Citrix will offer an open source virtual switch for Xen and KVM
At the end of April, Citrix announced the upcoming features of XenServer 5.5 and Essentials for XenServer / Hyper-V 5.5, opening the public beta program.
Last week during the Synergy conference, the company clarified which features will be included in the free XenServer and which ones will be part of Essentials:
| XenServer (free) | Essentials (non free, for XenServer and Hyper-V) |
| Consolidated Backup (pluggable architecture that allows 3rd party vendors to perform incremental, in-guest, file and image backups of virtual machines) |
Workload balancing (star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance) |
| New XenConvert (V2V migration from VMware VMDK to Microsoft VHD format and support for OVF format) |
StorageLink integration (native standards-based support for several storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel) |
| Active Directory integration | Support for 3rd party hypervisors in Virtual Lab Management component (the OEM’ed VMLogix LabManager) |
| Enhanced Search inside GUI |
Citrix also announced the general availability date, June 16, and the recommended price for Essentials: $2,500 per server, regardless of the number of processors.
But the less the most interesting feature has yet to come: a pluggable, open source virtual switch for Xen
This code will be used by 3rd party network vendors to develop virtual switches for XenServer that can compete with the Cisco Nexus 1000V for VMware vSphere 4.0.
Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group has some juicy details about it on his personal blog:
The virtual switch will be open source and initially compatible with both Xen- and KVM-based hypervisors.
It will provide centralized network management.
It will support advanced network management features such as Netflow, SPAN, RSPAN, and ERSPAN-
It will initially be available as a plug-in to XenCenter.
It will support security features such as ACLs and 802.1x.
Chris Hoff, the former Chief Security Architect at Unisys, knows even more about this upcoming module and wrote a long and interesting insight about it on his personal blog.
No words on when this virtual switch will be available but we can guess who will be involved in the project: the fearless Vyatta is already competing with Cisco thanks to their amazing open source router; if the company would ever decide to also release a virtual switch, this is their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
virtualization.info Newest articles
May 30th, 2012
Today Amazon announced the availability, with no additional charge, of VM Export, the counterpart of VM Import, that allows the export EC2 instances to costumers on-premise infrastructures.
This new features…
May 30th, 2012
Yesterday the Fedora Project announced the general availability of Fedora 17, the latest version of Red Hat sponsored free open source operating system distribution.
In the rich set of new…
May 29th, 2012
Last week Quest Software announced the availability of vRanger 5.4 its backup, replication and recovery solution for VMware.
The main feature of this new release is the plug-and-play integration with…
May 28th, 2012
Last week VKernel announced the release of vOPS Server Standar 5.0 with a particular emphasis on the introduction of new automation features like on-click auto-deployment of capacity reservations, automated risk…
May 24th, 2012
Today Milan hosted the VMware Forum 2012, during the opening keynote Brian Gammage, VMware’s Chief Market Technologist, tried to collect all the news and declarations we heard in the last…
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware announced the acquisition of Wanova Inc. a company whose main product is called Mirage.
Mirage is a centralized management and recovery solution for physical desktop images over the…
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware published a paper focused on VMware vMSC (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster), a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List intended for environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a…
May 22nd, 2012
Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.
Terms…
May 21st, 2012
On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.
This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.
All the new…
May 21st, 2012
In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…
May 17th, 2012
On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…
May 17th, 2012
Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…
May 15th, 2012
Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…
May 15th, 2012
On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress