Year: 2010

Microsoft has released version 2.0 of the Self Service Portal for its System Center Virtual Machine Manager product. The product which was announced in July this year during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, is an add-on for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.

The Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal (VMMSSP) is a stand-alone product which can coexist with the already existing self-service portal. The differencing functionality in this version 2.0 of the portal is that the self-service portal provides a way to delegate IT management to groups (called business units within the tool) within an organization while the central organization manages the centralized pool of physical resources (servers, networks, and related hardware).

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VMware has released a beta for a new training called: VMware vCloud: Architecting the VMware Cloud. The training, which will be instructor-led will have a duration of three days.

The course objectives of the training are:

• Install vCloud Director in an environment which the new cloud must co-exist with an existing vSphere environment

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Last week, during the TechEd Europe 2010 conference, Microsoft announced that the upcoming Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, thanks to the Dynamic Memory feature that will ship with it, will increase by 40% the Hyper-V virtual machine density in VDI environments.

Microsoft obtained the result testing Hyper-V R2 SP1 in its labs, running the hypervisor on HP and Dell servers against the now popular Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) benchmark tool offered by Login Consultants.
Thanks to Dynamic Memory, Microsoft has been able to pass from 85 VMs (with Hyper-V R2) to 120 VMs, running Windows 7 and served by a single physical host following specifications defined in the Dell’s Reference Architecture for VDI.

The company also reports that its TAP customers increased their VM density by a value between 25% and 50% for other server workloads and specific usage patterns, even if it doesn’t specify which ones. Hopefully these details will be exposed in an upcoming whitepaper that Microsoft promised to publish.

Citrix has made available the XenServer Virtual Machine Performance Utility. The utility is provided as a virtual appliance running Debian Linux which you can run on XenServer 5.5 or 5.6.

Basically you start with configuring a webserver on the performance VM, providing it with the ip address and credentials of the Pool Master, so the VM can control it. From a web page running on the performance VM you can then start the utilities.

The following test utilities are provided:

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The semi-stealth mode US startup Nicira may be near a major launch, virtualization.info has learned.

The company, founded in 2009, left the stealth mode in February 2010 (read virtualization.info coverage), raising a lot of interest because Diane Greene, the founder and former CEO of VMware, is among its investors.
Apparently, Nicira has been the very first public investment in virtualization technologies that Greene made after she was forced to leave VMware in July 2008.

Albeit the official website suggests that the technology focus is about network virtualization, so far Nicira has remained under the radar, without disclosing any additional information.

Now virtualization.info got reports that the startup is significantly increasing its recruiting activity, hiring talents from Google, Cisco, Yahoo! and other major Silicon Valley firms, including VMware.

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VMware has released a white paper titled: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1. The paper which contains 60 pages provides performance tips which cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 4.1.

The document covers the following topics:

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Pancetera has announced that it has reached a OEM partnership with i365, a Seagate Company for its Pancetera SmartRead solution.

i365 provides data protection solutions which reside in the cloud, called Evault SaaS. I365 will use the SmartRead storage optimization component part of the Unite solution from Pancetera to help reduce data I/O when replicating VMs to the cloud for disaster recovery purposes.

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In October Microsoft announced the public beta for Microsoft Enterprise Desktop ED-V version 2.0.

Last week Microsoft announced a refresh of the public beta, with the following additional features:

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Microsoft just made generally available the Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration for Software Assurance Tool, after releasing Beta 2 at the end of September this year.

The P2V migration for Software Assurance tool leverages the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit(MDT) and Sysinternals Disk2VHD to convert a user’s existing Windows XP SP3, Vista or 7 environment to a virtual hard disk. The tool can also be used from System Center Configuration Manager, when MDT is integrated to provide a Zero Touch Installation (ZTI) solution for P2V migration.

Corporations who want to use this tool, should have Software Assurance licensing in order to legally use the tool.

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William Lam, who runs the virtualGhetto blog has discovered more than 1200 undocumented VMware .vmx parameters. Using UNIX/Linux utility strings Lam discovered the parameters in the /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx binary which is used to load a VM configuration file.

Based on the contents he discovered Lam makes the following speculations:

• VMware vSphere is going to support virtual Hypervisors, specifically Microsoft and Xen.

• vSphere is going to support Mac OSX, by providing EFI Support and support for Darwin as guest OS.

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