Year: 2010

Last week Virtual Computer and the security vendor Sophos announced a technology alliance to secure the NxTop environment with Sophos Antivirus.

Similarly to the Citrix-McAfee alliance, this is a two-phases integration. In the first one, happening now, the two companies are optimizing the infrastructure for malware scanning.

Specifically, Virtual Computer prevents that every virtual desktop equipped with the Sophos endpoint agent and deployed on its NxTop client hypervisor will have to re-download and update the signature database at each boot. All AV updates in fact are downloaded and applied only to the virtual machines’ master image. 
Most parts of a NxTop virtual desktop guest operating system are rolled back to their master image status when rebooted, greatly reducing the risk of stay resident malware, but some parts are retained to offer profile personalization. According to that, the Sophos AV, which lives in a dedicated VM, can be fine tuned to perform scanning only on the persistent areas of the guest OSes.

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After the release of SPICE 0.6.0, happened in September, the development of the open source remote desktop protocol supported by Red Hat continues towards the next stable milestone, 0.8, expected in February 2011.

Besides bug fixes, SPICE 0.6.3 introduces the text copy & paste capability for all clients, while images copy & paste is currently limited to Linux.

The open source Linux distribution Fedora already includes SPICE 0.6 in its beta 1. Linux-KVM.com reports that the GA version, available soon, should include this new SPICE release.

Interestingly, the protocol’s roadmap now mention a planned client for Apple operating system Mac OS X. So far SPICE clients are only available for Windows, Linux and, experimentally, Nokia platforms.

In mid May McAfee, or better the now security division of Intel, announced a two-phases partnership with Citrix to deliver security solutions specifically tailored for virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). 
The first phase involved releasing a VDI-optimized antivirus, while the second is about introducing a single out-of-band security agent that control the whole virtual infrastructure through hypervisor’s APIs (something the industry usually calls introspection).

A couple of weeks ago McAfee completed the first step, announcing the availability of its new Management of Optimized Virtual Environments (MOVE) antivirus.

MOVE is based on a lightweight agent, that pseudo-randomizes some of its activities on the virtual desktops’ virtual hard drive, and that doesn’t carry on the scanning and removal engine. 
The core activities are in fact executed out of band, in a remote, dedicated virtual appliance. What the optimized agents, which are centrally managed by McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), really do is copying the suspicious files from the potentially infected virtual desktop to the security virtual appliance, over a secure channel.

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A little more than one month ago the New York Post reported about a soon-to-be-closed two-part sale deal reached by Novell and two undisclosed buyers. Immediately after, the Wall Street Journal reported that VMware was one of the bidders, interested in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) business unit. 
According to the first report, such deal was expected to finalize within 3-4 weeks, which means right now. Meanwhile, Reuters added color to the story, reporting that the acquisition couldn’t complete as soon as planned because none of the bidders wanted the NetWare asset at the price that Novell’s board of directors wanted to sell.

True or not, the whole virtualization industry is holding its breath to see if VMware will end up owning an operating system and, with it, a complete software stack, from the hypervisor to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.
Well, apparently, it won’t happen.

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In November 2008 VMware acquired the mobile virtualization startup Trango. Just a couple of months later Citrix invested in one of the biggest Trango competitors: Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs).
The moves clarified that virtualization vendors see the mobile market as their next battleground. Anyway, the competition there may take a while to start.

VMware has been silent for many months about the progress made with its Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) and while virtualization.info recently reported about the good health of the project, the company’s current position is very cautious about the opportunities in the mobile space.  At the beginning of the month VMware’s Srinivas Krishnamurti said:

“Our belief is that on mobile phones, we haven’t quite found that kind of a compelling use case with a clear [return on investment],” Krishnamurti said. The mobile world is different from data centers and PCs because users can’t simply choose to install bare-metal hypervisors on their phones. Rather, the handset makers and carriers have to sign on to the concept, Krishnamurti said.

Citrix has been silent too about the reasons behind its investment in OK Labs and the business relationship with the startup.

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Quest software is working on the next release of its backup and recovery product vRanger. The version of the new product will be 5.0 and currently is in beta 2 stage. Version 5.0 will be the follow-up of version 4.5 which was released in May this year. One of the interesting new things in this upcoming release is that the vReplicator product which provides Virtual Machine replication functionality will be integrated in the vRanger product.

vRanger is one of the products Quest integrated after it acquired Vizioncore and the vRanger product will now loose its Vizioncore name as reported by virtualization.info in May this year.

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Chad Sakac posted two interesting documents coming from the EMC Unified Storage Solutions group. The papers cover a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) reference architecture and solutions guide, covering the deployment of Citrix XenDesktop 4, running on VMware vSphere 4 using EMC Celerra Unified storage.

The EMC infrastructure for Virtual Desktops: Enabled by EMC Celerra Unified Storage (NFS), VMware vSphere 4 and Citrix XenDesktop 4 – Reference Architecture document which contains 16 pages covers how to design this specific VDI solution which provides performance, recoverability and protection.

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Ceedo is an Israeli startup founded in 2005. virtualization.info started covering it only in mid 2008, with the launch of Ceedo Enterprise 2.5, a centrally managed application virtualization platform that works similarly to a platform wrapper like VMware ACE.

So far the company has been mostly under the radar, with just a few major updates over the last two years and a half.
Like its more popular competitors, Ceedo is suffering an apparent disinterest for application virtualization technologies.

In the attempt to differentiate itself and turn its product into something more appealing for the enterprise, Ceedo is playing the security card: in March it announced support for RSA SecurID two-factor authentication tokens, and just last week it announced the upcoming support for McAfee Encrypted USB drives. it must be seen if this will be enough to make any difference.

Stratus Technologies has been busy supporting virtualization platforms for quite some time. The company joined the VMware Community Source Program in its early days, in March 2007, which eventually led to an OEM agreement.
More recently, the company has been bullish enough to launch a promotion called Zero Downtime Guarantee, where any unplanned downtime caused by the failure of the server or virtualization platform during the first six months after being placed into production will put $50,000 cash or product credit in the customer’s hand.

Stratus even leverages Citrix XenServer to offer a software-only version of its fault tolerant platform for SMBs: Avance, launched in June 2008.

Just last week, the company went a step further by announcing support for Hyper-V. This means that the Microsoft hypervisor gets out-of-the-box the famous Stratus’ 99.999% uptime.

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Just two weeks ago, Citrix released the first version of its client hypervisor: XenClient. While promising, the product still presents raw edges and limitations, as Brian Madden detailed in an early, uncensored report.

While Intel vPro technology is not mandatory, contrary to what Madden initially reported (virtualization.info correctly reported that vPro is just highly recommended), it’s still true that XenClient Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is significantly small. The biggest limitation is the complete lack of support for notebooks powered by the NVIDIA GPUs.

Citrix already stated its commitment to extend the HCL on the stage of the Synergy conference just ten days ago.
The company expects to introduce NVIDIA display cards support within the first half of 2011, according to an official reply published on the XenClient support forum.
In a follow-up article, Madden unveils additional details about Citrix plans to support multiple GPUs:

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