Year: 2010

Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants) and Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect at PQR) announced the release of phase 3 of their Virtual Reality Check benchmark.

This is the third version of the benchmark results which compares VDI workloads (Windows XP and Windows 7 virtual desktops) running on top of leading back-end hypervisors: VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. The first version was released in February last year and will continue to evolve in the future.

To measure the hypervisors performance they use the free of charge, Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI).

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While his LinkedIn profile in not yet updated, ARNnet reports that Citrix has hired Andrew Susa, a former Alliance Director of VMware to join the company as Senior Director for the Asia-Pacific region.

Susa worked more than 4 years for VMware, where his last role was Global Alliance Director, IBM STG and Tivoli. Before that he was Director of OEM and SI Alliances for the Asia-Pacific region. Susa landed at VMware from BEA Systems, where he was Director of Channels and Alliances for the Asia-Pacific region.

Just yesterday Lanamark released a new addition to its Suite 2010, launched in March. Called Terminal Services Analysis Pack, it extends the Lanamark capacy planning platform to gather detailed user access, bandwidth consumption, application usage and terminal server performance metrics.
It work with hosted applications and hosted shared desktops in Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, as well as Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environments.

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Some virtualization.info readers may remember that VMware and Samsung partnered sometime last year to deliver new PC monitors with out-of-the-box support for the VMware/Teradici PCoIP remoting protocol.
Now maybe Microsoft is working to do the same, and even more, with LG Electronics.

Reuters in fact reports about a new partnership between the two around cloud computing:

Under the pact, LG will introduce monitors integrated with Microsoft software. The monitors will function as virtual computers, allowing multiple users to run programs off a single standard PC, LG said…

The alliance will primarily target the market for virtualization solutions for educational institutions, aiming to become a leader in the segment with a 25 percent share in 2012…

LG and Microsoft will also team up to introduce monitors for cloud computing, a technology that allows users to access data and software over the Internet…

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When Intel announced its Hybrid Cloud platform in July, cloudcomputing.info published an article to clarify if it’s really a cloud computing technology or not:

The Intel Hybrid Cloud is a physical server (a Lenovo ThinkServer TS200v or a white label machine that meets the hardware requirements) that Managed Service Providers (MSP) can buy and deploy at a customer’s site.
MSPs remotely control the server out-of-band by leveraging the Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) 6.0, part of the vPro technology.

Inside the server there’s Microsoft Hyper-V, ready to serve a number of pre-configured and pre-deployed virtual machines, including Windows Server and Small Business Server (SBS) 2008, firewall, backup, disaster recovery, VoIP PBX and other software platforms. Additional applications provided by Intel partners will be published through a software catalog. The MSPs will be able to preinstall their own applications inside the server to differentiate the offering.

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Earlier this week, the Fedora Linux community announced the availability of Fedora 14 beta 1. As expected the distribution now includes the remote desktop protocol Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) 0.6, released in mid September.

SPICE adds a QXL display device to QEMU and provides drivers for this device for both Linux and Windows (XP, Vista and 7) clients.
The features currently supported in this version are:

• Accelerated 2D graphics
• “Hardware” cursor support
• Audio playing / recording
• Image compression, both lossless and lossy (for WAN support)
• Video detection with MPEG streaming
• Encryption
• Client side mouse pointer support

This should be considered a technology preview only, as SPICE 1.0 apparently won’t be available before H2 2011.

The US startup Virtual Computer is in a very nice spot right now. Its recently released NxTop 3.0 includes a pretty sophisticated client hypervisors that is free for the general public and that doesn’t require Intel vPro to work. Plus, the imminent release of Citrix XenClient and the recent acquisition of Neocleus from Intel are turning the company into a highly desirable acquisition target. 
For these reasons, and more, Virtual Computer is rated Worth Watching in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

But the death of Alex Vasilevsky, Virtual Computer had to reassure its current and potential customers about its technology leadership and long-term vision.
So today the company announces that Simon Graham has been named Chief Scientist.

Graham has been the Lead Architect at Stratus Technologies for 11 years. His responsibilities at the company included:

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VMware recently published a new paper titled: VMware Network I/O Control, Architecture, Performance and Best Practices. The paper contains 28 pages and is written by Sreekanth Setty, which is a member of the Performance Engineering team at VMware.

The Network I/O Control (NetIOC) feature available in VMware vSphere 4.1 (“vSphere”) addresses these challenges by introducing a software approach to partitioning physical network bandwidth among the different types of network traffic flows. It does so by providing appropriate quality of service (QoS) policies enforcing traffic isolation, predictability and prioritization, therefore helping IT organizations overcome the contention resulting from consolidation. The experiments conducted in VMware performance labs using industry-standard workloads show that NetIOC:

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VMware has made available version 5.3 of its vCenter Configuration Manager (vCM) product. VMware Configuration Manager is one of the products which was part of the Ionix infrastructure, which VMware acquired from its parent company EMC in March this year. EMC acquired the product in June 2009 from ConfigureSoft which at that time was called Server Configuration Manager.
 
vCM is a system compliance management tool. vCM can work across virtual and physical servers and desktops, ensuring compliance by collecting, fixing, provisioning and managing configurations.

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Microsoft released beta 2 of its P2V migration for Software Assurance tool. The first beta was released earlier this month.

The P2V migration for Software Assurance tool leverages the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit(MDT) and Sysinternals Disk2VHD to convert a user’s existing Windows XP SP3, Vista or 7 environment to a virtual hard disk.

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