Year: 2009

Intel is about to launch its new consumer processors based on the 45nm Nehalem architecture that we already saw in the new enterprise-class CPUs Xeon 5500  available since March.

This new architecture includes two critical extensions to improve the performance of virtualization platforms: VT-x (nested page tables) and VT-d (I/O virtualization).

The latter may be especially important to grant superior performance in a VDI environment powered by client hypervisors, but Intel is not offering VT-d on all its new CPUs.

The new Nehalem-based processors will be dubbed Core i3, i5 and i7 in place of the well known brand name Core 2. The first ones, that may arrive as soon as early September, will feature the VT-x but not VT-d extension.

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After launching its own remoting protocol and securing a grand total of $18 million in funding, the startup Pano Logic releases an update for its VDI platform Pano System.

The new version 2.7 introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0, some performance enhancements and a couple of new features:

• Policy-based installs and updates
  This allows to perform group policy installs and updates of the Pano Direct Service seamlessly and automatically, and allowing for Pano Manager to also be updated from within the administrator interface
• Remote user logoff and disconnect commands
  This enables the administrators to use the Pano Manager interface to logoff and disconnect users accessing their desktop virtual machines (DVMs) via Pano Devices for one-console management

Just one month after the first major release in years, PHD Virtual is back with a quick minor update for its flagship product esXpress.

The new esXpress 3.6 launched today introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0 and a significant performance enhancement:

• Improved file level restore speeds are now up to 4x faster
• Data Restoration and Archival via Windows’ Shares are now up to 4x faster
• Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to 2x as fast
• Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded 2x the previous rates

Despite its startup size VKernel continues to extend its portfolio, releasing new tools and updating the existing ones pretty much every month.
The last creation of the company is the Optimization Pack, just entered the public beta phase.

This new product includes three different tools:

• Wastefinder
  This one is able to recognize the storage, memory and CPU resources wasted by inactive virtual machines (including their snapshots and the templates they come from).
• Rigthsizer
  This one analyzes the virtual machines average utilization and peaks and suggests how to adjust virtual storage, vRAM and vCPUs accordingly.
• Inventory
  Easy to guess this one tracks the provision of virtual machines and generate reports about the inventory.

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VMware just released a very useful, 54-pages free ebook that collects many the principal guidelines to optimize the performance of the new vSphere: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0.

It includes four chapters:

• Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere
• ESX and Virtual Machines
• Guest Operating Systems
• Virtual Infrastructure Management

If you are planning a migration to the new platform this is a highly recommended reading.

Xen.org recently published a revamped edition of its official training slide deck titled Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Unfortunately the 154 slides don’t have footnotes and there’s no audio, but it’s still a welcome effort to simplify the evangelization of the hypervisor that powers half the virtualization platforms available on the market (Citrix XenServer and Oracle VM Server/Virtual Iron).

Last week Vizioncore announced a couple of interesting changes around its executive team.

Jason Mattox is now appointed as Vice President of Support, while Tyler Jewell becomes the Vice President of Products.

Mattox is the co-founder of Vizioncore while Jewell is a long time Quest executive.

The latter joined the Vizioncore parent company in May 2005 and was the Senior Director in charge of  several business units inside Quest in the last four years.
His new position as Vice President of Products, Virtualization sounds like a major Quest take over on the Vizioncore product line and strategy, which operated as a fully independent subsidiary since its acquisition in January 2008.

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virtualization.info keeps tracking the massive executive replacement that VMware is operating on a global scale, in almost every area, including the PR, the marketing and the sales department.

Last month we reported how a growing number of former Business Objects executives are joining VMware in the EMEA region after Maurizio Carli was hired as General Manager in this area in December 2008.
Before that we tracked the arrival of other high level executives from Microsoft, from Borland and from Oracle.

Another ex-Oracle joins the list today: Fred King, the former General Manager of Technology Alliances & Channels in the Australian & New Zealand region.

King joins VMware, after five years in Oracle, as its new Director of Partner Organization in the ANZ region, as CRN reports.

Last month virtualization.info reported how Oracle killed the Virtual Iron brand immediately after the acquisition, firing every employee but 10, terminating the reseller program and severely limiting the capability for existing customers to buy new licenses or upgrade licenses.

The move was so quick and brutal that Oracle gave the impression to completely disregard the loss of 1000-3000 SMB customers. And this represented an opportunity for VMware which launched a discount program to attract those customers on vSphere.

It’s possible that the pressure from competitors (also Microsoft jumped in recently) had a positive impact on the Oracle strategy, which finally decided to talk to the Virtual Iron customers through a semi-private webcast held today by Wim Coekaerts, Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering.

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IBM just announced VMControl, a plug-in for the Director management suite, which is free for the IBM customers.
VMControl, available in two editions (Express and Standard) adds management capabilities for multiple hypervisors on top of the Director 6.x platform:

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