Year: 2009

As most readers may know, exactly two years ago virtualization.info and its partner Kybernetika announced the availability of a data center facility that can be rented and accessed online.
We called it virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab, the on-demand data center for virtualization professionals.

Over the months this facility was scaled up and upgraded, at a point that now Rent-A-Lab is split into two independent data centers, offering a grand total of 28 enterprise servers (HP DL 380 G5, each with 2 x Quad Core Intel E5420 2.5GHz) and over 35TB of storage, distributed in multiple arrays from the leading vendors in the market.

Today we are happy to announce that availability of two EMC Celerra NS20 machines as part of the Rent-A-Lab equipment, featuring

• 45 disks with 146GB each
• 6 Fibre Channel interfaces (4GB)
• 8 Ethernet interfaces (1GB) that can be accessed through iSCSI, NFS and CIFS protocols

With EMC, NetApp, Dell EqualLogic, HP and Pillar storage side by side, virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab is the perfect playground to test how the hypervisors perform with different back-ends.

To demonstrate the value (and the speed) of this infrastructure we are preparing something special for our readers. Stay tuned!

hint: this has something to do with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

Meanwhile you may want to take a look at the actual configuration of Rent-A-Lab.

One of the biggest enhancements expected with the next version of VMware Infrastructure (possibly called vSphere 4.0) is the new pluggable virtual infrastructure, which will allow customers to replace the standard VMNet virtual switch with 3rd party software switches.

The first company to offer such product will be Cisco, which announced the Nexus 1000V at VMworld 2008 last September.

After seeing the virtual switch command line for in action and its architectural diagram, we now have extensive details about its features, thanks to an exclusive virtualization.info interview with Paul Fazzone, Product Manager of Nexus 1000V at Cisco.

Fazzone also provided a key information about the release date of the virtual switch: H1 2009.
This date makes very likely that both ESX 4 and Nexus 1000V will be released at the imminent VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes.

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Yesterday EMC and Microsoft signed a 3 years extension of their strategic alliance (now ending in 2011).

Part of the agreement involves virtualization, which is pretty odd considering that EMC owns 80% of VMware and that VMware can be seriously impacted by the endless amount of free virtualization products/technologies that Microsoft released and will release in future.

The thing is rather comic as part of the agreement (published by both companies PR departments) includes:

Microsoft offers one of the fastest-growing and most cost-effective virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server.
EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a thousand-person strong team with deep Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions.

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While VMware is busy releasing an open source client for its connection broker, Citrix is busy updating its end-to-end VDI platform.

The new XenDesktop 3.0, released just two months since version 2.1, introduces some important updates and new features:

• Includes XenServer 5.0 rather than 4.1 (which implies a higher consolidation ratio – Citrix claims that XenDesktop 3.0 can now host twice the number of virtual desktop of XenDesktop 2.x)
• Includes Provisioning Server (formerly Ardence Provisioning Server) as an integrated component rather than a bundled package
• Includes additional features from XenApp ICA (SpeedScreen multimedia redirection, USB devices support)
• Includes a brand new set of remote desktop rendering enhancements called HD-X
• Includes User Profile Manager 2.0
• Supports SmartCard authentication

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After entering the market in June 2008 (read the virtualization.info coverage here) and releasing its first product in September of the same year, the Canadian startup Lanamark is ready to hit the market with the second version of its hosted capacity planning solution.

Lanamark Suite 2009 introduces the capability to monitor virtualization hosts (both Citrix XenServer 4.1/5.0 and VMware ESX 3.0/3.5 are supported today, Microsoft Hyper-V will come soon).

The feature is interesting as it allows the product to develop a capacity plan with more information than just the resources consumption of physical servers candidate for virtualization.

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After a development period of ten months, Virtual Iron updates today its virtualization platform to version 4.5.

The upgrade introduces a key feature for customers with high-security requirements, the role-based access control, a long overdue capability, the internal network switches (aka switches not binded to physical NICs), and the support for Windows Server 2008.

Along with the new features, Virtual Iron 4.5 comes with a new packaging, as the company seems to have renamed the Enterprise Edition in Extended Enterprise Edition.
No chances to the Free Edition which is still capped as follow:

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Just two months after its debut, VMware View (formerly known as Virtual Desktop Manager or VDM) 3.0 is ready to receive the first maintenance upgrade.

The new 3.0.1 (build 142034) introduces many bugfixes and a couple of new features:

• Integrates the ThinPrint Virtual Channel Gateway module so that View deployments can communicate with ThinPrint server.
• Provides the capability for the Windows View Client to pass the machine name of the client device to the guest virtual machine.

It’s unclear if this version can be accessed by the just release VMware View Open Client but it’s very likely.

Microsoft just released an introductory book about its virtualization products for free:

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (From the Desktop to the Datacenter) Mitch Tulloch (with the Microsoft Virtualization Team) ISBN: 9780735693371 452 pages

The book covers Hyper-V 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, App-V (formerly Softricity SoftGrid), Terminal Services, MED-V (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspace), Microsoft Assessment & Planning Toolkit and even the technologies that Microsoft is trying to market as profile virtualization: User Profiles, Folder Redirection and Offline Files.

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In June 2008 Microsoft published an important document for all the customers that are evaluating and adopting its hypervisor: the Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008.

The document contains a section dedicated to Hyper-V and while most of the suggestions included in this whitepaper are just common sense or recap of the product features, there are some hidden treasures:

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By now it should be more than clear that the battle for the enterprise market between VMware and Citrix is no more played on the server consolidation playground, but rather on the VDI one.

The are a lot of component in a virtual desktop infrastructure where the two companies (and their additional competitors) can innovate: the consolidation ratio provided by the server-side hypervisor, the connection broker intelligence, the speed of the remote desktop protocol, the provisioning of the thin client OS, and very soon the efficiency of the client-side hypervisor (needed to achieve the much wanted offline VDI).

A notable move in this long-term game was made by Citrix which just two weeks ago announced a groundbreaking agreement with Intel to develop a client hypervisor which will be distributed through all the major OEM partners.

VMware answers today releasing an open source VDI client: VMware View Open Client.

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