Year: 2009

Now that Nexus 1000V, the first virtual switch for VMware vSphere is out for sale (and we know everything about it), Cisco is free to publish detailed demos of the product in action.

The company just uploaded two new HD videos on Facebook that cover how vEthernet interfaces relate to VMware vNICs, what are port-profiles, how to create them with a SSH console and how to apply them with the vSphere client, how to monitor the network statistics of a virtual machine despite its migration from a host to another with vMotion.

Both are worth a check:

• Nexus 1000V Demo – Part 1 (10:59 min)
• Nexus 1000V Demo – Part 2 (10:43 min)

With much irony, now that Microsoft is about to release Hyper-V R2, its Press department finally releases the Resource Kit for Hyper-V 1.0 (or better Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V).

The 750-pages book was written by Robert Larson and Janique Carbone, who already authored the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit.
The former comes from Microsoft Consulting Services, the latter is a former Microsoft Premier Support Engineer.

The book has been included in the virtualization.info Bookstore (which is powered by Amazon).

Today virtualization.info is happy to announce the launch of a new initiative called OneHourOn.

OneHourOn is a live webcast that virtualization.info will host from its cutting-edge Rent-A-Lab facility in Zurich.
We’ll use our on-demand datacenter to show the configuration and management of products provided by the many virtualization vendors that we daily track in the news.

So no slides at all.

This is a great opportunity to see in action a product that you may be interested in purchasing and by the way this also is a great opportunity to see how powerful, flexible and fast Rent-A-Lab can be.

Of course we’ll take full advantage of the enterprise equipment we have (currently 28 servers, each with 2 x Quad Core Intel E5420 2.5GHz, plus 35TB of storage served by SANs from several vendors).
This is why the first OneHourOn webcast will show a fairly complex installation to reproduce in a lab without expensive test equipment: the installation and configuration of VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 with EMC Celerra NS20 storage arrays.

Read more

After 5 weeks of public beta program, Citrix released today XenServer and Essentials 5.5 (codename project George).

The list of new features is well known since a while but so far Citrix did a poor job in detailing what is included with the free XenServer and what is instead only available in Essentials Enterprise and Platinum editions (the release notes are identical for both packages).
While waiting for an official clarification virtualization.info guesses the breakdown as follows:

XenServer

• Active Directory integration
  Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
• Expanded guest OS support
  RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.
• Snapshot support in XenCenter and CLI
  Create and manage virtual machines live snapshots from within XenCenter or the xe CLI.

Read more

Over one year ago one of the biggest phone carrier in US, Verizon, raised a lot of interest because of the rumors about its technology partnership with the startup Desktone and its plan to develop a VDI in the cloud, something that the industry is calling today Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

After 14 months the Verizon offering is is finally here (at least in US and Europe for now) but it doesn’t seem anymore oriented to the consumer market as the early rumors originally reported.

Called Verizon Computing as a Service (Caas), the platform is powered by several vendors including VMware, HP and Red Hat.
virtualization.info didn’t have the chance to try the service yet, but the press release talks about a fully featured virtual datacenter rather than a virtual desktop on demand:

Read more

Yesterday, with a single step, a new startup called 5nine entered two crowded and market segments: the P2V migration and the capacity planning ones.

P2V migration tools have been progressively included into every major virtualization platform: VMware, Microsoft and Citrix for sure have their own, and Oracle has three R&D departments now to produce a cool one as well.
The fact that all of the are available for free negatively impacted the business of the other vendors in this segment, which are struggling to survive.

So far none of the competitors in this space had the farsightedness to merge the migration tools with a capacity planning platform, so to accelerate the virtualization adoption and justify the existence of stand-alone P2V tools. 
5nine seems to have exactly this strategy.

Read more

Microsoft has just opened a new beta program for its almost unknown free capacity planning tool called Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit.

As for the previous versions, MAP 4.0 can be used to perform a capacity plan for Hyper-V and App-V but also for other, non-virtualization related tasks.
The most significant update of this new version anyway is the support for Hyper-V 2.0/R2 that will be released in late July for Microsoft partners and October 22 for the rest of the world.

On top of that MAP 4.0 can now perform the inventory of VMware hosts and guests:

In details, the new features available with MAP 4.0 are:

Read more

The VDI division of Quest, Provision Networks, is preparing to release the next version of its vWorkspace (formerly Virtual Access Suite or VAS) connection broker.

The beta 1 of vWorkspace 6.2 is mainly a bugfix release but it also enhances the support for multiple monitor configurations, for USB redirection and for the graphic acceleration (which now supports CPU throttling on the client).

Side by side with this beta Quest/Provision Networks also launched a second, more interesting beta program, unveiling its first client for Apple Mac OS X: Mac AppPortal.

In this first beta the only features that have been implemented are:

Read more

Almost one month ago a new startup called Liquidware Labs entered the VDI space. 
Behind it there are the founder and former CEO of Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008) and the founder of Foedus (acquired by VMware in January 2008).

At the foundation of Liquidware Labs there’s the technology of another startup called vmSight, which has been acquired while in stealth mode and that is now rebranded as Stratusphere.

The new company continues from where vmSight left, using the same Connector ID technology to rate the physical desktop candidates for VDI environments or to identify poor user experience in an existing VDI environment.

On top of that Stratusphere 4.2 introduces the following major features:

Read more

In January 2008 ClearCube decided to spin off its software division under the name of VDIworks to sell in an easier way its agnostic connection broker.

Since that time, VDIworks has been off the radar and yet it has made interesting moves: it released a VDI plug-in that works with System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) rather than System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and announced a plan to offer an offline VDI solution based on VMware Player.

In September 2008 the company even extended its support to the HP RGS protocol, but now it seems like there’s a completely different strategy as VDIworks announces its own desktop protocol: VideoOverIP (VoIP, easily confused with Voice Over IP).

With this new protocol VDIworks enters a dangerous and crowded space that it believes will dominate easily, at least looking at the comparison below:

Read more