F5 Teams With NetApp, VMware on Live Migration for Applications

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), a specialist in Application Delivery Networking, announced improved live virtual machine migration capabilities for customers leveraging NetApp unified storage and VMware virtualization solutions. The solution combines the companies’ technologies to help customers migrate live virtual machines between data centers without any perceivable disruption to users or applications.

F5 has continued its collaboration with NetApp and VMware to further simplify the migration of applications between data centers. Combining F5, NetApp, and VMware technologies, customers can optimize performance to improve the effectiveness of live migrations of virtual machines as well as applications that were not originally designed for distributed deployment.

“Strong partnerships with industry leaders such as NetApp and VMware help us maximize the efficiency of customers’ virtualization and cloud deployments,” said Jim Ritchings, vice president of business development at F5 Networks. “By implementing F5, NetApp, and VMware products in concert, our customers can dynamically and cost effectively scale application resources across data centers, providing higher availability and optimized performance for multiple scenarios—including geographically dispersed users, disaster avoidance, and consolidation efforts—to avoid planned downtime within data centers.”

The combination of VMware vSphere 5, vMotion, NetApp FlexCache, and F5’s BIG-IP products enables customers to distribute application deployments and virtual machines across multiple data centers. Through F5’s broader BIG-IP portfolio of Local Traffic Manager, Global Traffic Manager, and WAN Optimization Manager solutions, F5 helps ensure that user requests can be redirected and optimized throughout the migration process, meaning that systems can stay online and users maintain access to applications and data.

“With the combined solution, customers can extend the benefits of virtualization beyond traditional, siloed data centers,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of corporate alliances at NetApp. “Customers can enjoy more control over dynamic resources, including where applications reside and the physical resources they can access. With enhanced application mobility, organizations are in a better position to proactively address changing conditions, including potential disaster scenarios in which application resources need to be diverted quickly from a site or location under duress.”

Parag Patel, vice president of global strategic alliances at VMware said as many organizations build out their application deployment models using virtualization and cloud technologies, interoperable solutions are increasingly attractive. “VMware partners with leading network and storage vendors to help customers get the most out of their IT investments. F5 solutions, combined with VMware and NetApp technologies, enable organizations to overcome network latency across broader distances, providing fast and powerful live migration capabilities with vMotion and now Metro vMotion,” he said.  

Fidelis Introduces SSL Traffic Security Platform

Fidelis Security Systems, a specialist in network visibility, analysis, and control solutions, announced the SSL Decoder within Fidelis XPS, which provides the ability to assess the authenticity of a Secure Socket Layer certificate. Fidelis also introduced the SSL Inspector 10G, which enables the XPS Deep Session Inspection architecture to detect threats in SSL-encrypted content on 10G Ethernet networks. The XPS SSL Decoder and SSL Inspector 10G appliance will be available this quarter.

By leveraging the rules engine that is at the core of XPS, Fidelis is adding the ability to put rules in place to evaluate certificates and to take action, such as preventing a session, if the certificates characteristics are suspect. The combination of these rules and implementing this action at the network edge is designed to provide a measure of ease of use for large enterprises that would otherwise have to rely on application vendors retroactively providing patches following publicized breaches at SSL Certificate Authorities and users applying these patches correctly.

“With the recent widely-publicized breaches of Certificate Authorities, enterprises are in desperate need of a way to verify the authenticity of SSL certificates,” said Gene Savchuk, CTO at Fidelis. “While SSL pinning – white-listing a certificate authority public key in a browser for a specific domain or set of domains – is emerging as a potential solution, it will quickly prove inadequate for enterprises due to the dynamic nature of certificates and a need for a solution that scales. The Fidelis XPS SSL Decoder mimics this concept, but at the network edge rather than at client end-points, and offers more centralized management which is conducive to certificate changes and scale.”

Fidelis introduced the SSL Inspector in late 2010 to remove the blind spots in content inspection and threat detection created by SSL-encrypted traffic. “SSL-encrypted traffic makes up an ever increasing share of the traffic seen on an enterprise network with the proliferation and cloud computing and social networking,” said Andrew Hay, senior security analyst at IT research firm 451 Research. “Though the security and confidentiality capabilities provided by SSL are widely known, SSL can also be used to conceal malicious activity such as botnet command-and-control or data exfiltration. If companies are not leveraging network monitoring tools capable of inspecting encrypted traffic, they're likely missing an important threat vector.”

In response to increasing demand to inspect traffic at speeds above one gigabit, Fidelis is introducing the SSL Inspector 10G. The system is in a smaller form factor (1U), offers interface flexibility from 1 gigabit copper or fiber to 10 gigabit fiber, is designed to inspect multiple inline segments and can distribute traffic to multiple devices in the enterprise security stack. 

HP Looks for EU Help in Case Against Oracle: Report

Hewlett-Packard reportedly is looking to take its legal dispute with software giant Oracle international.

During a court hearing Nov. 22 in the suit HP is bringing against Oracle for ending development for the Itanium platform, lawyers for both HP and Oracle noted that the tech company is asking European regulators to investigate Oracle. According to a report in Reuters, HP wants the European Commission—the antitrust arm of the European Union—to investigate whether Oracle is using its powerful position in software to damage HP’s hardware business.

Like the lawsuit in the United States, the contention in Europe centers on Oracle’s decision in March to top developing software for systems that run on Intel’s high-end Itanium platform. That decision has had a particular impact on HP, which by far is the largest user of Itanium processors. HP uses the chips in its high-end Integrity servers to run such operating platforms as HP-UX, NonStop and OpenVMS.

In addition, HP and Oracle share about 140,000 customers, many of whom run Oracle’s database applications on HP’s Itanium-based servers. Oracle’s decision to end its support of Itanium means that many of those joint customers will have to look for other platforms on which to run their Oracle applications.

During the court hearing in San Jose, Calif., Daniel Wall, a lawyer for Oracle, said HP was looking to recruit regulators outside of the United States to hear its complaints. Attorney Robert Cooper, representing HP, said the arguments the tech company is making to European regulators are separate from the lawsuit in the United States. It’s unclear whether the European Commission will take up any investigation of Oracle.

The relationship between Oracle and HP, at one time strong partners, has deteriorated over the past couple of years. A significant change happened in early 2010, when Oracle closed on its $7.9 billion deal to buy Sun Microsystems. 

Oracle not only got Sun’s software—including the Solaris operating system—but also its SPARC hardware business, putting Oracle into direct competition with HP in the data center.

Later in the year, when HP CEO Mark Hurd was forced to resign after the board of directors raised questions about his personal and professional conduct, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison lambasted the HP board and then hired Hurd as Oracle’s co-president.

The Itanium decision was only the latest dent in the relationship. Oracle officials claim that Intel plans to end Itanium development soon, and that their decision to stop developing for the platform will help their customers start making decisions on where to migrate their workloads. They also point out that other top-tier software makers—most notably, Microsoft and Red Hat—also have ended support for Itanium.

Oracle officials claim the only reason Intel continues to develop Itanium is because of payments from HP. HP officials have said that their company and Intel do have a contract to continue enhancing the Itanium platform and to use the chips in HP’s high-end systems.

However, Intel executives have said their Itanium roadmap goes through at least the rest of the decade, and HP officials have accused Oracle of using the issue to force customers off HP systems with hopes of propping up its own SPARC/Solaris platform.

HP executives on Nov. 22 unveiled “Project Odyssey,” a plan to enable its x86-based systems that run Intel’s Xeon EX processors to handle the same mission-critical workloads that its Itanium-based servers now handle, and to run on the same platform as those Integrity systems. Customers will start seeing the first products from Project Odyssey within the next two years, and the move could convince businesses to stay with HP systems rather than port their applications to another platform, most likely Oracle’s or IBM’s Power servers or mainframes.

HP officials said the program will give enterprises options when considering which platforms to run their workloads on, and added that they have no intention of discontinuing innovating around their Integrity platform.

The two sides are scheduled to go to trial on the issue April 2, 2012. 

AMD Cancels its 28nm APUs from GlobalFoundries

According to a report from ExtremeTech, AMD will shift its 28nm APUs from GlobalFoundries to TSMC. In the process of switching foundries, the company has cancelled its Wichita and Krishna APUs, the 28nm successors to its C-Series (codenamed Ontario) and E-Series (codenamedZacate) chips for budget notebooks and low-power computing devices. The decision by AMD to drop its Wichita and Krishna APUs and shift its 28nm manufacturing process to TSMC was also driven by the slow and low-yield production from GlobalFoundries.

(Source: techETA)

This may translate to longer shelf lives for the C and E-Series APUs, probably until the end of 2012 unless AMD ramps up its efforts in developing its next generation Kabini and Samara APUs. AMD may also decide to release 28nm Ontario and Zacate APUs after their move over to TSMC. 

Source: ExtremeTech

Acer and Asus to Raise Notebook Prices by 2-3 Percent

According to Taiwanese IT news site, Digitimes, two of the world's largest PC manufacturers based in Taiwan -- Acer and Asus -- have confirmed that they will raise the prices of their notebooks by at least two to three percent more than the original prices.

This confirmation was given by Acer's vice president Scott Lin, who said that notebooks produced in December would reflect this price change, as the companies deplete their current stock of hard drives in November.

Asustek Computer's vice chairman Jonathan Tseng has also confirmed that his company will do the same,  according to Hong Kong, Chinese-language publication, Apple Daily.

This is due to the recent floods in Thailand, which has submerged many hard drive factories, causing work on these essential components to be stalled. Thailand is the second biggest hard drive manufacturer after China.

Microsoft shoots down Google's Dart language

Google hopes to better the Web with Dart, but Microsoft has declared itself an opponent of the programming language rather than a potentially valuable ally.

Google hopes Dart will address shortcomings in JavaScript, the programming language that endows Web sites with some brains. In a blog post yesterday, though, Microsoft said that improving JavaScript is the way to go.

Five members of Microsoft's JavaScript team said the Dart sales pitch argues "JavaScript has fundamental flaws, and to support these scenarios requires a 'clean break' from JavaScript...We disagree with this point of view."

Dart got off to a rough start, with Google alienating some potential allies with an insular early-stage development process. And allies are key: For Dart to live up to its potential, it needs support among browser makers. Microsoft's stance makes it look like it'll be very hard to build that support into Internet Explorer. In addition, Microsoft remains influential with programmers, and it just offered a very public vote of no confidence.

JavaScript has the classic benefits of an incumbent technology. Programmers are familiar with it, newer browsers are remarkably faster at running it, and many libraries of pre-written software such as jQuery make powerful features easily accessible to Web developers. Such factors mean a virtuous cycle of steady improvement that makes it harder for a more revolutionary approach to gain a foothold.

And there are more improvements on the way--from Microsoft, from Mozilla, and yes, from Google itself, which continues to improve its JavaScript technology even as it preaches the gospel of Dart.

Type inference's JavaScript speedup

One potentially major change coming to JavaScript execution is taking place at Mozilla through a feature called type inference that's built into the upcoming Firefox 9. That version of Mozilla's browser is currently in beta testing, slated to arrive before by very early 2012.

Type inference gets to the heart of a fundamental divide between programming languages: the nature of variables that store information such as numbers or text. JavaScript is dynamically typed, which means that a variable can hold any sort of information. Traditional heavy-duty languages such as C or Java, though, use statically typed variables whose nature must be declared in advance by the programmer.

Dynamic typing adds flexibility, but it slows down program execution. And one of Dart's high-profile features is that it supported static typing.

One person who has high hopes for type inference is Paul Bakaus, CTO of Zynga Germany, which builds browser-based games.

And the performance is looking good, said Dave Mandelin, a Firefox programmer working on the Firefox's JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine. "JM+TI [JaegerMonkey and type inference] is looking good and on track for shipping with Fx9, with nice speedups pretty much across the board," he said in a blog post yesterday.

ECMAscript improvements

Microsoft has its own ideas for JavaScript--ideas that call for changes to the language, not just to how its browser runs it. Specifically, Microsoft promoted several new features at an ECMAscript standards meeting last week, the company said.

The features would build several items into JavaScript's included library that programmers today must add on their own. Those items include a handful of mathematical and numeric operations, ways to process text, and globalization technology to more easily handle different currencies and date formats.

In addition, Microsoft offered prototype software at its HTML5 Labs site that lets people try the technology.

"As the Web transitions from Web sites to Web apps, and as Web developers build new experiences in HTML5, we know that JavaScript will also need to make this transition without compromising its simplicity, flexibility, or performance," the Microsoft JavaScript team members said. And without mentioning Dart directly, they called for evolution rather than revolution: "An approach that enables broad, incremental adoption by the Web developer community has the highest chance of success."

Taking out the garbage

Even if Dart were to take off tomorrow, there still is an endless amount of JavaScript on the Web, so running it fast is important for Google's "build a faster Web ambition. On top of that, another faction within Google remains committed to JavaScript and its next-generation "Harmony" changes.

For those reasons, JavaScript performance is a top priority in the Chrome browser. Google has been locked in a benchmark battle with IE, Safari, Opera, and Firefox for years, but now it's working on another JavaScript performance improvement: consistent performance.

To that end, Google announced that the developer-channel version of Chrome now includes a feature called incremental garbage collection in its V8 JavaScript engine. It's designed to keep software responsive.

Garbage collection periodically frees up memory that a program claimed but didn't release, a very useful technology. But that process can hang up a computer while memory is tidied up. Incremental garbage collection breaks the process up into steps to reduce the pauses.

Google measured its success with one of its V8 benchmark tests of JavaScript performance. "In our testing the maximum time to render a frame including pause time is reduced from 272 milliseconds to 50 milliseconds," the programmers said.

Mozilla also is working on incremental garbage collection. "This stuff is hard, and we don't know how much tuning work there will be, but we're currently targeting IGC landing for Firefox 11," Mandelin said.

Fiddling with the JavaScript engine is difficult but has paid performance dividends for all the browser makers--and for developers, too. Dart will have to offer very compelling benefits to dislodge the established language of the Web.

HP's 'Project Odyssey' Will Bring Together Itanium, x86 Systems

Hewlett-Packard is embarking on a project that will enable enterprises to run their mission-critical workloads on either Unix or x86-based server architectures within a single platform.

HP’s far-reaching “Project Odyssey” will involve continuing to innovate on the current high-end HP-UX, OpenVMS and NonStop solutions and Integrity servers running on Intel’s Itanium processing platform, while also developing blade servers powered by Intel’s Xeon chips that can run mission-critical applications that call for high availability, scalability and reliability within Microsoft Windows and Linux environments.

The x86-based blades will be able to run in the same Superdome 2 enclosure as Itanium-powered HP systems, while also sharing many of the same high-end features, according to HP officials.

Project Odyssey is the response to demands from HP customers who currently run their mission-critical workloads on HP’s high-end Itanium-based systems but—because of such issues as finances, the need to simplify their computing environments or the demands from their software partners—are looking to move some of those applications onto x86-based systems, according to Lorraine Bartlett, vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy at HP’s Business Critical Systems  (BCS) Group.

“Most customers are exploring moving some of these mission-critical workloads,” Bartlett told, adding that Project Odyssey will enable them migrate these application to platforms that work with the environments they’re already operating.

Project Odyssey has a number of moving parts that not only calls for HP to innovate around its own hardware and systems software, but also to work closely with Intel ondevelopment of the Xeon EX and Itanium chips and operating system vendors like Microsoft and Red Hat to fortify their software for such mission-critical environments, Kirk Bresniker, vice president and CTO of HP BCS, said.

HP customers should begin seeing the fruit of the project within the next two years, Bresniker said.

The new Xeon-based x86 blades that will fit into the HP Superdome 2 enclosure are being developed under the codename “DragonHawk,” he said. The scalable c-Class blade enclosures are being codenamed HydraLynx. With DragonHawk, enterprises will be able to run high-end workloads on HP-UX on Itanium-based Integrity servers and on Windows or Linux on Xone-based blades within the same Superdome 2 enclosure.

Creating such a converged environment will give businesses greater flexibility and more options when looking for scalable and reliable platforms on which to run their mission-critical workloads, Bresniker said.

The sysmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) DragonHawk systems will scale to 32 sockets that will offer hundreds of processing cores and run big and complex workloads, according to HP. HydraLynx x86 blades will offer two, four and eight sockets offered in c-Class enclosures and supporting mission-critical virtualization and availability.

HP also is bringing its Serviceguard cluster software and nPartitions capabilities, found in its mission-critical systems, to the x86 environment, Bresniker said. Serviceguard automatically moves workloads between servers in a cluster environment when there’s a failure or other need, assuring high availability of the workloads. HP’s nPartitions enable IT managers to partition system resources across multiple workloads and to eliminate failure points, enabling businesses to scale within a single system.

HP also is embedding Analysis Engine for x86 into the system firmware for server diagnoses, automatic repair of system errors and restoration of the system in seconds. In addition, HP will bring its Crossbar Fabric to the x86 systems for the routing of data within the servers.

HP’s Mission Critical Services business also will play a key role within Project Odyssey, Bresniker said.

The announcement comes at a difficult time for HP’s BCS group, which on Nov. 21 reported a 23 percent drop in fiscal year fourth-quarter revenue, compared with the same period last year. During a conference call with analysts and journalists, CEO Meg Whitman reportedly admitted that the BCS business is in a “slow decline,” and that the company needed make its way to a new platform.

HP’s high-end server business has been embroiled in a controversy since March, when Oracle officials announced that they no longer would develop software for the Itanium platform, claiming that Intel was planning to shutter Itanium in favor of its Xeon processors. The move drew a sharp rebuke from Intel, which said it plans to roll out the next-generation “Poulson” chip in 2012, which will form the basis of a roadmap that extends to “Kittson” in 2014 and through the end of the decade.

HP has sued Oracle, claiming the software maker violated an agreement to support technologies that are used by the companies’ 140,000 joint customers. HP officials accuse Oracle of endangering customer businesses to prop up the SPARC/Solaris platform it inherited from Sun Microsystems. Oracle officials counter that HP is hurting its customers by continuing to tie them to a dying Itanium platform.

HP’s Bartlett said the company’s plan is to continue to innovate around its high-end HP-UX, NonStop and OpenVMS platforms powered by the Itanium-based Integrity systems, and that there are no plans to migrate HP-UX to x86 processors.

Intel officials for the past several years have been working to a common platform between the Itanium and Xeon product lines. For example, the Itanium 9300, Xeon E7 and Xeon 7500 chips support the company’s “Boxboro” 7500 chipset, and all support the QuickPath Interconnect—or QPI—architecture. Some Itanium and Xeon chips also share the same memory controller. For HP, that means it can leverage its sx3000 chipset now found in the Superdome 2 blades for Xeon processors, Bresniker said. 

Facebook Looks to Expand Open Hardware Push to Storage, Management

More than six months after open-sourcing its server specs, Facebook and the Open Compute Project are looking into other areas of the data center, from storage to systems management. If Facebook officials have their way, theirOpen Compute Project will go beyond servers and power supplies, touching on every aspect of a data center’s infrastructure.

The initiative, which kicked off in April when Facebook open-sourced the server and data center specifications the social networking giant employed in building its data center in Prineville, Ore., now offers an impressive array of members, from Intel, Asus and Rackspace to Mellanox, Huawei and Red Hat, not to mention a few research and education institutions.

It’s an indication of the various directions in which the project is rapidly moving, Amir Michael, hardware design manager at Facebook, said in an interview during the recently concluded SC 11 supercomputing show in Seattle. Facebook already is moving forward with the next generation of the custom servers it’s designed, Michael said.

At the same time, project members also are looking to tackle other aspects of the data center, including systems management, storage and I/O. The push in these directions will help create the momentum to solve that key issues that Facebook officials saw when looking at data center technology—that proprietary products from large and small vendors alike could address in a broad way some of the mainstream needs that are present in most enterprises, but do not meet the unique demands a particular business may have.

Facebook engineers set out about two years ago to start designing their own servers using standard off-the-shelf technologies. Up to that point, the company has been using systems from traditional OEMs. Facebook worked with chip makers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, as well as systems makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell, to create the custom servers.

The aim was to build systems that offer the performance needed to run a fast-growing social network with 800 million-plus members while keeping down capital, power and cooling costs in the densely populated data centers. The Facebook-developed systems are 1.5U (2.65 inches) tall—rather than the more traditional 1U (1.5 inches) servers—which, among other positives, makes for better air flow and lower cooling costs, Michael said.

There is no paint or logos that are found on servers from OEMs—which not only reduce the capital costs, but also make the systems lighter—there is a more energy-efficient power supply in place and they’re easier to service, with tool-less components, from fans to power supplies.

The result of the work was a 38 percent increase in energy efficiency at the Oregon facility at a lower cost of 24 percent as compared with Facebook’s other data centers, he said. The Oregon data center also has a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.07. The PUE ratio is a way to measure how efficiently a facility uses its energy; the closer to 1.0, the better. The Environmental Protection Agency has a standard PUE rate of 1.5.

Facebook expects to get similar results as it builds new data centers, Michael said. Last month, company executives said they plan to build their next data center in Lulea, Sweden, just on the edge of the Arctic Circle, to serve users in Europe and other regions. The site was chosen for its cold air and access to hydroelectric power.

The company also is working on its next generation of servers, which will include such technologies as an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and the ability to reboot on the LAN. They also will continue to be powered by Intel and AMD chips, though Michael said the company also is keeping an eye on other chips, including those from ARM Holdings. ARM-designed chips from the likes of Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung are found in most smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, but the company also is looking to move up the ladder and into low-power servers.

Facebook officials also are interested in leveraging what comes out of the various Open Compute Project working groups that will focus on storage, systems management and interconnect technologies, Michael said. The company has never intended to run the project, he said; instead, the hope is that the community will evolve to the point where Facebook is just another participant that can take advantage of the open technologies that come out of it.

Facebook’s decision to open up its hardware specifications in April was a significant change for an industry where other businesses, such as Google and Amazon, have closely guarded their data center specs, using them instead as a competitive advantage. However, Facebook officials saw an open community as the way to faster innovation and more product options.

On Oct. 27, the Open Compute Project announced it was forming a foundation to lead the effort, with directors and advisers coming from such places as Arista Networks, Facebook, Rackspace and Intel, as well as a mission statement and guiding principles. In a blog post on the project’s Website, Frank Frankovsky, director of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook, said he was surprised at the level of enthusiasm for the idea since it was announced in April.

VMware 4.1 lifts block on Snow Leopard Client virtualization

Recently VMware released version 4.1 of its Fusion virtualization software for OS X, which in addition to offering a number of bug fixes and speed improvements has lifted its restriction on virtualizing the Client version of Snow Leopard.

In the past, and as is the case with other virtualization options, when you tried to install Snow Leopard or another operating system that is restricted from virtualization by its EULA, Fusion would issue an error message notifying you of this restriction. Now VMware appears to have changed this so its software only requests that you abide by the operating system's EULA, but does not prevent you from installing Snow Leopard if you choose.

In essence, VMware Fusion now puts the responsibility of abiding by Apple's EULA on its customers, instead of imposing its own restrictions. When I contacted VMware, the company issued a statement saying that it could not comment on this development at this point in time (It has since mentioned this happened in error--see below).

With this setup, it is possible to run Snow Leopard within Lion and thereby run applications like Quicken 2007 that require the Rosetta PowerPC-to-Intel translator (which Apple removed from OS X in Lion). While this development is welcomed by many who have been looking for a method of running PowerPC applications on Lion systems, is it here to stay?

Apple has historically been very restrictive as to how its operating system is used, and the Snow Leopard EULA specifically prohibits virtualizing and installing it on non-Apple hardware. While the community of independent "Hackintosh" hobbyists has been able to skirt Apple's legal team, the company has been fairly active in addressing commercial products that have made breaking the EULA easier.

After Apple's switch to Intel chips, companies like Psystar began making hardware options for running OS X on non-Apple systems, but Apple put a halt to these efforts with legal action.

Additionally, Apple's public relations department takes steps to prevent violation of its EULA. When Oracle released version 3.2 of its VirtualBox software, it temporarily gained the ability to virtualize Snow Leopard Client, which I briefly discussed here on MacFixIt. However, at Apple's request and in accordance with Snow Leopard's EULA, VirtualBoxwas changed to no longer support Snow Leopard Client, and I changed my article's focus to discussing the Server variant of the OS.

These past actions from Apple suggest that this recent development in VMware's software may cause a stir in Cupertino. Even though Apple has moved past Snow Leopard, it still adheres to its EULA and may attempt to influence both VMware and the coverage of how to virtualize its OS using Fusion 4.1. Furthermore, the Fusion 4.1 release notes do not indicate that this new functionality is an intended feature, indicating there is a possibility this development was accidental, as it was with VirtualBox.

Therefore, while this might seem like a positive step for those wishing to get PowerPC applications running in Lion, it may be best not to count on the software keeping this capability, since it could be removed in future versions of the program.

UPDATE (7:00pm, PST): In response to this news, VMWare has issued a new statement on its Fusion Blog stating, "When the license verification step was added in VMware Fusion 4.1 the server edition check was omitted."

This development was clearly a mistake by the VMWare team, and the company is preparing an update to VMWare Fusion to address the issue accordingly. For now if you have installed Snow Leopard client in VMWare Fusion, it will currently work but as we predicted it will likely not work properly in the future. It was fun while it lasted.

UPDATE (Nov 23, 5:40pm PST): VMWare has released version 4.1.1 of Fusion, which has reinstated the OS X version checking routines. Unfortunately this and future versions of the software will not boot virtual machines running Leopard or Snow Leopard client versions of OS X. VMWare has instructions on it's site for how to update these virtual machines to OS X Lion so they will boot and continue to work.

(Courtesy: CNET)

Microsoft Looking to Buy a Piece of Yahoo, Again

In what could be the first sign of a potential buyout, Microsoft has signed a confidentiality agreement with Yahoo to get access to the company’s financial information, Reutersreported Wednesday.

Citing a “source familiar with the matter,” the report says Microsoft is one of many companies now combing through Yahoo’s business. Private equity firms KKR, TPG Capital, and Silver Lake Partners are also said to be interested in buying minority stakes of up to 20 percent, with plans to eventually own controlling interest in the company.

KKR and Silver Lake recently invested a substantial amount of money into domain registrar GoDaddy, a deal reported worth $2.25 billion.

The interest from Microsoft is especially notable since the software giant once before tried to buy the company back in 2008. The offered price was reported to be almost $45 billion, or $33 a share. Today Yahoo trades for about $15 a share. Commenting on the failure to work out a deal three years ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said: “Sometimes you’re lucky.”

Now it seems Microsoft is once again looking a buying Yahoo, or at least a sizable chunk of it. Why the renewed interest? Microsoft wouldn’t comment to Mashable on the matter, but it appears the company is interested in preserving its partnership with Yahoo on search.

The two worked out an agreement in 2009 where Yahoo would use Microsoft’s Bing search technology, and Microsoft would serve up ads in Yahoo searches. Yahoo is still the second most popular search engine, according to comScore, so Microsoft has good reason to keep that partnership alive.

Yahoo has been struggling for years. Although its search and email services were once dominant, the company has failed to respond credibly as Google and other competitors gained market share. The company fired its CEO, Carol Bartz, in September. Former CFO Tim Morse is the current interim CEO.