Year: 2009

After almost three years PHD Virtual Technologies (formerly PHD Technologies) has finally released a solid update for its flagship backup solution: esXpress 3.5.

This new version, released at the beginning of May, includes the following features:

• Multi-user global deployment and configuration application featuring hierarchical, policy-driven configuration to significantly reduce deployment time
• Patent pending source-side global de-duplication across the entire ESX farm to greatly reduce LAN traffic and disk space usage
• Multi-user file-level restore for instant access to compressed data
• Built-in incremental replication which can replicate newly changed blocks and inject them directly to into the replicated virtual machine
• Date-smart dynamic export with pre-defined date-based directories, providing critical flexibility in deciding what data is exported to a choice of tape or disk

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On the Windows Server Division blog, Ward Ralston, Group Product Manager of Windows Server Marketing, announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 will reach the RTM milestone the same time of Windows 7.
Both will be generally available on October 22, 2009.

The big question is when Hyper-V 2.0 will be available then.

At the time of Hyper-V 1.0 Microsoft decided to include just a beta version of the hypervisor inside the Windows Server 2008 final code, and to subsequently update it to RTM using the Windows Update services.
The official explanation for this was that the virtualization team could fine-tune the hypervisor only after the operating system was finalized, as the former is embedded into the latter.

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At the end of April virtualization.info broke the news about the HP plan to stop the development of its high-performance remote desktop protocol, RGS, and its connection broker, SAM, to leave the VDI market as a software player.

The information we published is based on an internal, official and very updated HP presentation that we received from trusted sources.
Despite that, both HP and several anonymous claimed our article as false and misleading.

Because we don’t want to damage our sources, we didn’t (and will not in the future) publish that presentation. We believe that the credibility we built over the years will be enough for most of our readers.

Nonetheless, because we have no interest in discredit HP, we were happy to reach the company by phone yesterday to understand their official version of the story.

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Right now Novell has a lot to clarify to its shareholders about its virtualization strategy: a remarkable number of executives are leaving its subsidiary PlateSpin after the acquisition, Recon (formerly PowerRecon) doesn’t get a significant upgrade since over one year and its development unit is being moved to India, the announced stand-alone virtualization platform based on Xen is not here yet, Oracle is probably building a powerful hypervisor to compete against Novell by merging its product and the Sun and the Virtual Iron ones.

Despite all of that Novell didn’t touch any of these topics at all during its Q2 earnings call, which took place on May 28, three days after virtualization.info broke the news about them.
The only thing that Novell had to say about PlateSpin was:

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StartWind software is famous company in the world of storage because of their free iSCSI target for Windows systems (which is supported inside VMware, Microsoft and Citrix virtual machines).

The company has recently increased its activity in the virtualization space and released yesterday a free Virtual to Virtual (V2V) migration tool dubbed V2V Converter.

The tool is able to turn a VMware VMDK virtual hard drive into a Microsoft Hyper-V VHD one and vice versa.
If customers want the tool can even convert the vHD in the IMG format that StarWinds uses for its iSCSI Target.

V2V Converter, which performs a sector by sector copy on the selected target, is available without limitation here.

The Canadian startup Lanamark continues to release new modules for its hosted capacity planning suite.

After the recent Desktop Analysis Pack, now the company launches a Storage Design Module.

The module assesses physical disks usage and I/O requirement, helping to properly size the SAN to host a virtual infrastructure for server consolidation or VDI scenarios.
This new component is also able to evaluate what-if scenarios taking care of technical constrains that may depend on the HBAs, FC switches and storage arrays that the customer wants to use.

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Last week VMware updated to version 3.1 (build 167577) its connection broker solution View (formerly Virtual Desktop Manager).

This version includes the following new features:

• Support for HP RGS protocol (version 5.2.5)
  but only when the VDI endpoints are HP hardware (blade PCs, Workstations and Blade Workstations
• Multimedia Redirection (MMR) for Windows Vista
  MMR technology delivers the multimedia stream directly to the client using an RDP virtual channel instead of decoding and rendering it with RDP. This enables full fidelity playback in View Client
• Client Information
  Information about the client device that the end user is connecting from is now provided for the desktop session as registry settings. This enables customers to use third party tools or create custom scripts to map local printers to devices. The information available includes the device name, IP address, and MAC address.
• Automated Backup
  You can now configure automated backup of LDAP data and View Composer databases in View Administrator, enabling disaster recovery.
• Adobe Flash Bandwidth Reduction
  The Adobe Flash bandwidth reduction feature improves end-user productivity when browsing Adobe Flash content

While the virtualization community continues to debate on the real-world value of the VMmark benchmark platform, VMware continues to update it.

VMmark 1.1.1 was released at the end of April with the following updates:

• The VMmark harness has been updated to include automation of hypervisor and workload virtual machine reporting for disclosure
• The reporting script has been updated to support a future version of VMware ESX
  (is this referring to vSphere?)
• A new VMmarkConfigChecker script is included to help confirm that the workload virtual machines comply with the Run and Reporting Rules for VMmark
• The disclosure.html template has been updated

Starting June 1st, VMware only accepts benchmarks submissions scored with this new version of VMmark.

Seven months after its first release, the Swiss startup icomasoft is ready to upgrade its flagship product, VI PowerScripter, to version 1.5.

The new version includes the experimental support for VMware vSphere (with the integration with vCenter 4.0 GUI).

Unfortunately for icomasoft, one of the most popular vendor in the virtualization market, Vizioncore, recently launched a competing product, EcoShell, which seems able to do everything VI PowerScripter does but for free.

In September 2008 Surgient, one of the first startups in the virtual lab automation space, partially re-tuned its strategy, changing the name of its product suite and adopting a new licensing model.

At the end of April 2009 the revamped solution, dubbed Virtual Automation Platform (or VAP, formerly Virtual Q&A Management System or VQMS) received its first minor update.

VAP 6.1 includes the following new features:

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