Year: 2010

Rebecca Grider, who works at the performance engineering department at VMware posted an article on the VMware VROOM! Blog about performance scaling of an cluster which is build on entry-level hardware. Using VMmark they determined how a four-host cluster with a modest hardware configuration, the Dell PowerEdge R310 running ESX 4.1. would scale under increasing load.

Since most of the times the workload throughput is limited by disk performance the tests were repeated with two different storage arrays, the EMC CX500 and the EMC CX3-20.

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Version 0.7.1. of SPICE, the open source remote desktop protocol supported by Red Hat is now available. The 0.7.x releases will be a so called development release which will only contain bugfixes and support for Common Access Card (CAC) smartcard and redirection eventually leading to the 0.8.x stable branch. The current stable release is version 0.6.3 which introduced the long awaited copy & paste support.

Changes in this “Brown paper bag” release:

• Update SPICE_SERVER_VERSION
• Include server/tests/test_util.h in the make dist generated tarbals, so that they actually compile

In a reaction to the announcement from Quest to OEM the Liquidware Labs VDI assessment tooling and rebranding it as Quest VDI assessment, Lanamark, a competitor of Liquidware Labs responded to that announcement by stating that Sensitive data will be at risk when the Quest VDI assessment is used.

This statement is based on information provided in the login screen of the Quest VDI assessment, which states:

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Symantec has announced the development of a management plugin for its Backup Exec 2010 products which integrates into VMware vCenter. The plugin is scheduled to be available early next year.

The Backup Exec Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter Server works with the core Backup Exec virtualization features to provide a consolidated protection status view of all virtual machines within the VMware vCenter Server or VMware vSphere Client. 

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Patrick Rouse, who is Enterprise Solutions Architect at Quest Software published an article on the Quest community site detailing how to use Group Policies to tune Windows 7 for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures.

Patrick took the challenge to roll out Windows 7 on Hyper-V without adding more hardware than the customer was currently using with Windows XP Service Pack 3. In order to do this, instead of "hacking" the system, Patrick decided to user Group Policies (GPO) to tune the Windows 7 OS. He was able to trim 100MB of RAM from his Windows 7 VMs, and reducing the running processes by 6.

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In October this year virtualization.info reported on the expected features for the upcoming Feature Pack 1 for XenServer 5.6, codenamed Cowley. Citrix has now made generally available Feature Pack 1 for Citrix XenServer 5.6. This Feature Pack(FP) adds key functionality such as distributed virtual switching, automated VM protection and recovery and a web management console for delegated administration

Feature Pack 1 adds the following new functionality and improvements:

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Quest has signed a silent OEM agreement with Liquidware Labs, under that agreements Quest now provides the Liquidware Labs Stratusphere tool rebranded as Quest VDI assessment, for free to everyone to use for up to 45 days on a unlimited number of desktops, Brian Madden reports. If users want to continue to use the product afterwards Quest should be contacted, it’s not clear if Quest is charging users for that though. Its interesting to note that the founder of Liquidware Labs, David Bieneman also is the founder of VizionCore, which was acquired by Quest in January 2008.

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VKernel has released a study on virtual infrastructure management, titled: Virtualization Management Index. The report which contains 6 pages is written by Bryan Semple, who is Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel.

The study uses data drawn from over 2,500 virtualized environments representing over 550,000 virtual machines, the first Virtualization Management Index (VMI) details a significant resource under-utilization in virtualized environments. If not corrected, this resource underutilization represents a ROI risk factor as companies move to virtualize more mission critical applications.

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Richard Garsthagen, who is an Senior Evangelist at VMware EMEA posted a interesting blogpost on the run-virtual blog detailing some mobile management solutions for managing VMware virtual infrastructures. The applications tested are in the price range from free till $595.

The following applications were tested:

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After releasing beta 2 in October this year, Quest has now made available version 7.2 of its VDI connection broker solution: vWorkspace. This version is the follow-up of version 7.1 which was released in April this year.

Changes in this version:

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