Year: 2010

Hyper9 has released version 3.0 of its Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO) solution, this version is the follow-up of Hyper9 VEO version 2.5 which was released in April this year. The product is provided as a Windows installation or a Virtual Appliance which runs on VMware.

VEO is a search engine that integrates with vCenter and indexes the information stored inside the VMware Infrastructure inventory. Once the index is build, Hyper9 allows to find any detail about your virtual infrastructure (VMs, virtual networks, data stores, applications inside the Guest OSes, etc.) through a search engine interface. VEO is also capable to provide performance tracking, capacity planning, configuration management and chargeback automation.

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Just one month after releasing two new products, VMTurbo Planner and VMTurbo Watchdog, VMTurbo now announces the release of VMTurbo Host Resolver and VMTurbo Storage Reporer. Both new tools will be included in the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) based virtual appliance and are part of the VMTurbo Integrated Management Suite for VMware virtualization platforms.

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At its TechEd Europe 2010 conference, Microsoft spent a lot of time talking about its progress in cloud computing. Among the other things, it announced a set of programs dubbed Hyper-V Cloud to accelerate the adoption of private and virtual private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

A key piece of any cloud computing infrastructure, and next-generation virtual data center, is the orchestration framework. Microsoft must be convinced of this, as it acquired Opalis Software in December 2009. In March the company confirmed that Opalis was being integrated with Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), but admitted that it won’t be part of System Center before some time in 2011.

Now we have more specific dates thanks to the brief report published by Bink.nu:

• Opalis 3.6 is expected for November 25
• System Center Opalis 2012 is expected 12-15 months from now

For years now, the virtualization community has discussed the partnership between Citrix and Microsoft around virtualization, started when the former acquired XenSource in August 2007.

At the end of last week, Simon Crosby, CTO of Data Center & Cloud division at Citrix, published a new post on his corporate blog, trying to clarify, once again, the dynamics of this partnership. 
Compared to the past attempts, the go-to-market strategy detailed in this new post is more explicit than ever (emphasis our):

…Neither company [Microsoft and Citrix] wants to monetize the hypervisor.

…The Citrix position is that the role of XenServer is to offer a compelling feature set that permits Citrix and Microsoft to compete successfully with VMware…

…If a customer chooses XenServer today because it offers features not present in Hyper-V, (such as IntelliCache) the customer can be sure that Citrix has no interest in locking the customer to that choice: XenServer is 100% compatible with Hyper-V and if the customer replaces XenServer with Hyper-V in the future, we have no issue with that whatsoever…

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Once upon a time, VMware and Oracle were great business partners. VMware probably spent a great amount of resources in fine tuning its hypervisor for a smooth execution of Oracle products, and it certainly spent a huge effort in educating the customers about the viability of such virtualized solution.

In mid 2006 Oracle publicly declared its frustration for the lack of standardization in the virtualization market. It eventually decided to enter the hardware virtualization market itself, and launched the Oracle VM virtual infrastructure just one year later. As the company immediately restricted support to its own hypervisor only, the partnership with VMware ended.

The acquisition of Sun and Virtual Iron virtualization technologies suggested that Oracle would never change its mind about the topic, using restricted support as a tool to gain market share.
Meanwhile, VMware continued, for years, to recommend Oracle products on ESX and Oracle’s competitor SAP has been more than happy to highlight its broad support for market hypervisors.

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Last week virtualization.info reported about the release of a paper titled: Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide by VMware.

On November 9th, the Microsoft Exchange product team responded on that paper with a blog post titled: Answering Exchange Virtualization Questions and Addressing Misleading VMware Guidance.

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Michel Roth, who works for the desktop virtualization division of Quest (previously known as the startup Provision Networks, which was acquired by Quest in 2007) and runs the Thincomputing.net blog wrote a great review about the upcoming RemoteFX functionality in Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

The review looks at what RemoteFX exactly is, what it can do (for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures and for Remote Desktop Session Hosts) and cannot do and how it works under the cover.

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HyTrust made generally available version 2.1 of its access control and change management applicance for VMware virtual infrastructures. This version is an update to version 2.0 which was released in March this year.

The HyTrust Appliance is available in multiple editions, including a free Community Edition that protects up to 3 hosts.

Changes in this update:

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While Citrix is playing in both server and desktop virtualization market with XenServer, XenDesktop and now with XenClient, it’s not a secret that the company’s primary focus is desktop virtualization. Citrix’s huge effort in competing with VMware on that front, helped its business partner Microsoft to gain some time and prepare a more VDI-friendly hypervisor.

Specifically, Microsoft had the time to develop two key technologies for VDI: the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) enhancement called RemoteFX (a technology inherited with the acquisition of Calista Technologies in January 2008) and the memory management capability called Dynamic Memory, which is already being promoted as a key enabler for virtual desktop infrastructures.
Microsoft has its own VDI solution, part of the Remote Desktop Services (RDS), but the ultimate goal to maintain control on the physical hardware gives priority to the development of Windows and Hyper-V. Improving Hyper-V for VDI reduces the chances that customers select an alternative back-end hypervisor, ceding control to competitors.

Now that Microsoft has more pieces at the right place, it is also expected to ease its position about licensing and actually start facilitating the VDI adoption.
The company first extended Dynamic Memory to both Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Standard and Web editions, and now it may be preparing a major price reduction for its Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license.

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Cisco, VMware, HyTrust, Savvis and Coalfire have released a paper titled: PCI-Compliant Cloud Reference Architecture. The paper contains 19 pages and details a reference architecture for constructing a cloud architecture meeting the requirements of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS).

PCI DDS defines a set of requirements to protect payment cardholder data, and the environments in which cardholder data is stored, processed or transmitted. The current PCI DDS standard, which is version 2.1 does not specifically address the risks associated with virtual machines and cloud computing, instead they empower PCI Qualified, Security Assessors (QSAs) and vendors to work collaboratively on providing guidelines. In the case of this specific paper, the QSA is Coalfire and the vendors are Cisco, VMware, HyTrust and Savvis.

The paper uses a case of an e-commerce merchant and details its reference architecture using the solutions from the earlier mentioned vendors.

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