Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft plans to raise the price of the Datacenter edition of the upcoming R2 release of Windows Server 2012 by 28 percent, adding to what analysts call a record number of price increases for enterprise software products from Redmond. According to licensing data sheets available for download from the Windows Server 2012 R2 Website (PDF), the price of a single license of Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter will be $6,155, compared to $4,809 today—plus the cost of a Client Access Licenses for every user or device connecting to the server. News of the increase was posted yesterday by datacenter virtualization and security specialist Aidan Finn, a six-time Microsoft MVP who works for Dublin-based value added reseller MicroWarehouse Ltd. and has done work for clients including Amdahl, Fujitsu and Barclays. The increase caps off a year filled with a record number of price increases for Microsoft enterprise software, according to a Tweet yesterday from Microsoft software licensing analyst Paul DeGroot of Pica Communications."

hypnosec writes "Oracle will soon be announcing its decision to stop development of Sun virtualization technologies including Sun Ray Software and Hardware, Oracle Virtual Desktop Client, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product lines. In an update to its support policies [Oracle support login required] for virtualization software and hardware, the database company has revealed that this decision is a result of its efforts to 'tightly align Oracle's future desktop virtualization portfolio investments with Oracle Corporation's overall core business strategy.'"

hypnosec writes "The Linux 3.11 merge window is about to close, most probably this Sunday, and most of the pull requests have been merged, including feature additions and improvements to disk & file system, CPU, graphics and other hardware. Some notable merges are: LZ4 compression; Zswap for compressed swap caching; inclusion of a Lustre file-system client for the first time; Dynamic Power Management (DPM) support for R600 GPUs; KVM and Xen virtualization on 64-bit hardware (AArch64); and a new DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the Renesas R-Car SoC."

Dan Kusnetzky and I started out talking about cloud computing; what it is and isn't, how "cloud" is often more of a marketing term than a technical one, and then gradually drifted to the topic of how IT managers, CIOs, and their various bosses make decisions and how those decisions are not necessarily rational. What you have here is an 18-minute seminar about IT decision-making featuring one of the world's most experienced IT industry analysts, who also writes a blog, Virtually Speaking, for ZDnet.

Nerval's Lobster writes "The same layers of virtualization that have made networked business computing so much more convenient and useful have also given bad guys much easier access to both physical and virtual servers within previously-secure datacenters. A group of engineering researchers from MIT has demonstrated one approach to making secure servers harder to access using a physical system that prevents attackers from reading a server's memory-access patterns to figure out where and how data are stored. Ascend, which the group demonstrated at a meeting of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in Tel Aviv in June (PDF), is designed to obscure both memory-access patterns and the length of time specific computations take to keep attackers from learning enough to compromise the server. The approach goes beyond simply encrypting everything on the whole server to try to shut off one of the most direct ways attackers can address the server directly — whether the server is an air-gapped high-security machine sitting in an alarmed and guarded room at the NSA or a departmental server whose security settings are a little too loose. Other ways to try to obscure memory-access patterns were built as applications to run on the server. Ascend is the first time a hardware-only approach has been proposed, and the first to approach an acceptable level of performance, according to Srini Devadas, Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the MIT researcher who oversaw the team developing the hardware."

First time accepted submitter Jagungal writes "Although the core Xen hypervisor has always been open source from the start, Citrix have now released the next version of their XenServer including all features and tools under an open source license. This includes also introducing a new XenServer.org community portal. The major change for users is that they now get all features from the licensed version for free but unless they pay for support, they have to do all security updates manually. Change logs for the new version 6.2 can be found here. It's been a few years since Citrix started giving it away, free as in beer.

An anonymous reader writes "If you have a fascination with old supercomputers, like I do, this project might tickle your interest: A functional simulation of a Cray X-MP supercomputer, which can boot to its old batch operating system, called COS. It's complete with hard drive and tape simulation (no punch card readers, sorry) and consoles. Source code and binaries are available. You can also read about the journey that got me there, like recovering the OS image from a 30 year old hard drive or reverse-engineering CRAY machine code to understand undocumented tape drive operation and disk file-systems."

sagecreek writes "If you are in charge of a small network with just a few servers, you may still be doing configuration management primarily by hand. And you may take particular pride in maintaining that 'artisan' role. After all, it's mostly up to you to set up new users and their machines, fix current problems, manage the servers and their software, create databases and their user accounts, and try to keep the network and user configurations as uniform as possible despite running several different brands--and vintages--of hardware and software. However, warns infrastructure consultant John Arundel, '[b]eyond ten or so servers, there simply isn't a choice. You can't manage an infrastructure like this by hand. If you're using a cloud computing architecture, where servers are created and destroyed minute-by-minute in response to changing demand, the artisan approach to server crafting just won't work.' In his new book, Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide, Arundel emphasizes: 'Manual configuration management is tedious and repetitive, it's error-prone, and it doesn't scale well. Puppet is a tool for automating this process.'" Read below for the rest of sagecreek's review.

alphadogg writes "Ed Iacobucci, whose work on OS/2 at IBM helped fuel the PC craze and whose efforts at Citrix and VirtualWorks aimed to bring computing back under control, has died at the age of 59 from pancreatic cancer. Born in Argentina and schooled in systems engineering at Georgia Tech, Iacobucci got his career start in 1979 at IBM, where he held architecture and design leadership roles involving PC operating systems OS/2 and DOS, working closely with Microsoft in doing so (and later turned down a job there). Iacobucci left 10 years later to start thin-client/virtualization company Citrix, followed by creation of on-demand jet company DayJet, and most recently VirtualWorks, a company dedicated to managing big data sprawl. He stepped down as CEO of VirtualWorks in May because of his health."

crookedvulture writes "With its Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, Intel allowed standard Core i5 and i7 CPUs to be overclocked by up to 400MHz using Turbo multipliers. Reaching for higher speeds required pricier K-series chips, but everyone got access to a little "free" clock headroom. Haswell isn't quite so accommodating. Intel has disabled limited multiplier control for non-K CPUs, effectively limiting overclocking to the Core i7-4770K and i5-4670K. Those chips cost $20-30 more than their standard counterparts, and surprisingly, they're missing a few features. The K-series parts lack the support for transactional memory extensions and VT-d device virtualization included with standard Haswell CPUs. PC enthusiasts now have to choose between overclocking and support for certain features even when purchasing premium Intel processors. AMD also has overclocking-friendly K-series parts, but it offers more models at lower prices, and it doesn't remove features available on standard CPUs."

First time accepted submitter rarkian writes "I am the teacher in this story. I teach Python and C++ to high school students: grades 9-12. I use CentOS 6 with DRBL to run my computer lab. Some of my students have become Linux experts. Next year I'm planning on allowing students to create and run their own VMs in a segregated LAN. Any advice on which virtualization technology to use and security concerns with allowing students to be root in a VM?"

Gonzalez_S writes "Let's say you need to give access to 100+ users to create their own virtual machines and devices (eg. switches, .., ms windows or linux family) in a manageable and secure way. Which virtualization solution would you choose? There are vmware, xen, kvm, .. based solutions, but which one would you prefer and why? The solution should be stable, manageable, scriptable and preferably have ldap integration. In this case I also need to setup a playground for IT students, next to hosting production servers on the same system."

hypnosec writes "IBM is taking its COBOL server platform to the next level by updating the mainframe platform in a bid to extend and enable its mainframes to host cloud based applications and services. The latest update is looking to add XMLS Server as well as Java 7 capabilities to the System/z COBOL platform and this update would extend the overall lifespan of COBOL by taking it up a notch and gearing it towards the cloud computing arena."

An anonymous reader writes "Andy Oram reports on the quality, security, and community driving open source adoption. 'All too often, the main force uniting competitors is the fear of another vendor and the realization that they can never beat a dominant vendor on its own turf. Open source becomes a way of changing the rules out from under the dominant player. OpenStack, for instance, took on VMware in the virtualization space and Amazon.com in the IaaS space. Android attracted phone manufacturers and telephone companies as a reaction to the iPhone.'"

First time accepted submitter anarcat writes "After two years since the last Debian release (6.0, nicknamed "squeeze"), the Debian release team has finally published Debian 7.0 (nicknamed "Wheezy"). A newly created blog has details on the release, which features multi-arch support (e.g. you can now install packages for both i386 and amd64 on the same install), improvements to multimedia support (no need for third party repositories!) and improved security through hardening flags. Debian 7.0 also ships with the controversial Gnome 3 release, and the release notes explicitly mention how to revert to the more familiar 'Gnome classic' interface. Finally, we can also mention the improved support for virtualization infrastructure with pre-built images available for Amazon EC2, Windows Azure and Google Compute Engine. Debian 7.0 also ships with the OpenStack suite and the Xen Cloud Platform. More details on the improvements can be found in the release notes and the Debian wiki." An anonymous reader points out (from the announcement) that "[t]he installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages, and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too. In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for Secure Boot yet."

jrepin writes "The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. The Xen Project is an open source virtualization platform licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. Designed from the start for cloud computing, the project has more than a decade of development and is being used by more than 10 million users. As the project experiences contributions from an increasingly diverse group of companies, it is looking to The Linux Foundation to be a neutral forum for providing guidance and facilitating a collaborative network."

snydeq writes "We need bare-bones Linux distros tailored for virtual machines or at least the option for installs, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'As I prepped a new virtual server template the other day, it occurred to me that we need more virtualization-specific Linux distributions or at least specific VM-only options when performing an install. A few distros take steps in this direction, such as Ubuntu and OEL jeOS (just enough OS), but they're not necessarily tuned for virtual servers. For large installations, the distributions in use are typically highly customized on one side or the other — either built as templates and deployed to VMs, or deployed through the use of silent installers or scripts that install only the bits and pieces required for the job. However, these are all handled as one-offs. They're generally not available or suitable for general use.'"

dcblogs writes "Virtualization, cloud services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) is making it much easier to shift IT infrastructure operations to service providers, and that is exactly what many users are doing. Of the new data center space being built in the U.S., service providers accounted for about 13% of it last year, but by 2017 they will be responsible for more than 30% of this new space, says IDC. 'We are definitely seeing a trend away from in-house data centers toward external data centers, external provisioning,' said Gartner analyst Jon Hardcastle. Among those planning for a transition is the University of Kentucky's CIO, who wants to reduce his data center footprint by half to two thirds. He expects in three to five years service provider pricing models 'will be very attractive to us and allow us to take most of our computing off of our data center.' IT managers says a big reason for the shift is IT pros don't want to work in data centers at small-to-mid size firms that can't offer them a career path. Hank Seader, managing principal of the Uptime Institute, said that it takes a 'certain set of legacy skills, a certain commitment to the less than glorious career fields to make data centers work, and it's hard to find people to do it.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Anandtech compares the Boston Viridis, a server with Calxeda's ARM server technology, with the typical Intel Xeon technology in a server environment. Turns out that the Quad ARM A9 chip has it weaknesses, but it can offer an amazing performance per Watt ratio in some applications. Anandtech tests bandwidth, compression, decompression, building/compiling and a hosted web environment on top of Ubuntu 12.10." At least in their tests (highly parallel, lightweight file serving), the ARM nodes offered slightly better throughput at lower power use, although from the looks of it you'd just be giving money to the server manufacturer instead of the power company.

hypnosec writes "Linux KVM has been ported to ARM64 just ahead of the release of the architecture, it has been revealed. Just last year ARM KVM virtualization support for Cortex-A15 32bit ARM processor was published. Marc Zyngier of ARM released a set of 29 patches that contained the implementation of KVM for ARM that depends on the pre-arm64 rework as well as tiny perf patch published earlier. Some of the newly released port are support for 4k and 64k pages and 32-bit as well as 64-bit guests."