Leostream
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Leostream is a Waltham, Massachusetts-based company offering primarily two products for virtualization: P>V Direct and the Virtual Desktop Connection Broker. It was founded in 2002.
The Leostream Virtual Desktop Connection Broker is an outgrowth of the older Virtual Machine Controller, a LAMP-stack Virtual Appliance designed to monitor and control a heterogeneous network of virtualization layers, such as VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server.
The Connection Broker is also a Virtual Appliance that's heavily integrated with VMware's VirtualCenter, Microsoft's Active Directory and several thin client products from manufactures like Wyse and Neoware. In an environment in which users' desktops are virtual machines with RDP enabled (like Windows XP or Windows 2003), the Connection Broker uses Active Directory information to map users to a specific virtual machine or a pool of virtual machines.
Similar connection brokers are offered by Citrix with XenDesktop, VMware with VDM, and Ericom with WebConnect.
Leostream P>V Direct is a Physical-to-Virtual conversion tool to convert physical Microsoft Windows computers to virtual VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server servers.
The software works by installing a P>V Wizard on the Windows server to be virtualised, a Host Agent on the server (Windows for GSX or Linux for ESX) the virtual machine will be running on.
A Macromedia Flash demonstration of the Wizard in action can be seen here.
It does not require a restart of the computer, merely that all processes writing important data to the hard disk be suspended during imaging.
Leostream may also be used as a V2V (virtual to virtual) backup solution, which is aided by the disk synchronizing feature. Virtual Machines created by Leostream can be updated with changes made to the source machine.
Imaging can be scheduled to happen using the Windows scheduler. The Wizard can be used to record a transfer, and replay the commands later. Using this method, incremental transfers can be done that will do one large v2v to copy all the data the first time, and then subsequently copy only the changed data.
Support for ESX Server 3.0 is handled through another Virtual Appliance called a Host Proxy, which is currently in public beta testing. The official release is expected in November, 2006.
Leostream can have difficulty virtualizing some kinds of Windows servers like Domain Controllers, Citrix and Exchange servers. However, many users never run into problems at all. See the P>V manual for further discussion of these issues.
