Year: 2009

Just 33 days are left before the Virtualization Congress 2009 takes place at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

For the ones that don’t know it the Virtualization Congress is an independently developed conference by virtualization.info but this year it will run side by side with the Citrix iForum, the Geek Speak Live! and the Network World Live, all together under the umbrella of the Citrix Synergy brand.
So if you like our agenda and you want also to see/try some of the technologies that Citrix is releasing/developing (XenServer for free, Essentials for Hyper-V, Project Independence, the ICA Receiver for the iPhone just to name a few) this may be a great opportunity.

We already offer a bundled ticket to let you attend all of the four events at a discounted price but we’d like to do some more today. Let’s call it a stimulus package to travel.

(of course this is not an April Fool’s prank)

We’ll select 40 people from our event system that registered by 9pm PST on April 15 and give them the following:

• 5 people will get free airfare on round trip domestic or international airfare to the conference
• 10 people will get a 4-night hotel stay at the MGM Grand during the conference
• 25 people will get a $100 room credit for on site expenses

(please see Terms and Conditions for eligibility)

The winners will be notified via email no later than April 20.
The email will provide instructions on how to book the travel using our event system.

To win you have to register.

At this point almost every customer know that the release of vSphere 4.0 (formerly VMware Infrastructure) is imminent.
The company provided abundant details about the new features and modules that will be part of this major update, but didn’t provide a definitive release date for it.

This morning The Register is reporting that the product suite will be released on April 21.

The date is compatible with the announcement made by Cisco just two weeks ago: presenting its new Unified Computing System (UCS), the networking giant suggested that the blade platform would be available somewhere in Q2 2009, and during the Q&A session it was specifically indicated April.

One of the building blocks of UCS is vSphere 4.0 so it’s very unlikely that the two products will hit the market on different days.

At the beginning of this month VMware released the Update 4 for its management tier vCenter.
Yesterday the company also pushed the big update for the hypervisor itself.

The new Update 4 (build 153875) is available for both ESX 3.5 and ESXi and includes:

• support for Intel Xeon 5500 series CPUs (codename Nehalem)
• support for Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 (both Server and Desktop, both 32bit and 64bit), Ubuntu 8.10 (both Server and Desktop, both 32bit and 64bit), Windows PE 2.0 as guest OSes
• support for new SATA Controllers (from PMC, Intel, CERC and HP)
• support for new NICs (from HP, NetXtreme and Intel, including the just announced ones with VT-c)
• support for new storage arrays (from Sun)
• support for new management agents (from Dell and HP)
• an enhanced VMXNET driver for Windows XP and 2003 (which will require the re-installation of VMware Tools)

In October 2008 the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced that the virtualization standard known as OVF (Open Virtualization Format) reached the Preliminary Standard status.
It took another six months to finally call it a Final Standard, as announced one week ago.

It’s important to remind that OVF doesn’t replace the proprietary virtual hard disk formats like VHD (used by Microsoft, Citrix, Virtual Iron and Novell), VMDK (used by VMware) or QCOW, but rather works as a wrapper, containing the metadata necessary to correctly install and configure the virtual hard drives of one or more virtual machines.

The OVF standard is the first, major step to have better virtual appliances, a concept that so far failed to take off, plagued by multiple issues.
And because the next generation of virtual appliances will be a building block for what we are calling today cloud computing, the release of OVF today couldn’t be more timely for the industry.

The OVF standard is also the first component of a much broader set of standards called VMAN.

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Sooner or later even the the graphic cards had to be virtualized.

To achieve the task three components are needed: a chipset providing some sort of I/O virtualization technologies, a virtualization platform that can support it, and a display card that can handle the requests to access its GPU coming from different virtual machines at the same time.

The first three companies that made this possible are Intel, which provides the I/O virtualization technology (VT-d), Parallels, which provides the platform (Workstation) and NVIDIA which provides the GPU (Quadro with SLI Multi-OS).

Intel announced the new Xeon 5500 series (codenamed Nehalem) with Intel VT-d technology.
NVIDIA announced the SLI Multi-OS technology as part of the new Quadro FX 3800, 4800 and 5800 cards. 
Parallels announced the upcoming availability of a new edition of Workstation 4.0 called Extreme which supports both Intel VT-d and NVIDIA Multi-OS.

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Yesterday Intel announced the availability of its new 45nm enterprise-class CPU: the Xeon 5500 series (codenamed Nehalem).

The new processor features a lot of much awaited components like:

• an integrated memory controller
• a new point-to-point processor interconnect (QuickPath Interconnect) that replaces the Front Side Bus (FSB)
• the nested page tables technology (Extended Page Tables or EPT), part of Intel VT-x
• the I/O virtualization technology (VT-d) that supports the VMware VMDirectPath technology

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Citrix is one of the few virtualization vendors that strongly believe in a future where data centers will be accessed through mobile devices.
The company started to tease about a presentation virtualization client for the iPhone in June 2008, announcing an official commitment in December 2008.

Today, finally, version 0.9.0 of the Citrix Receiver for the iPhone (codenamed project Braeburn) makes its appearance on the iTunes App Store:

Citrix did an amazing job to map the Windows applications commands to the iPhone interface and gesture model.
The company published a nice video about the integration that is really worth a look.

To further improve the mobile experience Citrix released a XenApp extension called Doc Finder that allows users to easily find, view, edit and send documents.

Every time Parallels makes the news about its upcoming bare-metal hypervisor it’s impossible to not highlight how in late this product is: disclosed at the the beginning of 2006, the product was delayed and delayed and at today the company doesn’t provide yet a final date for its GA milestone.

The only server-side product released so far by Parallels came out in June 2008 and it’s called Server for Mac, but it doesn’t feature a bare-metal architecture that can compete against VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Iron, Oracle VM, etc. etc.

Over the months and the years, the belief that Parallels can really deliver such product started to fade away. Last month finally the company gave a sign that something is moving by scheduling a promising session about this product at its Summit in Las Vegas.

Now a slide deck of the Parallels roadmap coming from that conference is publicly available (as The Register promptly highlighted yesterday) exposing a lot of concrete details about the hypervisor:

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In February 2008 Microsoft released Windows Server 2008.
At that time Hyper-V was still in beta phase. Despite that, Microsoft decided to take some serious, unprecedented risks and included it in the RTM version of its server operating system.

The actual RTM version of the hypervisor didn’t come out before June 2008.
The customers that wanted to upgrade could download a stand-alone package or just connect to the Windows Updated service.

At today the situation is still the same: who downloads Windows Server 2008 has to install Hyper-V beta and then upgrade it in some way.

Microsoft will fix this with the upcoming Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2008, which will finally integrates Hyper-V 1.0 RTM as part of the OS.

The RTM-Escrow of this SP2 was released just yesterday and this means that the final release is really near.
It’s ironic that this happens now that Hyper-V is already in 2.0 beta phase.

At a point of its history VMware must have decided that leading the hardware virtualization market was not enough. To actualize its long-term strategy (whatever it is) the company figured out that it would need at least an additional layer of virtualization.
So, in January 2008, it acquired the US startup Thinstall.

The first rebranded version of Thinstall technology came out in July 2008 under the name of ThinApp 4.0.
It included a couple of interesting features (Application Sync and Application Link) but was not a groundbreaking major release.

After 8 months (or 13, if you start to count from the acquisition announcement) ThinApp just reached version 4.0.2 (build 3089), a bugfix release that came out earlier this week.

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