associated with IT management, power consumption and data centre space.  At the same time we were also looking for increased user performance and better utilisation of hardware.  We are very happy with the results.”

The solution enhances resilience and availability by utilising technologies such as VMware ESX HA and DRS cluster, supported by an EMC Clariion storage array.   This platform protects against single component failure or complete server failure and provides the most optimal use of server resources at the data centre.   In order to facilitate maintenance, live servers can be moved from one piece of server hardware to another using the features of VMware ESX.

 “Windsor Motors have reduced the physical server footprint of their production infrastructure from twenty to two” said Eddie O’Rourke, Sales Director, Novosco. “This has had a hugely positive impact on the total cost of ownership of their IT infrastructure and the entire swap out of Windsor’s enterprise servers was achieved within three months.  This was a strategic project, meaning that Windsor Motors’ entire server infrastructure now runs on VMware technology.”

All Windows servers with heavy workloads such as production application servers were reduced down to two physical hosts.  In future, by using live migration technology, production servers never need to go offline, so routine maintenance can be carried out during normal working hours. 

All servers have been made highly resilient using VMware’s High Availability features.  The backup solution leverages Symantec Backup Exec and esXpress to allow online replication of virtual machines to the Disaster Recovery (DR) site.  DR testing of key functionality is easily achieved by bringing up the replicated virtual server at the DR site within a non-live virtual switch.  VMware VirtualCenter also delivered the added benefit of an excellent remote management tool.

At the DR site, where the emphasis is on recovery in the event of a disaster, a single host has been configured. This DR solution was designed to provide enough storage to house virtual machine images and allow Windsor to take advantage of replication facilities, while also providing them with an environment which can be used to test and develop future services. As virtual machines were encapsulated into a small number of files, backup and recovery is streamlined and simplified.

For the purposes of Disaster Recovery, copies of the virtual machine files are required at an offsite location, where esXpress allows the replication of live virtual machines from one host to another.  This eradicates the need to maintain a live virtual machine at the DR destination, saving on licensing costs and providing a simple, effective and controllable DR model.

About Novosco

Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual IT infrastructure and services and is committed to assisting customers in the evaluation and optimisation of their IT systems.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions. Novosco has pioneered the use of end to end virtualisation with server, desktop and application technologies to redefine the dynamic data centre.  This approach enables Novosco to develop and deliver cost-effective IT solutions that enhance client operations and enable them to get the most out of their IT infrastructure.

Novosco have provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes including Lagan Holdings, John Sisk & Sons and many more.  Novosco was recently recognised at the annual ICT Excellence awards as ‘Best System Integration Company, for 2009.  For more information visit www.novosco.com

About Windsor Motors

Windsor Motors Group was established in 1968 and since then has grown to be Ireland’s largest and favourite dealer group. It is best known for its strong relationship with Nissan as it operates eight Nissan dealerships in Airside, Belgard, Bray, Cork, Deansgrange, Galway, Liffey Valley and Raheny. In addition it also operates four Chevrolet and SsangYong dealerships at Airside, Bray, Deansgrange and Galway and two Opel dealerships in Liffey Valley and Airside Motor Park. It has a turnover of €270m and 350 staff. Windsor is committed to ensuring customer retention and securing new customers by providing an excellent service every time.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: virtualisation, VMware

John Stone, CTO, Cisco; Novosco MD, Patrick McAliskey;Jimmy Kehoe, Partner Manager, VMware;Brendan Crossey, Territory Manager, EMC

Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual IT infrastructure and services, held an industry leading ‘Virtual Datacentre’ briefing in the Europa Hotel, Belfast on 11th June.   With 140 IT end users registered, the event focused on the IT industry’s first Cloud offering now becoming a reality.  Novosco held the briefing in conjunction with key technology partners VMware, EMC & Cisco. 

 The exclusive briefing featured Novosco’s new Cloud network offering and how Novosco, VMware and other technology partners can deliver a new cloud computing platform.

The benefits of IT virtualisation, such as server consolidation, cost savings and desktop/application centralisation have always been widely known, but clients are realising more and more the future operational benefits that a virtual IT infrastructure has to offer, including the move to a cloud infrastructure.  Cloud computing essentially is the delivery of applications/files, (anything from storage to email and CRM), over the internet.

“As Ireland’s leading virtualisation expert, Novosco is best placed to bring the new Cloud offering to the IT market”, said Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director, Novosco.  “Cloud computing has long been a buzz word within the IT industry, but until now its true implementation has not been possible.  With a reputation for delivering industry firsts and working alongside our technology partners, VMware, EMC and Cisco, we are set to transform the IT industry once again”.   

During the briefing, VMware released its new vSphere 4 product, which is the leading platform for building cloud infrastructures.  Novosco technical staff supplemented this with a LIVE vSphere demo.   EMC also discussed virtualised storage and Cisco presented virtualised networking. 

Registered delegates included Novosco customers such as Belfast Trust, Belfast International Airport, and Progressive Building Society.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: Cloud Computing, EMC, virtualisation, VMware

Posted in: Events Tags: datacentre, EMC, virtualisation, VMware

Novosco virtualise servers using VMware technology to cut costs and implement disaster recovery plan

Ken Kennedy, Sisk Group IT Manager & Eddie O'Rourke, Novosco Sales Director

Dublin, 16th April 09 - Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual IT infrastructure and services is to implement the second phase of John Sisk & Sons IT virtualisation project.  Part of a strategic phased virtualisation project to centralise John Sisk & Sons IT network, Novosco will implement VMware technology on all servers, with the benefits of consolidating hardware and reducing core infrastructure costs. 

The largest general contracting company in Ireland with turnover in excess of €1.2 billion, John Sisk & Sons’ IT infrastructure serves approximately 700 IT users and a vast number of remote construction sites.  Landmark construction projects include Croke Park and more recently, Lansdowne Road. 

“Over the past year we have been working with our preferred supplier Novosco, to centralise our IT infrastructure using VMware virtualisation technology, as well as to risk manage the move of our IT infrastructure to a 3rd party data centre,” said Ken Kennedy, IT Manager, Sisk Group. “Our VMware environment has grown significantly and has become the lynchpin of our IT systems. Within the last 4-6 months we have removed 15 of our physical servers and virtualised them onto two hosts. We feel virtualisation is the way forward for us to further centralise IT and to reduce both ongoing support and capital costs.”

With virtualisation phase two, Sisk will consolidate all servers into the external data centre. This decentralised platform is particularly beneficial given the low level of bandwidth in Ireland and has provided Sisk with a solid disaster recovery plan. From a return on investment perspective, the second phase of virtualisation will create ‘significant’ cost savings, which is particularly important given the current economic climate.

“With 60 to 70 construction sites throughout the country, reducing servers has greatly improved the Sisk Group’s ability to setup new remote sites. Virtualisation creates the ability to rapidly provision servers and applications to meet the needs of the business,” said Eddie O’Rourke, Sales Director, Novosco.  “We brought virtualisation to the table and advised Sisk Group on a staged virtualisation approach.”

“We have a very close relationship with Novosco. We chose Novosco as a preferred partner not just because of their virtualisation experience, but because they added value with their wide range of knowledge of other technologies such as thin client and core infrastructure,” said Daragh Doohan, Network Infrastructure Manager, Sisk Group.

With virtualisation phase two, Sisk & Sons will endeavour to make IT a business enabler, as opposed to being just a cost centre within business operations.  Virtualisation will free up more resources and will add value to projects, rather than be a cost contributor.  Over the next couple of years, Sisk & Sons will also focus on the whole area of desktop virtualisation in order to provide an even better experience for all IT users.  

About Novosco
Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual IT infrastructure and services and is committed to assisting customers in the evaluation and optimisation of their IT systems.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions.  This approach enables Novosco to develop and deliver cost-effective IT solutions that enhance client operations and enable them to get the most out of their IT infrastructure.

Novosco have provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes including Lagan Holdings, John Sisk & Sons and many more.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: business continuity, datacentre, virtualisation, VMware

Posted in: Events Tags: Novosco, VMware

At VMworld 2008, VMware announced VMware FT, their solution for continuous availability (zero downtime on hardware component failures – different from HA. HA is a crash and reboot). This will stack up nicely against the likes of Marathon Technologies and Stratus who have been doing this for a while.  And since everyone and their granny are rolling out a VMware based infrastructure, they will be best positioned to take advantage of it.

Stratus is currently a hardware based solution and Marathon’s is software, running on Windows Server 2003. Both of these companies have enjoyed a certain level of exclusivity but that of course will not last. I have very little info on where Stratus is going other than it can run ESX on its FT kit. Marathon have embraced the Xen hypervisor and have jumped in bed with Citrix, helping Citrix initially provide a host based XenServer HA solution (on a per VM basis!), along with their on HA solution for XenServer adding component level HA. And eventually in Q1 2009, their XenServer based FT solution will be released.

What this means, is that we will still have a choice about which hypervisor to use across all availability levels: Marathon on XenServer and VMware.  This is good!

After reading a blog post from Marathon about VMware FT and some retort from a VMware supporter, I thought I’d throw in my 2p, as there appeared to be some problems with these arguments.

Firstly, the comparison is Marathon’s existing FT product that only runs on Windows against VMware’s that only runs on VMware’s hypervisor. This is a pointless comparison as they dont compare like for like and  VMware’s product has not been released and wont be until some time in 2009. It would be a much fairer comparison to pitch Marathon’s new XenServer based FT against VMware’s FT…when they both arrive.

Secondly, Marathon argued against the requirement for shared storage with the VMware FT solution and the VMware guy stated that where you’d want to use FT you’ll likely have a SAN in place anyway. I have a slight issue with this. Quite often, FT solutions are used for critical production lines, health systems and emergency services. These systems may not run anywhere near a SAN, nor require one. It would be a considerable expense to require a SAN just for a 2 node FT solution. Also consider the site that has two data centres connected via fiber. We have Marathon FT systems running like this, which would allow for the likes of a site failure. This kind of setup requires that the writes are done to each system and that shared storage just doesn’t work in all cases.

Judging by the review of the FT session at VMworld by Scott Lowe, VMware may change their minds about the need for shared storage for FT. I hope so.  I think it’s great that VMware is getting into this game.  We have a lot of VMware sites that would be reluctant to add another virtualisation platform into the mix at this time. Being the pioneers and market leaders of server virtualisation gives them a big advantage. It widens their scope and will certainly provide decent competition for Citrix and Marathon. But, Marathon have been in the FT game for a long time too and know the problems and limitations that can be encountered in FT land. I wouldn’t underestimate them either.

Posted in: Technology Tags: Citrix, fault-tolerant, Marathon, virtualisation, VMware, Xen

It looks like Microsoft have finally announced virtualisation support for their enterprise server software running on Windows Server on VMware’s hypervisor (VMware joins Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program). This is a validation of VMware’s technology and further enhances Microsoft’s integration story with other third party virtualisation solutions. In fact, Microsoft now support six virtualisation platforms including their own Hyper-V product.

This is great news for customers who have been holding back on running applications such as Microsoft Exchange on VMware due to support concerns. Those “not officially supported” barriers, that we’ve heard here in Ireland time and time again, have now been removed.  Now we just have to figure out the licensing.

Posted in: Technology Tags: Microsoft, virtualisation, VMware

The classic VMotion problem of recent times is the customer who buys tin from a vendor, only to find out that the processor number e.g. 53xx and 54xx, is actually quite significant. The principle difference which will prevent VMotion is the addition of SSE4.1 to the 54xx range of Intel processors (if you previously only had 53xx Intel processors).

An application using the SSE4.1 feature (or is aware of this feature) when VMotioned to a non-SSE4.1 host would likely blue screen trying to make use of this feature on the older host.

People then recalled the CPU mask feature in VMware – we’ll just mask it out they thought. Unfortunately VMware declared this was an unsupported mask with KB1993 and KB1991.

Note that for production environments, VMware neither supports nor recommends modifying VMotion masks for SSE3, SSE3, or SSE4.1 because of the risk of failure of the application or guest operating system after migration.

The reason soon became clear:

• SSE features can be used by user-level code (applications).
• Mask does not work for user-level code (i.e. applications).
• In user-level code, CPUID is executed directly on hardware and is not intercepted by VMware.
• Thus, VM cannot reliably hide SSE from an application

The best that customers could do was buy compatible hardware, and keep themselves right with vendor compatibility charts such as these ones from Dell and HP.

ESX 3.5 U2 brought a new feature: Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC for short) which I’ll explain…

New CPUs are coming out with a facility to ‘turn off’ (mask) features that would make them VMotion incompatible with other hosts running older (compatible) CPUs.

For Intel this is called Flex Migration. It is clear that for processors that are in different families but support Flex Migration will negotiate the common feature set amongst the CPUs.

Where it is not absolutely clear, is where you have an existing cluster and you want to add in hosts with the new Flex Migration facility. You should be able to do this if you satisfy the following requirements (paste from Basic Administration Guide):

All hosts in the cluster must either have hardware live migration support(Intel FlexMigration or AMD‐V Extended Migration) or have the CPU whose baseline feature set you intend to enable for the cluster. For specific host processors supported, see Table 15‐1.

Table 15-1. Processors Supported in EVC Clusters

Vendor	Baseline Processor	Processors Supported
Intel	Intel Core 2 (Merom)	Intel Core 2 (Merom) 45nm Core 2 (Penryn)
AMD	AMD Second Generation Opteron (Rev‐E/F)	AMD Second Generation Opteron (Rev‐E/F) AMD Third Generation Opteron (Barcelona)

It is therefore advised that customers buying new tin, if they cannot acquire a processor that is exactly the same or in the same family – purchase a Flex Migration enabled CPU.

It should also be clear that only masks the features on the processors, it does not turn them off. Programs which are written to guidelines will behave, those which are coded badly will see these features regardless – and more importantly will encounter issues if VMotioned to a host that used that feature. Pasted from VMware:

EVC utilizes hardware support to modify the semantics of the CPUID instruction only. It does not disable the feature itself. For example, if an attempt to disable SSE4.1 is made by applying the appropriate masks to a CPU that has these features, this feature bit indicates SSE4.1 is not available to the guest or the application, but the feature and the SSE4.1 instructions themselves (such as PTESE and PMULLD) are still available for use. This implies applications that do not use the CPUID instruction to determine the list of supported features, but use try‐catch undefined instructions (#UD) instead, can still detect the existence of this feature.

Therefore, for EVC to be useful, application developers must adhere to recommended guidelines on feature detection. CPU vendors recommend that software programmers query CPUID prior to using special instructions and features available on their CPUs. If this guideline is followed by programmers, EVC is a reliable mechanism for live migration of x86 virtual machines across varied hardware. Thus, you can use EVC to enable an entire cluster to use the same set of basic features, allowing migration with VMotion across any two nodes in the cluster. VirtualCenter can also set up new hardware add‐ons to the cluster and apply these masks.

Intel provide a comparison tool to check beforehand if a CPU possesses Flex Migration capability.

Further Information on this subject can be located in the VMware VMotion Guide and the ESX 3.5U2 Basic Admin Guide Page 238 Onwards.

Posted in: Technology Tags: virtualisation, VMotion, VMware