Year: 2009

In the last couple of years virtualization.info reported how the relationship between Microsoft and Citrix is getting tighter and tighter around virtualization, well beyond the historical Terminal Server/Metaframe partnership.

In the name of a planned integration that the two announced two years ago, XenServer uses the Microsoft virtual hard drive format (VHD), the Citrix Essentials management suite controls Hyper-V (and Citrix gives a part of it away for free) and the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will manage XenServer and XenApp.

It’s not finished anyway: yesterday Citrix announced further integration, this time about App-V and XenApp.

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Last week Wyse Technology announced the release of Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA).

This new protocol enhancement, probably a superset of the existing TCX Multimedia technology that VMware is OEM’ing, is promised to accelerate up to 3 times the performance of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp (using the ICA protocol), VMware View and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (both using the RDP protocol) in WAN scenarios with more than 200ms in network latency.

Like the Citrix Branch Repeater and other products in this space, VDA works as a proxy that customers need to install on the branch office.

VDA is embedded in Wyse thin clients that use the ThinOS 6.4 but its works also on regular fat clients like workstation and laptops powered by Windows XP.

Here’s a 2 minutes demo of the technology:

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A couple of weeks ago HP announced its support for the StorageLink technology that Citrix is offering inside the Essentials management suite.

StorageLink allows the XenServer and Hyper-V administrators to manipulate the SAN LUNs directly from inside XenCenter and Hyper-V MMC console.
HP is supporting this technology on its StorageWorks SANs, including EVA, MSA and LeftHand Networks arrays.

With this move HP may be trying to consolidate its position in the SMB market, as the announcement comes just a little before the Citrix one about a free version Essentials for Hyper-V (called Express Edition) that includes the StorageLink layer.

After more than one year VMware finally seems to make some progress on one of the most useful tools in its revamped product portfolio: Lifecycle Manager.

The technology behind this product was acquired in September 2007 from the Swiss startup Dunes Technologies.
The Dunes orchestration framework was used to build a simple yet very useful web portal for self-service virtual machines provisioning.
The framework itself turned into vCenter Orchestrator, bundled as part of vSphere 4.0, while the automation package turned into vCenter Lifecycle Manager. In fact the new 1.1 beta (build 4376) requires an updated version of the former to run properly.
While fairly complex, in theory a customer should be able to develop his own version of Lifecycle Manager just using Orchestrator.

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Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and vCenter AppSpeed 1.0.

AppSpeed 1.0 (build 36919) is powered by the technology that VMware acquired in May 2008 from B-hive.
It is able to discover the elements of the virtual infrastructures (physical hosts, virtual machines, clusters, etc.), the applications running inside them, and even some structures inside the applications (like tables inside a database).
Once tracked the applications, AppSpeed sniffs their traffic to understand their “normal” behavior (like the response time, the performance) and build some baselines.
At this point the product compares the baselines with the actual application performance to recognize potential slows down (or lack of availability) that affect the user experience.

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Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and AppSpeed 1.0.

The need for chargeback capabilities is growing at a fast pace as the virtualization technologies mature and multiple departments of the same organization start to use the same virtual infrastructure with confidence.
This is why startups like VKernel are growing in popularity and seasoned players like Vizioncore start to include the chargeback feature in their performance monitoring products.

With a perfect timing VMware enters the segment and releases this new module for vCenter Server 3.5 and 4.0.

Chargeback 1.0 (build 175384), which comes as a virtual appliance, sports the following capabilities:

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Today VMware releases the fourth generation of its virtual lab automation tool Lab Manager.

The new 4.0 version (build 1140) introduces the following features:

• Support for multiple workspaces (isolation of resources in multiple workspaces in the same organization, sharing of configurations across different workspaces)
• Host spanning across network fencing (network-fenced virtual labs can see the same host) 
• Resource usage monitor
• Configuration history and archiving
• Support for vSphere 4.0 (excluded VMware FT and Linked Clones technologies)

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Microsoft releases today the RTM version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit 4.0.

As anticipated during the beta program, this new version supports Hyper-V R2, that will be part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM between today and tomorrow, and the inventory of VMware Server Hosts and Guests.

The product is still free of charge.

Today VMware releases the first minor update for its disk and file backup/restore product Data Recovery, included in bundle with vSphere 4.0 Plus, Advanced and Essential Plus licenses.

The new build (176771) doesn’t introduce any new feature but fixes a number of bugs and improves the performance.

Despite vSphere 4.0 is finally out VMware didn’t stop to release major updates for the previous platform.

The new Update 5 (build 174841), available today for vCenter Server 2.5 only, introduces support for up to 80 virtual machines per host in a HA cluster.

Reaching the new limit requires some modification on the virtual infrastructure that are described in the knowledgebase article 1012002.