PUBLIC MARKS with tags xen & application

Zentific is a browser-based management interface for clusters of virtual machines running on the open-source Xen® hypervisor. In the spirit of the open-source projects which have made Zentific possible, the application will be released to the community. To ensure that Zentific maintains a high level of reliability, security, and ease of use, we will also be offering a supported version for commercial use.

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.

The idea of using virtual machines to build high available clusters is not new. Some software companies claim that virtualization is the answer to your HA problems, off course that's not true. Yes, you can reduce downtime by migrating virtual machines to another physical machine for maintenance purposes or when you think hardware is about to fail, but if an application crashes you still need to make sure another application instance takes over the service. And by the time your hardware fails, it's usually already too late to initiate the migration.

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).

The Enomalism Virtualized Management Console (VMC) is a powerful web-based systems administrator management tool for the XEN hypervisor. Geared toward hosted environments, Enomalism provides an easy to use interface to provision hundreds of concurrent isolated Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Multiple physical servers can be managed as a single server using a specialized tool set which include a centralized user provisioning system, virtualized server creation wizard and templates which facilitate virtual server configuration, application deployment mechanism, and integration into 3rd party applications via web services API as well as centralized software patch management.