Year: 2010

Almost one year ago, after a long co-development with the startup Teradici, VMware launched a software-only version of the remote desktop protocol PC over IP (PCoIP). PCoIP support has been introduced in View 4.0, side by side with support for Microsoft RDP, and it’s obviously still present in the new View 4.5.
Since then, customers interested in VDI have wondered if PCoIP is on par or superior to the Citrix High Definition eXperience (HDX) protocol, an extension of the ICA protocol, introduced with XenDesktop 3.0 in February 2009.

While a few benchmarks have been published about the topic, there’s a lack of real-world tests that can answer the simple question: how the experience will be for the average employee?

Chris Wolf, Vice President of Research at Gartner, just provided an answer: the two protocols are on par on LAN, while Citrix HDX performs better over WAN links with more than 200ms latency. 
Wolf tested both XenDesktop 4.0 Service Pack 1 and VMware View 4.5, through a L2TP/IPsec VPN to connect from Europe to his facility in US.

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Now that Veeam Backup & Replicator 5.0 is generally available, its worth to report that NetEx and Veeam have reached a partnership where Veaam will bundle a one-year subscription of the NetEx HyperIP VM Edition software with it’s Backup & Replication for VMware product, Businesswire reports. This offer will be available from July 1, 2010 to July 2011, with a maximum of two virtual appliances per company.

The NetEx HyperIP is WAN optimization software and will be supplied as a virtual appliance which will run inside a VMware VM, it will be limited to 2Mb/s though, while the full version of HyperIP can support up to 800 Mb/s. Combining this solution with the Backup & Replication solution from Veaam gives this product more performance while moving large amounts of data across a WAN.

This is not an OEM agreement, but a bundling offering, therefore customers have to request the HyperIP license key at the NetEx website after purchase

This partnering is quite interesting, because Veeam didn’t announce a partnering with a company like this before. This could potentially mean that Veeam is testing the interest of HyperIP at it’s customers, which if succesfully could end up in Veaam buying NetEx, so it can include its HyperIP product.

VMware has released a Product Interoperability Matrix on its website. The matrix gives an overview of which versions of VMware products are compatible with each other.

The Product Interoperability Matrix allows you to select the VMware product and its version. After that you can select a platform and see if it is compatible with the selected platform. The Interoperability Matrix will show you the supported versions in a table.

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Veaam today announced the release of its disaster recovery solution: Veaam Backup & Replication version 5. This version is the follow up of version 4 which was released in 2009.

This version includes the SureBackup functionality on which virtualization.info reported extensively in March this year.

Released as vPower technology the following new functionalities are provided:

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While busy speaking at the Symposium ITxpo 2010 this week, Gartner analysts are also blogging and sharing some details about their presentations. The most interesting one comes from Thomas Bittman, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, the firm’s front man for virtualization and cloud computing research.

Bittman reports three key details (emphasis our):

1. Virtual machine penetration has increased 50% in the last year. Gartner believes that nearly 30% of all workloads running on x86 architecture servers are now running on virtual machines
2. Penetration of virtualization in midsized enterprises (100-999 employees) will exceed that of the Global 1000 within the end of this year
3. Hyper-V is under-performing (compared to Gartner’s expectations)

Bittman says:

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Yesterday VMware held its quarterly earnings call, announcing a new record for revenue, non-GAAP operating profit and trailing 12-month free cash flows.

Revenues for the third quarter were $714 million, up 46% from a year ago. $343 million come from the license revenue, an increase of 43% from Q3 2009. 
US revenues are equal to $362 million. International revenue is $352 million. In Latin-America Mexico, Brazil and Argentina scored over 100% year-over-year growth, while the APAC region grew more than 50% year-over-year.

Globally enterprise license agreements (ELAs) were 20% of total Q3 booking.
Software maintenance and support revenue was $314 million, an increase of 48% from 2009.
Customers continue to buy on average more than 2 years of support and maintenance with each new license purchase, but Q3 back maintenance was slight down from 2009 and VMware predicts this trend to continue in Q4.
Professional Services revenue was $57 million, an increase of 55% from last year, thanks to acquisitions and vSphere training.

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In January VMware released a new product for SMBs called GO: a hosted web-based console that can be used to manage on-premises vSphere Hypervisor (formerly ESXi) hosts and their virtual machines.

Go allows to initialize and patch ESXi hosts, create and operate virtual machines, check the VMs patching level connecting to the Shavlik Technologies service.
The company made the product available for free but customers have to grant to VMware the privilege to analyze the way they use the console.

Last week, at VMworld Europe (read virtualization.info live coverage) announced a new edition of Go, simply called Go Pro.

There are two additional key capabilities: Go Pro introduces software licensing management and patch deployment (rather than just scanning).

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In July 2010 Citrix and Microsoft released a technical white paper detailing a reference architecture for a VDI environment combining Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 running on top of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and Dell hardware. This end to end solution provided by Dell is called Dell Virtual Remote Desktop (VRD). The paper is called Dell Virtual Remote Desktop Reference Architecture and contains 27 pages.

The document covers three types of configurations:

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Mark Russinovich, founder and former Chief Software Architect at Sysinternals/Winternals and now Microsoft Technical Fellow has released version 5.0 of the SysInternals LiveKd tool.

LiveKd is a utility which allows you to enable kernel debuggers like Windbg and Kd, part of the Debugging Tools for Windows on a local system. Normally these tools only work when attaching a serial “null modem” cable between two systems and booting the to be analyzed system into debugging mode.

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Beginning October Quest released vWorkspace 7.2 beta 2 of its multi-platform VDI connection broker software. vWorkspace 7.2 will be the follow up of version 7.1 which was released in April this year.

Quest did also announce that for vWorkspace it will extend support for connectors to the Apple iPad and Zero PC , InfoWorld reports. By providing support for the Apple iPad, Quest follows other companies like Citrix and VMware which earlier announced support for the Apple iPad as well.

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