Year: 2010

VMware shows vCenter, View and vCloud Request Manager iPad clients

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VMware has been considerably slower than its competitor Citrix in embracing the Apple iPad tablet as an endpoint to manage and consume virtual infrastructures, but it now seems that the company is fully focused on the device.
Exactly one month ago in fact a vCenter Client for the iPad appeared in a short video, with VMware promising a public beta for this October and the GA within the end of the year.

The progress made on that front was shown earlier this week in another video, along with two additional new projects: an iPad version of the web-based self-service provisioning portal of the new vCloud Request Manager, and more importantly, an iPad client for View.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UseseTSNOP0[/youtube]

Release: Convirture ConVirt 2.0.1 Enterprise Edition

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Convirture has released version 2.0.1 of its ConVirt Enterprise Edition product. This version is a update for version 2.0 which was released in July this year.

ConVirt is an open source management console that supports Xen and KVM hypervisors. The product is offered in a free edition called ConVirt Open Source and in a paid version called ConVirt Enterprise Edition which offers additional functionality.

New features for the Enterprise Edition in version 2.0.1:

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Release: VMware Workstation 7.1.2/Player 3.1.2/ACE 2.7.2.

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At the end of last month, VMware updated its virtualization platform Workstation and Player and its platform wrapper ACE to build 301548.

Workstation version 7.1.2 contains some bug fixing and adds the following new features:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 support for Integrated Virtual Debugger’s live debugging mode
  • Support for use with VMware vCenter Converter 4.3.
  • Support of older versions of Cent OS Linux
  • Support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Apache Server 2.2.15 for ACE management Server.

VMware player version 3.1.2 and VMware ACE 2.7.2 only contain bug fixes.

VMware gets its third CTO – UPDATED

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As most virtualization.info readers and VMware customers know, VMware currently has two CTOs: Stephen Herrod, one of the very first engineering directors that joined the company in its early days (Herrod also is the Senior Vice President of R&D) and Scott Davis, co-founder and former President and CTO at Virtual Iron, who was promoted CTO of the Desktop Virtualization business unit at VMware in September 2009.

During the summer VMware appointed a third one, Paul Strong, as confirmed by Herrod in a video interview recorded earlier this week at the VMworld Europe 2010 conference in Copenhagen (read virtualization.info live coverage here).

Strong, appointed as CTO of the EMEA region (can we expect an APAC CTO too?) in August, comes from eBay, where he has been a Distinguished Research Scientist for almost five years.
He was responsible for research into Enterprise Grid Computing, driving eBay’s long term Enterprise Grid strategy/vision.
At the same time, Strong has been involved in the Open Grid Forum activity as Chairman first and then Secretary of the board of directors for almost three years.

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Release: eG Innovations VDI Monitor 1.0

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eG Innovations released version 1.0 of its eG VDI Monitor. eG VDI Monitor which is part of the eG Enterprise Suite is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) end-to-end service monitoring solution capable of monitoring all involved components in a VDI infrastructure. The product supports the Citrix, LeoStream and VMware View connection brokers. Besides that eG VDI Monitor supports all three major hypervisors and VDI solutions from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, but also mixed configuration environments consisting of products from these vendors.

As mentioned before, the product provides end-to-end monitoring , which means that it tracks performance inside the guest OS giving details about the user activity, at the Virtual Machine (VM) level and outside the VM, which consists of the Virtual Infrastructure, but also components like firewalls, network switches and routers.

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Microsoft opens the MED-V 2.0 beta program

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At the beginning of this week Microsoft announced the public beta program for Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) 2.0.

The technology, acquired from the US startup Kidaro in March 2008 and originally called Workspaces, is what virtualization.info calls a platform wrapper: a remotely managed layer that envelops a virtual machine, defining things like the network access policy, the expiration time, the virtual hard drive encryption, etc.
With MED-V Microsoft has a very limited number of competitors, including VMware, Virtual Computer, RingCube and MokaFive.

The product was rebranded just a couple of months after the acquisition but Microsoft took an entire year to re-release it. MED-V 1.0, released as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) in April 2009, didn’t introduce any new feature compared to the Kidaro original solution and it is safe to say that the product got only a minor .1 update in more than two years. 
The lack of active development seen so far raised concerns about the Microsoft commitment on enterprise desktop virtualization.

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Additional details about XenServer 5.6 FP1 emerge

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At the end of September Citrix announced the upcoming availability of XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 (codename Cowley). This is a significant release as it finally includes the Open vSwitch technology and the distributed virtual switching capabilities that come with it, as well as the VMLogix technology acquired in August 2010.

A couple of weeks after the opening of the beta program, a number of key details emerges about the product, including a number of limitations that is worth reporting:

Q: Which edition of XenServer will be required for Distributed Virtual Switching?
A: The Open vSwitch will be included in all editions of XenServer, including Free XenServer. The vSwitch Controller functionality will be a licensed part of a premium XenServer edition.
…
Q: Will the Open vSwitch support Link Aggregation?
A: Not in the first release. We are looking into this kind of functionality for a future release.

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