VMware announced it has completed the acquisition of B-hive Networks. VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive on May 28, 2008. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. With this acquisition, VMware will leverage the B-hive team and technology to enhance the VMware portfolio of application and infrastructure management products by offering proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within virtual machines.

Beijing PowerUnique Technologies announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver solutions to mutual customers.

Tek-Tools announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver timely, joint solutions to mutual customers.

Certeon announced that Unitus has selected Certeon's aCelera to improve remote file accessibility among its global users. Certeon's aCelera Virtual Appliance for Application Acceleration delivers acceleration as a service through software inside a virtual infrastructure--an ideal solution for enterprises looking to optimize remote access performance over the wide area network (WAN).

For many years secondary sites have been a part of the enterprise computing equation. Recent natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina opened the eyes of many IT administrators to the devastation that can compromise primary and backup IT facilities. The widespread confusion that followed Hurricane Katrina brought into sharp focus the need for comprehensive business continuity plans that incorporated secondary data center sites located far enough away so as to be untouched by the disaster affecting the primary data site. However, many IT organizations believe the costs involved in establishing secondary data centers are out of reach for all but the largest organizations.

Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Egenera CTO Pete Manca are among the top industry executives joining Jeremy Geelan in the famous 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' to be recorded on the eve of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

InstallFree has reached an agreement with CDG Europe to distribute its products in the UK and across Europe. The arrangement expands CDG Europe's portfolio into the developing application and desktop virtualization space, which helps IT directors lower total cost of ownership, improve operational efficiency and increase end-user productivity. InstallFree benefits from CDG Europe's pan- European network, large reseller base and value added services.

VMware announced that VMware Fusion for the Mac was named one of PC World's '100 Best Products of 2008.' VMware Fusion, introduced in 2007, brings the Mac and PC worlds together to let people use the hardware they want and the software that best serves their needs. With VMware Fusion, Mac users can seamlessly run Mac OS X, Windows, and other PC-based applications at the same time on the Mac. Combining a clean and innovative user interface with a virtualization platform trusted by millions of users today, VMware Fusion lets Mac users run Windows applications without rebooting and share information between Mac and Windows.

David Marshall in his InfoWorld 'Virtualization Report' blog writes: 'Despite a sharp slowdown in U.S. business software spending, an April 2008 survey report from ChangeWave Research shows that virtualization may be spared as virtualization software spending has increased.' Marshall continues: 'The fact is, a troubled economy is probably yet another reason why virtualization software sales continue to grow. Virtualization is a technology that helps a company reduce its datacenter costs, such as less spending on server hardware, server maintenance, datacenter space, power, and cooling. So it makes sense for companies to continue to spend IT budget on virtualization software during troubling economic times.'

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

The SCOPE Alliance, an association of leading Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), announced the availability of its Virtualization Package containing three technical white papers that discuss different aspects of virtualization. Virtualization is an emerging technology that provides benefits in areas such as porting legacy software on new platform technology, optimizing hardware resource usage and using multi-core processors. The Virtualization Package gives ecosystem providers a set of hardware and software virtualization requirements that describe functional and non-functional aspects of virtualization features required by the NEPs in support of their carrier-grade telecommunications solutions.

Opalis announced the availability of Opalis Integration Server's integration with CA eHealth. The new integration pack enables customers to create unified, enterprise-wide, cross-platform monitoring services that deliver IT services faster, with fewer errors, throughout the data center.

Parallels announced the Parallels Certification Program, which enables software vendors to test their products and certify their compatibility with Parallels virtualization software. Product certification provides assurance to end users that popular ISV applications are supported and compatible with Parallels virtualization solutions. Certification is available for software vendors that want to assure compatibility with Parallels virtualization products, including Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Parallels Server and Parallels Workstation.

RELDATA announced its solutions powered by the RELDATA 9240 have been verified for Citrix XenServer. The verification supports RELDATA's ongoing effort to develop partnerships to support reliable iSCSI SAN and NAS solutions that function across all industry standards.

HP, the largest computer company in the world, is pretty pleased with itself. Sales were up 11% in its second quarter, its margin expanded and it delivered its best cash flow performance in the company's history, $4.8 billion. Yes, there are spots where it can do better - like in x86 servers. Murk Hurd will always say that. But all in all, he's pretty happy. You can hear it in his voice.

Vizioncore announced that Russ Naples is the new senior vice president of product development reporting into Vizioncore president and chief operating officer Chris Akerberg effective immediately. Prior to joining Vizioncore, Naples spent 13 years in increasingly important product development roles at Citrix Systems, beginning as a director in testing and rising to vice president of product development for the company. Before Citrix, Naples served as project lead in General Electric's Systems Integration, Test and Quality Department and has experience teaching management science courses at the university level.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

In a move that will put pressure on EMC's VMware unit, Hitachi is claiming to have a mainframe-derived firmware approach to virtualization that's better than VMware or Xen or Microsoft. The approach has been built into a new species of Hitachi's blade servers called BladeSymphony with Virtage.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

Being held for the first time on March 18, 2008 at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, AJAXWorld Security Bootcamp is a compelling, intensive, one-day, hands-on training program that will teach Web developers, Web designers, and other Web professionals how to build secure AJAX applications and demonstrate what the best practices are to mitigate security problems in AJAX apps. It is led by one of the world's foremost AJAX security experts and popular teachers, Billy Hoffman.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

The astonishingly rapid rise of virtualization technology has made it a vital component of any Enterprise IT strategy today. And the technology is triggering dramatic changes in product offerings and business practices to support virtualized operational models. These breakneck speed developments have lead to a plethora of solutions, with the attendant confusion that typically surrounds fast moving technologies. In this presentation Mr Stevens will outline current trends in virtualization technologies and examine their potential impact on, and benefits for, future Enterprise IT deployments. Topics will include tradeoffs between open source and proprietary solutions, hardware integration efforts, deployment models, and long-term, high-volume serviceability/security considerations.

One of the Google folks working on OpenSocial sent me a message via Facebook asking what I thought about the technical details of the recent announcements. Since my day job is working on social networking platforms for Web properties at Microsoft and I'm deeply interested in RESTful protocols, this is something I definitely have some thoughts about. Below is what started off as a private message but ended up being long enough to be its own article.

Virtual appliances represent a new opportunity to streamline and simplify software distribution for virtual environments. With a virtual appliance, software vendors can ship thoroughly tested, standard configurations that require minimal installation effort. In this session, Erik will discuss best practices on how to build virtual appliances.

At Mindbridge we try to use Open Source Software (OSS) as often as possible. I am not dogmatic about it and there are a few proprietary solutions that I use in my every day tasks. Our first and oldest software offering, IntraSmart, is a proprietary product, albeit a significant portion of the code is OSS based. In fairness, large pieces of IntraSmart are 'open source like' in that our customers can modify major components at will.

As part of its commitment to supporting and contributing to open standards, AMD has joined the Eclipse Foundation. AMD will add its expertise and history of collaborative innovation to the Eclipse community, helping to drive the standardization of an extensible development platform and application frameworks that can harness the power of x86 architectures and multi-core processing.

IBM says it's gonna start shipping a new General Parallel File System (GPFS) that acts like a search engine to identify and migrate files between different storage pools, including tape, and feed high-speed BI and scientific computers. GPFS tightly integrates policy-driven information lifecycle management functionality into the file system. Using file virtualization to analyze and identify data, IBM says GPFS will support policy-based file operations on billions of files in hours instead of weeks.

Attune Systems, Inc., a provider of enterprise-class file virtualization solutions, has announced that NVIDIA Corporation, a provider of programmable graphics processor technologies, has chosen the Maestro File Manager as a comprehensive file virtualization solution for the company's growing data storage needs. NVIDIA will take advantage of the non-disruptive deployment of the Maestro File Manager in the company's existing IT environment.

Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 is now available to customers worldwide. Open Enterprise Server 2 features full 64-bit support of software services previously found only on NetWare, along with storage management enhancements and NetWare virtualization. Novell Open Enterprise Server combines proven workgroup services from Novell with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, completing the Open Enterprise Server shift to providing workgroup services entirely on Linux.

SANZ, Inc., a provider of data access solutions, has announced that its new Virtualization solution can help enterprises and government organizations simplify their IT infrastructure, while helping to reduce their costs.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

Lehman Brothers has been sifting through the Penryn rumors and suggests that Intel may be able to come up with a low-power 3GHz/80W chip to checkmate AMD's attempts to field what may be a 2.5GHz/75W Barcelona penciled in for December.

In a 'joint experiment,' Sun and Microsoft will work together to ensure that Solaris runs well as a guest on Microsoft virtualization technologies and that Windows Server runs well as a guest on Sun's virtualization technologies. Sun and Microsoft will work together on a support process for customers who are using the virtualization solutions.

Ajax13, Inc., a software development company delivering Web-based applications written using the AJAX-based methodology, has announced the launch of ajaxWindows. AjaxWindows is a Web-based middleware solution that uploads and securely stores all desktop data, documents and content, free of charge, by leveraging the customer?s gMail account from Google.

OpenVZ for Linux 2.6.22 includes new Process ID namespace code that replaces the implementation that was previously in OpenVZ. The code is expected to be adopted in an upcoming release of the Linux kernel and was contributed to the Linux kernel by the OpenVZ project with additional contributions from IBM, plus requests, reviews and comments from other parties.

VMware has introduced VMware ESX Server 3i, a next-generation thin hypervisor to be integrated in server hardware from Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, NEC and others. Building virtualization into the server hardware simplifies the deployment and management of virtual infrastructure.

SYS-CON Events announced today that 'AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West' main sponsorship opportunities are now sold-out! Limited number of expo and event sponsorship opportunities that are still available are expected to be completely sold before the end of the month. The new sponsors who joined the conference this week, and are not yet listed on the conference Website, will also be announced later in the week.

I will be teaching a one day Bootcamp course on Ajax at the AJAXWorld Conference in Santa Clara, California on September 23, 2007. Details are at http://aja xbootcamp.sys-con.com I will be expanding the Ajax construction tools section from the Ajax Bootcamp I taught in New York at the SOA World conference. I am very impressed with TIBCO GI and Sun jMaki