Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Paul Wilson, architect working in the Citrix Worlwide Consulting Solutions team, hosted a webinar “Designing Scalable XenDesktop Farms” on 22 September. This webinar is still available on Citrix TV.
Based on this webinar he created a blog post giving answers to the questions he wasn’t able to answer at that time.
Here is a snippet from that blogpost:
VMTurbo, who entered the virtualization market in April this year announced the availability of VMTurbo Planner and VMTurbo Watchdog, both offered in the same Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) based virtual appliance, which already contains VMTurbo Monitor and Host Reporter.
VMTurbo Planner is the key piece of the suite, it can use the statistics which are collected and information about under and over-utilization from to offer Capacity Management recommendations.
VMTurbo Planner is capable of:
Oracle has released VM VirtualBox version 3.2.10. This version which is a maintenance release, is the follow up of version 3.2.8. which was released in August this year.
Oracle VM VirtualBox is a hosted desktop virtualization platform and used to be known under the name Sun VirtualBox, and was renamed after Sun was acquired by Oracle in April 2009.
Features:
• Bugfixes
• Support for Ubuntu 10.10
• Support for Fedora 14
virtualization.info is here in Copenhagen to follow the european edition of the VMware VMworld conference.
The US event has been a great success (read virtualization.info live coverage), with over 17,000 attendees. We’ll see if VMware will be able to impress the european audience as much as it did with the US one.
Maurizio Carli, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EMEA region, is on stage. He reports that there are over 6,000 attendees, 1,000 more than VMware’s target.
After a short introduction, Carli leaves the stage to Rick Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer.
He suggests that the companies’ journey in virtualization is made of three stages: the IT Production, focused on cost efficiency (where virtualization is used for server consolidation), the Business Production, focused on quality of service (where virtualization is used to achieve unprecedented reliability for mission critical applications), and the IT as a Service, focused on business agility (where virtualization is used to deliver a more agile cloud computing architecture).
The first two are for optimizing the production of IT services, but the companies should really look forward the third phase, which is for optimizing the business consumption of IT services.
VMware’s CEO, Paul Maritz, is on stage.
He reports that in 2009 the number of running virtual machines were equal to the number of physical servers. In 2013, IDC predicts that VMs will be more than 15M, almost doubling the number of physical servers deployed worldwide
Pano Logic announced the release of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform Pano System version 3.5, offering support for Microsoft Hyper-V. This release comes after version 3.0 which was released in April this year.
Pano offers a complete remote VDI solution which consists of a software agent which resides in the guest Operating System, a connection broker and a Keyboard/Video/Mouse (KVM) over IP hardware box, called Pano Device. Communication between the Pano Device and the connection broker leverages a bus extension protocol called Pano Direct.
New Features:
Veeam released Veeam Monitor version 5.0. Veeam Monitor which is part of the Veeam ONE offering released in August covers VMware monitoring and management.
Veeam Monitor is a VMware Ready Certified monitoring tool for Vmware environments and is capable of monitoring more than 200 ESX(i) hosts and offers full support for vSphere 4.1. The product offers a comprehensive knowledge base, with more than 125 built-in alerts. Also performance dashboards are offered with drill-down functionality.
New features:
Earlier this week, Citrix announced the new features that will be part of XenDesktop 5.0, the company’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform.
Besides the obvious presence of XenClient 1.0, officially released last month and already included in XenDesktop 4 Feature Pack 2, the most relevant new component of the platform is called Desktop Director, an additional web-based console for operations management.
The tool provides statistics about the deployed applications instances and virtual desktops, the software inventory usage and even basic information about the health of underlying infrastructure.
If an end-user reports a problem, Desktop Director can be used to analyze the desktop environment and recognize if there’s any performance bottleneck or any missing software component (like the Flash plug-in for internet browsers). From the new console, operators can also launch a Remote Assistance session on Windows desktops and directly solve misconfiguration errors.
One of the most useful capabilities anyway, is the one that allows operators to recognize unused virtual desktops and terminate them in different ways (put them in maintenance mode, powering them off, logging-out inactive users, etc.), freeing up resources inside the virtual data center.
Citrix published a video tour of Desktop Director here.
Last week Red Hat made available the video recordings of the KVM Forum 2010, which took place in August in Boston.
Most videos are available, including the one about Ganeti, the cluster management solution for Xen and KVM that supports live migration, para-virtualized and fully virtualized guest operating systems.
As virtualization.info already highlighted, it’s remarkable that Google is leading the Ganeti project as the company in the past stated that “…it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization” in 2007.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14639529[/vimeo]
AppZero announced that it has hired Bill Cullen as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This news follows the recent addition of Mark Striling and Nigel Stokes as new investors for the company.
Before joining AppZero, Cullen was responsible for the Products and Engineering teams at Sonic Software, which developed SonicESB, an Enterprise Service Bus. Cullen developed SonicMQ, a message broker technology. Before joining Sonic Software Cullen worked for OneWave, Inc, IRI Software, Softbridge Microsystems and Advantage Systems.
VMware has released the VIX Java Toolkit. The toolkit which will be covered under the BSD license allows Java developers to leverage the VMware VIX API for use in their programs. In oder to use the toolkit developers need the JDK version 1.6 and the JNA library.
“…Java developers who are writing code with the vSphere/VI APIs will find this particularly useful as the vSphere API does not currently provide any functionality for interacting with the guest operating system. In addition, this is helpful for software testing as well as systems administration.
Features
• Provides Java wrapper for the VIX API
• Provides VIX objects and utility code to reduce complexities of using the VIX API…”
Thanks to Eric Sloof for providing this news.