Year: 2007

A tool Microsoft uses internally since some years, VMRCPlus, has been finally released online for general public by its creator Matthijs ten Seldam.

VMRCPlus is definitively interesting, extending and replacing Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 web console capabilities in many aspects:

• Direct control of local or remote instances of the Virtual Server service
• Tabbed interface to quickly jump between Virtual Server hosts and guest VMRC sessions
• Reusable saved states: this feature allows users to preserve a particular saved state and return to that state at any time
• Multiple guest selection supported for startup/shutdown/save/display
• Browse button navigation for media, hard disk images, ISO images, .VMC files, etc.
• Drag and Drop support for .VMC files, ISOs images, VHD and VFD files
• Resizable desktop support for guests running Virtual Machine Additions (maximize VMRC window supported)
• Limited cut and paste of text from host to guest (only)
• A built-in utility to take JPG screenshots of running guests. Useful when filing bugs
• Built-in error notification with Virtual Server eventlog viewer
• A Virtual Networks Manager and Virtual Disks Manager that cover all features
• Keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl-S to save state a guest)
• Create multiple guests at once
• Create guest from parent (or multiple guests)
• Automatic reconnect to a designated Virtual Server host
• Toolbars in both Guest and Console Manager for quick access
• Unlimited number of guests
• Maximum of 32 Virtual Server hosts
• Sorting on columns of guests so you can sort based on status and multi-select
• Automatic detection of Virtual Machine Additions and notification
• Detection of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

The tool doesn’t require official web console at all, so Microsoft customers could install Virtual Server without it (even on upcoming Windows Server 2008 Server Core edition) and use VMRCPlus to complete every administrative task.

Despite Matthijs is not a Microsoft employee, VMRCPlus has been announced by a Microsoft employee, Keith Combs, and is distributed through Microsoft Download facility (on the other side nor Matthijs neither Microsoft will provide support for it).

Download it here.

In April 2007 uXcomm acquired the US startup Virtugo. After two months uXcomm decided to take subsidiary name as main one and hire a former VMware executive to the management board.

Quoting from the official announcement:

uXcomm, a leading provider of software products that manage solutions for virtualization platforms, today announced that it has changed its name to Virtugo Software, raised $4 million in new funding and has appointed Ashmeet Sidana, a former VMware executive and partner at Foundation Capital, to its Board of Directors.

…

Mr. Sidana is a partner at Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm committed to early stage company building within the enterprise software market place. Before joining Foundation Capital, Mr Sidana was at VMware where he was responsible for multiple products including Virtual SMP, P2V and their flagship product: VMware’s ESX Server. With over 15 years of experience in Silicon Valley, including CEO at Sidana Systems, and leadership roles at Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics, Mr. Sidana brings a broad perspective on enterprise software and creating category leading companies…

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Quoting from the CiRBA official announcement:

CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence, today announced that it has expanded its presence into Europe, naming Ayman Gabarin as vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa. Mr. Gabarin, who previously worked with CiRBA President and CEO Gerry Smith at Changepoint Corporation, will play a key role in helping to further develop CiRBA’s business, presence and relationships across Europe.

…

Ayman Gabarin has 20 years of experience in various business sectors including enterprise software and industrial services. Prior to CiRBA, Mr. Gabarin was the EMEA Vice President of IT Governance at Compuware Corporation. He also launched the EMEA business as Vice President for Changepoint Corporation, a leading provider of solutions for automating IT services delivery. As a member of Changepoint’s executive team, where he worked alongside Gerry Smith, Mr. Gabarin grew revenues to 30% of Changepoint’s global sales, resulting in the company’s 2004 acquisition by Compuware. Mr. Gabarin holds a Bachelor of Applied Science and Engineering degree from the University of Toronto…

Quoting from the Kidaro official announcement:

Kidaro, a leading provider of enterprise desktop virtualization solutions, today announced that Kevin Brown has been named President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the board of directors. Mr. Brown, an accomplished entrepreneur and executive in the software, networking, storage, and security sectors, will lead Kidaro’s expansion in the enterprise and government markets. Prior to joining Kidaro, Mr. Brown served in executive roles at Network Appliance, Decru, and Inktomi, and has served as an advisor on privacy and security matters for the U.S. Congress, Federal Trade Commission, and U.S. Department of Defense.

…

Prior to joining Kidaro, Brown served on the original executive team of storage security firm Decru, where he led worldwide marketing, business development, and product management. Brown helped the company achieve #1 market share and global adoption across the financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, and government sectors. Following the $272 million acquisition of Decru by Network Appliance, Brown was named to the Network Appliance Information Governance Board, where he helped shape the company’s policies relating to compliance, security, and intellectual property protection…

Quoting from The Register:

…

“Our applications don’t run on anything smaller than a data warehouse,” said Google engineer Luiz André Barroso, while speaking last week at the Usenix event in Santa Clara, California.

…

By data warehouse, Barroso means a facility with software spread across thousands of systems. Google has announced at least four such $600m systems in the last few months just in the US. This type of scale has Google working on software problems, energy issues and component conundrums beyond the realm of conception for most companies. For that reason, Google has largely bypassed the Tier 1 server and software vendors’ pitches.

For example, Barroso noted that he “loves” the people at VMware but doesn’t plan to use their software.

“I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,” he said. “It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Possibly Google doesn’t see a benefit in hardware virtualization but probably has different opinion about application virtualization approach since earlier this month acquired GreenBorder.

Quoting from the Nimsoft official announcement:

Nimsoft Inc., an emerging leader of Service Level Management (SLM) solutions, today announced that Nimsoft is leading the industry by providing end- to-end, service level monitoring and reporting for VMware environments. Nimsoft’s signature in-depth and real-time reporting brings enterprise customers and managed service providers central management of multiple VMware Virtual Centers and 360 degree monitoring for all levels of the VMware stack, including hosted business applications…

PodTech.net published an interview with VMware founder and chief scientist, Mendel Rosenblum. On second part of it he shows a live demo of new Record/Replay feature introduced in VMware Workstation 6.

Watch it here.

VMware published a new beta of its first desktop virtualization product for Apple market: Fusion.

This new build (48339) introduces support for just release Apple Mac OS X 10.4.10 and pre-release Mac OS X codename Leopard.

Enroll for the beta program at source.

After a long time Dunes Technologies releases a minor release of its virtual infrastructure automation framework: Virtual Service Orchestrator or VS-O.

In this new version Dunes introduces few enhancements like:

• Revised access rights management
• Support for Novell eDirectory and open-ldap

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Quoting from the XenSource official announcement:

XenSource, Inc., the leader of the open source Xen virtualization project and a provider of enterprise virtualization solutions, and NEC Corporation, one of the world’s leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions, today announced a broad alliance in which NEC will deliver XenSource’s server virtualization solutions. With this agreement, NEC and XenSource will collaborate to deliver XenSource virtualization solutions to market to help businesses dramatically reduce operating costs through savings on hardware, provisioning, power, space, cooling, and system maintenance.

Additionally, the companies will collaborate to deliver Integrated VM on NEC’s REAL IT PLATFORM vision. Integrated VM is a technology which realizes total management for multiple virtualization products and is performed by NEC’s platform management software, NEC SigmaSystemCenter. By this collaboration, NEC and XenSource will add XenEnterprise into the Integrated VM and enhance the virtualization market by joint development of the management features…