VMware presented a new virtualization products during its VMworld Europe 2009 conference in Cannes. Their names are vCenter Server Heartbeat and vShield. Both virtualization technologies bring it closer to supplying the data center operating system via its virtual machine management capabilities.

The company announced that the new name of "Virtual Center", its virtual machines provisioning and management server is now vCenter Server. In Cannes the virtualization producer presented vCenter Server Heartbeat, a software that enable IT engineers to monitor the central management server. VCenter Server Heartbeat works as automation solution which transfers operations to another physical server in the case of failure.

The new virtualization technology now makes possible for VMware to offer a greater guarantee of continuous operations, because it provides automated failover of the central VM management server.

VMware will sell VCenter Server Heartbeat for $4,995. The solution works in conjunction with vCenter Server, a product priced at $9,995.

The other data center product that VMware announced in the virtualization conference is vShield Zones. It is a virtual appliance for security which allows data center engineers to create logical zones with different levels of security based on groupings of virtual machines.

VMware executives explained that "instead of having to cordon off a group of Internet-facing servers with their own settings in a demilitarized zone, vShield allows a DMZ to be created among VMs that may be co-hosted on the same physical server with internal applications".

Using vShield, the enterprise users can segment applications based on their security needs and run them in a shared environment, covered by their zone's protections. The product will be released within the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2009. A beta release however is set to be released within a month or two.

More news about VMWare's new releases

VMware Adds To Data Center Operating System, "Mware's Heartbeat Offers High Availability for vCenter Server"

VMware has announced vCloud, its ambitious plan for public and private computing clouds six month ago. For those who missed the announcement we have to say that VMware considers vCloud as an "initiative" not as new product or platform.

The purpose of vCloud is to demonstrate VMware's technology capacity in virtualization technologies and to attract more attention from corporate customers and public institution.

John Foley, from Information Week also says that the company's main goal however is "to enable application hosting in the cloud, including multicloud interoperability, using a VMware API called the Cloud vServices API, as well as VMware's implementation of the industry standard Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), and other VMware technologies".

In an article titled "VMware To Take Its Next Steps Into The Cloud" Mr. Foley says that he had a conversation with VMware's CTO Stephen Herrod about his company's future developments.

Herrod explained that VMware is focused to develop solutions in three main areas: internal or private clouds; public cloud services; and federating multiple clouds.

In the field of "private clouds" the company entails bringing some of the capabilities of public cloud services, including self-service provisioning and usage-based billing, to the corporate data center. VMware also works to secure private clouds by isolating VMs in environments where multiple business units share IT resources.

Steve Herrod told Information Week that some of VMware's customers "already have taken it upon themselves to develop capabilities such as self-provisioning, chargeback, and VM isolation".

In the filed of "public clouds" VMware plans to deliver a software stack for public cloud service providers. The virtualization producer is developing capabilities to let them to offer on-demand, subscription services from their self-service portals.

The third area of VMware's cloud strategy, according to Information Week is to enable interoperable, hybrid clouds.

VMware To Reveal More About Their Cloud Strategy At VMword Europe 2009

The annual conference of VMware VMworld Europe 2009 open within a few days, on February 24. in Cannes, France. The company has already published "Speaker and Session Catalog". The organizers says that the keynotes will be posted for viewing once they have taken place.

The event offers 3 full days of conference activities that include:

- General session keynotes from the President and CEO of VMware - Paul Maritz, its Chief Technology Officer - Dr. Stephen Herrod, and Managing Director of SAP Hosting - Dr. Wolfgang Krips.

- More than 150 sessions

- Hands-on labs, where you conference participants can see the technology first-hand and ask questions in an interactive environment.

VMware announced the release of Fusion 2.0.2, an update to company's virtualization software for Mac OS X.

VMware Fusion enables Macs that use Intel processors to run other OS and their application software as "virtual machines", rather than having to reboot. The technology allows anyone to run Mac OS X and Mac apps alongside Windows, Linux and other OS that work on Intel hardware. It also operates on Apple’s Xserve systems as an enterprise server virtualization product.

The new version 2.0.2 allows its users to import virtual machines created using a competitor product — Parallels Desktop 4. The update supports Parallels Server as well.

Fusion 2.0.2 makes also possible Leopard Server to be be virtualized and this mounts a .DMG (disk image) from a virtual machine. An issue with running Mac OS X 10.5.6-based virtual machines has been fixed. Now all the issues that Mac users experienced when installing the Leopard Server virtual machine on new MacBooks, MacBook Pros and MacBook Air are resolved.