The UK web hosting provider eUKhost announce this week the launch of new Cloud Virtual Private Servers. They are powered by its new cloud environment based on VMware virtualization platform.

The company claims that their new Cloud VPS Hosting offers one of the best solutions available for delivering 100% uptime in a virtual server environment. The host uses VMware's Fault Tolerance and High Availability features and Distributed Resource Scheduler features.

"At eUKhost, our intention was to make the Cloud Hosting Service generally available to all users worldwide after successful testing of the product late last year", said in an official statement Ryan Watson, business development manager at eUKhost.

The new service is provide form Milton Keynes based data center facility. Customers can choose between any type of OS, application and hardware. The eUKhost's officials explain that If any single node experiences failure for any reason, VMware will automatically move the affected websites to a backup node, eliminating the possibility of any downtime.

The Cloud VPS plans start at £30 per month (accounts to around $47). Both Windows and Linux based VPS are available. Each VPS comes with pre-installed software, including ASP.NET and SQL Server on Windows and PHP, Perl, and MySQL on Linux. Additionally, Cloud VPS plans feature 24×7x365 expert technical support and a 100 percent uptime guarantee.

KickAssVPS.com, a Linux and Microsoft Windows VPS hosting provider announced this week its new ColdFusion® 9 Virtual Private Servers.

ColdFusion 9 was released by Adobe in October this year. It introduces a multitude of productivity enhancing features, deeper integration with the Adobe Flash Platform, and simplified integration with enterprise environments that enable developers to build enterprise-ready Internet applications. ColdFusion 9 also offers Microsoft Office interoperability and object-relational mapping.

KickAssVPS is one of the web hosts that traditionally support ColdFusion development community by offering Windows VPS hosting services with ColdFusion 7 and 8.

The company's ColdFusion 9 Windows VPS start at $70 per month for 10 GB disk space and 100 GB data transfer.

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"