Year: 2010

Desktone announced that the company has hired David Grant as Vice President of Marketing and James Glover as Vice President of Sales.

Grant comes from IBM, where he was Director of Marketing for the security business unit of IBM Rational, before that he was Vice President, Marketing and Product Management at Watchfire where he started in 2000. Watchfire which was acquired by IBM in 2007.

Glover comes from Momento, where he was Senior Vice President and General Manager for 3 1/2 years. Before that he also worked for Watchfire as Vice President North Americal Sales but apparently he left the company after it was acquired by IBM. He started to work for Watchfire in 1999.

These new hires come close after Desktone replaced it’s CEO Harry Ruda with Peter McKay in August this year.

Last week, virtualization.info reported that Citrix hired Andrew Susa to become the Senior Director for the Asia-Pacific region.

Today we were tipped by a reader that Thomas Huber, who was Director Systems Engineering Eastern EMEA at VMware, is now Director Channel Sales and Development at Citrix.

Huber started to work for VMware in 2005 as Manager Partner Presales Organization Central and Eastern Europe. After that he became Senior Regional Presales Manager Central Eastern Europa, Middle East and Africa. Ending up as Director Systems Engineering Eastern EMEA.

VMware’s vSphere PowerCLI is a set of Windows PowerShell snapins that provide administration and automation for VMware vSphere. The PowerCLI allows you to do most of the things you can do with the vSphere Client. The latest version available is version 4.1. and can be downloaded from the VMware website.

The vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide, which contains 31 pages provides information about using the VMware vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets (pronounced “commandlets”) set that ships with vSphere PowerCLI for managing, monitoring, automating, and handling life‐cycle operations for VMware vSphere components—virtual machines, datacenters, storage, networks, and so on.

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In September this year EMC published an article titled: Deploying Microsoft Windows 7 Virtual Desktops with VMware View – Applied Best Practices.

This paper discusses how Windows7 should be configured for optimal performance in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementation. The paper details how to configure the Windows 7 subsystem to minimize the performance requirements on the shared storage and VMware ESX environment.

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In May this year EMC published an article titled: EMC Performance Optimization for Microsoft Windows XP for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure – Applied Best Practices.

The 32 pages document, which is aligned with VMware documents covering these topics as well discusses how Windows XP should be configured for optimal performance in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementation.
The paper details how to configure the Windows XP subsystem to minimize the performance requirements on the shared storage and VMware ESX environment.

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Following the release of SPICE 0.60, KVM – The Linux Kernel-Based Virtual Machine blog reports that Red Hat has released SPICE version 0.6.1. which contains some bug fixing. Red Hat already announced earlier this week that SPICE is included in Fedora 14 beta 1 distribution.

The awaited cut and paste support is scheduled for release in version 0.6.2.

VMware has hired John Donovan, to become the new Director for Partner Organizations across the Australian/New Zealand region starting the 1st of November, ARNnet reports . He will replace Fred King, who left in June this year.

At this moment Donovan is still Vice President of Alliance and Channel sales at Novell in the Asia-Pacific region. Before joining Novell in 1995, he worked more than 12 years for Symantec, his latest function there was Vice President Channels.

After AppZero lost much of its entire executive team in this year, the company announced earlier this month that Nigel Stokes, former CEO and chairman of DataMirror would become a controlling and majority investor for the company.

Appzero company now announced that Mark Stirling, Vice President, Investments at GrowthWorks Capital will join the AppZero’s Board of Directors, PRWeb reports.

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Earlier today Citrix announced the first public beta of a 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.

The early bits of Open vSwitch appeared online in August 2009, along with a technology roadmap that clears the intention to compete against the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch architecture and the Cisco Nexus 1000V software switch. It took almost an entire year to reach version 1.0. Meanwhile Open vSwitch became a key component of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) networking infrastructure, another project supported by Citrix.

In the last few weeks Simon Crosby, CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Computing division at Citrix, spent some time to clarify the need for a more sophisticated virtual switch:

OpenFlow based virtual switches in each server can be logically pooled into a single fabric by an external distributed virtual switch controller to build a dynamic, multi-tenant, programmable datacenter fabric that supports key innovations in cloud computing, as well as allowing us to take advantage of standard x86 CPUs to run a set of rich edge packet-processing functions to secure, direct, filter and otherwise control the delivery of cloud based applications.
With the Open vSwitch in place, the Open Stack open source cloud orchestration layer will be able to exert direct control over the data center fabric to deliver a rich, enterprise ready network layer with powerful controls for security, multi-tenancy, load balancing, monitoring, compliance, charge-back and more.

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After almost two years since the public announcement, Citrix finally delivered its first client hypervisor: XenClient 1.0 (formerly Project Independence), as part of the XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 2.

Originally expected at the end of 2009, the new product has been postponed to the point that the first public beta appeared only in May 2010. Despite the delays, Citrix managed to release the product before its competitor VMware, which has been indefinitely postponed its Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), replacing it with a hosted (type 2) virtualization platform included in View 4.5 and called Local Mode.

virtualization.info previously published some details about the architecture and the capabilities of the client hypervisor.
A key point of the platform is the mandatory support for the Intel vPro technology feature set: at the GA time the Hardware Compatibility List includes 23 supported laptops (9 from Dell, 8 from HP and 6 from Lenovo), ranging from Intel Core 2 Duo to Core i7 CPUs, all featuring vPro.
Another limitation is the current lack of support for NVDIA display cards: all machines listed above only support Intel GPUs, in most cases the GMA 4500.

Citrix incrementally added capabilities until the very last minute, to both the hypervisor and the Synchronizer component.

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