Year: 2008

Citrix didn’t lose time after the XenSource acquisition and after winning 400 new customers in Q4 2007, it’s now working at the new version (codename Miami) of XenServer.

The first public beta is available today with some interesting improvements like:

• Update/patch management integrated in XenCenter
• Centralized logging
• Support for NIC bonding (host level) for fail-over
• Support for hot-plugging USB storage as a storage repository
• Support for Windows guest OS hot disk remove
• Support for 10Gb Ethernet NICs (Mellanox/Chelsio)
• Support for shared fibre channel storage
• Support for Windows Vista (x86 only), Red HAT Enterprise Linux 5 (both x86 and x64), Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (both x86 and x64)

Enroll for the beta here.

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Today VMware releases its much awaited VDI connection broker: Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.0

Despite the versioning this is the very first release of VDM that VMware makes available outside its Professional Services channel. This specific release is also interesting because is the first one which integrates technology acquired from Propero.

The product is in public beta since September 2007 and the RTM build (403) sports some interesting features:

• Partially fault-tolerant architecture (user database synchronization between VDM servers)
• DMZ-friendly architecture (front-end tier for incoming connection and back-end tier for Active Directory and VI3)
• Integration with VirtualCenter
• Win32 and web-based client (it integrates rdesktop on Linux and Microsoft RDP Client on Windows and Mac OS)
• Web-based management interfaces
• RDP tunneling over SSL
• Support for HA solutions (NLB or clustering)
• Support for persistent and non-persistent desktop pools
• Support for RSA SecurID based authentication
• Support for Microsoft Active Directory authentication
• Support for client USB redirection

Download a trial here.

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

The still calm Virtual Lab Automation market, where only three major companies use to compete (VMware, Surgient and VMLogix), welcomes today a new player: StackSafe.

Founded in 2005, the US startup enters the virtualization world with 20 people and a product, Test Center, which features a web-based management interface and supports both VMware ESX Server and Citrix XenServer platforms. Besides that the company doesn’t provide much more details about the internal virtual architecture behind the product.

StackSafe offers a cold P2V migration utility to import production servers inside the Test Center. The product is available at $50,000 for an annual subscription.

The company has an impressive focus on security.
The management team has some relationship with Symantec: Loren Burnett, company’s CEO, helped selling its previous firm (Riptech) to the security giant in 2002, while Jonah Paransky, Vice President of Marketing, worked in Symantec as Director of Product Management for Global Managed Security Services.
Additionally, StackSafe Vice President of Engineering, Carolyn Turbyfill, comes from the popular security firm Counterpane (of Bruce Schneier fame), acquired by British Telecom in 2006, where she covered the same role.
Even Board Advisors feature strong knowledge on security, with representatives from George Mason and Columbia universities, as well as from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The company is funded by Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Chart Venture Partners.

Both the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.

VMware just released a minor update for its desktop virtualization platform on Apple Mac OS X.

The new build (72241) introduces several bugfixes and one additional feature: transparent mapping of keyboard shortcuts in non-Unity mode (for example: Command-C to Ctrl-C).

Download a trial here.

IBM is trying to gain momentum relaunching its virtualization platform for POWER architecture under a new name.

Unfortunately Big Blue is missing the market in any case because its platform is unable to virtualize Windows operating systems, which are the large majority of guest OSes worldwide.

Other non-Microsoft-oriented companies recognized this and focused on providing interoperability and smooth performances for Windows virtual machines. It’s not a case that its partnership with Microsoft is driving Novell virtualization business. Sun will follow soon.

Quoting from the official announcement:

…IBM introduced today a new virtualization platform — PowerVM Express — specially made to enable customers to better manage their IT costs, drive maximum energy efficiency and increase resource utilization. PowerVM provides virtualization solutions for the broadest range of operating systems in the industry, including AIX — IBM’s UNIX operating system, Linux, and i5/OS for System i customers…

…

PowerVM software — formerly known as Advanced POWER Virtualization (APV) — is now available in Express, Standard and Enterprise Editions. New to all three PowerVM editions is a feature — at no additional charge — that allows System p servers to run Linux x86 binary applications unmodified without recompilation, in addition to UNIX and Linux on POWER applications…

IBM also published a new 58-pages paper about the product: Getting started with PowerVM Lx86.

Propalms, a US-based company focused on the server based computing (SBC) market, just announced its entering in the VDI market.

The new product will be called Virtual Desktop Manager and will be included in the existing TSE.

The company is the last one of a long series which includes VMware (since its Propero acquisition), Sun (with its new VDI), Citrix (with its upcoming XenDesktop), Leostream, Qumranet (with its new SolidICE), Ericom, ClearCube (now vendor-agnostic), and others.

Providing a competitive and valuable offering against the big players and the horde of startups will be hard.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar will be updated as soon as Propalms releases the Virtual Desktop Manager component.

Quoting from the Xsigo official announcement:

Xsigo Systems, Inc., the technology leader in data center I/O virtualization, today announced the management integration of the Xsigo VP780 I/O Director with VMware Infrastructure 3, the market-leading virtual infrastructure software suite. The solution is available immediately as a plug-in for VMware VirtualCenter 2.5, the central management console for VMware Infrastructure environments, allowing users to manage VMware virtual machines and virtual I/O resources from a single console…

Quoting from the Isilon official announcement:

Isilon Systems, the leader in clustered storage, today announced that Isilon’s new X-Series clustered storage systems have been certified and integrated with VMware ESX Server 3.0.

…

Isilon’s X-Series clustered storage systems deliver the industry’s first and only storage system to scale to greater than 1.6 Petabytes of capacity and provide performance of 10 Gigabytes per second in a single file system and single volume – achieving 100X the scalability and 20X the performance of traditional SAN and NAS storage systems.

…

Isilon also today announced it is working with Cisco, ColdWatt, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Riverbed and VMware to ensure interoperability with its X-Series clustered storage systems…

Following a well-known process already seen for VMware ESX Server, independent software developers (ISVs) are starting to support their produces inside Citrix XenServer virtual machines.

The first wave, announced at Citrix Summit 08, includes DataCore (storage), Reflex Security (security), SteelEye (security) and Catbird (security)

This is a mandatory step towards enterprise wide adoption. Now bigger players should follow.