Year: 2008

This June Microsoft launched a new initiative called Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) to simplify customers’ life when they need support for company’s software running on virtual machines.

The program already generated a lot of buzz for two good reasons:

• some vendors which didn’t have a hypervisor to validate surprisingly appear as members (good example are Cisco and Unisys).
• the most combative competitor VMware was the first to achieve validation for its hypervisor ESX

After this LeMagIT took the disturb to dig more into this last achievement and discovered something interesting.

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In May Citrix released the second major version of its VDI solution XenDesktop.

The product is much more than a connection broker for virtual infrastructures as it includes a plethora of other Citrix products, from the Provisioning Server to the Access Gateway, passing through the GoToAssist.

The result is a feature-rich and powerful product but the side effect is that newcomers can be very confused trying to understand how the platform works.

To address the issue Citrix just released a lengthy slide deck detailing XenDesktop 2.0 architecture, exploring all the tiers used in different business cases.

The document is certainly not enough to fully get the potentials of this product but it’s good starting point.

By now many corporations in the world approaching virtualization have discovered that finding proper ISV support for their virtual machines of choice is still one of the biggest challenges.
At this point the situation is probably good enough for VMware customers, but when a firm decides to adopt a new platform like Microsoft Hyper-V things may become more complex.
Of course, with the proper incentives, Microsoft will have no problems in persuading the whole ecosystem to support its hypervisor, but it will require some time in any case.

So it’s very good news to know that SAP has officially extended its support for virtual infrastructures to Microsoft Hyper-V.
Besides VMware no other virtualization vendors are currently supported (which means issues for Citrix, Virtual Iron, Novell and Red Hat customers).

To reflect this new policy SAP also updated a small paper which describes the exact guest environments supported for VMware and Microsoft platforms.

Note that at the moment SAP only supports the Hyper-V edition included with Windows Server 2008 and not the new Hyper-V Server 2008.

Update: As several Novell representatives point out, SAP should have at least another hypervisor mentioned in the document above: the Xen platform included in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.

Novell and SAP in fact announced the support for that virtualization engine in March 2007 and as far as we can see the policy is still in place.

We wait a formal answer from the two companies on the incongruence.

On Sep. 1 Microsoft application virtualization platform App-V 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid) finally reached RTM status but wasn’t available to customers until Oct. 1, when the new Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2008 R2, still available only for Volume License customers with Software Assurance.

(the App-V 4.5 version for Terminal Services instead will be released Nov. 1 as Microsoft confirms on its corporate blog)

The new version 4.5 brings in a deeper  integration in the System Center family (the management tier for example is now called Microsoft System Center Application Virtualization Management Server) and several improvements including:

• HTTP streaming from IIS 6 and 7 as well as from Windows shares
• New application sequencer
• Support for Volume Shadow Service (VSS) writer

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virtualization.info is happy to announce the launch of an iPhone version of the website.

To see it please navigate with your iPhone Safari to:

http://virtualization.info/i

If you like you can the page to your Home clicking on the “Plus” icon. 
At that point virtualization.info should appear on your iPhone dock like any other application.

Enjoy!

Current limitations:

• comments can be read but cannot be written
• search is unavailable

virtualization.info has just learned that VMware acquired the security vendor Blue Lane Technologies.

The company, popular for its inline patching technology, entered the virtualization market at the beginning of 2007 and completely refocused its effort around the VMware Infrastructure over the last two years.

Like all its competitors, their VirtualShield, is still unable to provide a special integration with the ESX hypervisor and requires a traditional VM-to-VM interaction: the product must be installed inside a virtual machine that acts as a proxy and the virtual networking must be reconfigured to point all protected virtual machines to it.

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Amazon launched a virtual infrastructure available on demand and powered by the Xen hypervisor, the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), in August 2006.

As far as we know the number of customers that are currently using it is not public, but, despite early security issues and multiple outages, reliable sources reported to virtualization.info that such number is remarkable.
Nonetheless Amazon may have many more customers if it would start offering Windows virtual machines.

So far in fact the company only offers Linux instances. It’s unclear if this depends on technical issues (like the version of Xen that it’s currently in use), on policy issues (like the feeling that EC2 is not robust enough to support million of customers hosting Windows) or licensing issues (Microsoft has to give its blessing for such a massive infrastructure).

It seems that the things are finally changing: with a brief note online Amazon announced that EC2 will have Windows instances this fall.

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At its conference VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas last month, VMware previewed the next phase of its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies announcing it as VMware View.

On stage Steve Herrod, the company’s CTO, unveiled a partnership with the startup Teradici to develop a more efficient remote desktop protocol.
It seems that this may be not enough, maybe because of the time needed to have a commercial product, so VMware took some extra steps to boost Microsoft RDP performance today.

The company signed a license agreement with the thin computing vendor Wyse Technologies to use its technologies TCX-MMR (for multimedia) and TCX-MDS (for multi-display) to enhance the virtual desktop experience in VMware View products.

Last week VMware released the Update 3 (build 119825) for VirtualCenter 2.5.

Unlike the previous Update 2, this one wasn’t released for the entire VMware Infrastructure and doesn’t bring any new feature.
It’s only for bug fix and existing components (like the FLEX license server) refreshment.

The full list of resolved issues is here.

It’s strange that VMware just changed its release strategy and didn’t include any new feature in this update.
Probably all the juicy new capabilities are now already planned for the imminent VMware Infrastructure 4.0.

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

Microsoft has recently released an update to extend its new hypervisor capabilities in managing CPU cores and virtual machines.

When released in June, the version of Hyper-V included as server role in Windows Server 2008, could manage no more than 16 logical processors and no more than 128 virtual machines per host.

The new software package, available as manual download and through Windows Update, allows Hyper-V to manage up to 24 physical CPU cores and up to 192 VMs per host (this last limit anyway needs a manual edit of the Windows Registry. Without it Hyper-V can manage only 150 VMs per host).