Year: 2010

Last week virtualization.info reported about the stealth release of Parallels Desktop 6.0. A few days later the company formally announced the product which is available for download today.

The product introduces 80 new features and improved performance: the Crimson Consulting Group, in a July 2010 study, reports that Desktop 6.0 can launch Windows applications 41% faster than the previous version and that 3D games are 40% faster.

Top new features include:

• 64bit engine
• virtual machines hard drive encryption
• Mac OS keyboard shortcuts mapped to Windows applications
• automated migration of personal data from Windows folders to Mac OS X folders
• automated migration of browser bookmarks from Windows to Mac OS X (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari supported)

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In March VMware acquired a number of products from its parent company EMC for $200M, all parts of the Ionix infrastructure management portfolio, and all coming from acquisitions of small technology firms happened between 2006 and 2009.

In July some of these products have been rebranded and relaunched so that Application Discovery Manager (acquired from nLayers in June 2006) has been renamed in vCenter Application Discovery Manager (ADM).

As the name suggests, vCenter ADM is an interesting product that automatically, in real-time and without agents, discovers applications and maps their dependency by analyzing the network traffic and recognizing specific software patterns.
In a large, complex data center this is extremely useful to perform change and configuration management, or to speed up infrastructure troubleshooting.
In a cloud computing environment, ADM could be leveraged to automatically update a content catalog.

EMC used to ship this product as a physical appliance, using an IBM 3250 System x server, but in mid August VMware released vCenter ADM 6.1 (build 6060), which introduces the virtual appliance version.

Other new capabilities of ADM 6.1 are:

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In mid February the startup Virsto entered the virtualization market with a rather unique positioning: it’s offering a storage optimization technology for virtual infrastructures powered by Microsoft Hyper-V.
Virsto developed a solution to improve efficiency and performance of Hyper-V virtual machines, by hijacking and optimizing their interaction with the underlying storage.

Virsto has been brave enough to steer away from the VMware crowded ecosystem, where a startup can cash in much faster with the right solution (until VMware starts competing with it), to bet on the Microsoft hypervisor.
Hyper-V still has less than 30% market share, but Virsto has practically no competitors there.

The company released the first update of its flagship product yesterday: One 1.2
This release introduces a number of key capabilities:

• full support for the Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS) technology
  One now uses a writer and provider model ensure that VSS can perform a full server backup to help protect all data required to fully restore the server

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A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced the availability of Workflow Studio 2.5.

This release primarily introduces support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, along with support for SQL Server 2008, PowerShell 2.0 and the .NET Framework 4.0.
The orchestration framework also ships with new activity libraries for Hyper-V and SQL Server, plus a number of new security roles.

Version 2.0  was released exactly one year ago, and in twelve months Citrix only released a very minor update.
As virtualization.info highlighted several times, virtualization vendors are missing the opportunity to bring virtual infrastructures to the next level with automation.
So far Citrix has severely overlooked the potential of its product, but its competitors are not doing any better: VMware is simply giving away its vCenter Orchestrator (acquired from Dunes Technologies three years ago) as part of most vSphere editions, and Novell barely mentions its PlateSpin Orchestrate (formerly ZENworks Orchestrator).

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During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is the long awaited View 4.5.

The product, which has been postposed in the past, introduces the following features (besides the obvious support for vSphere 4.1):

• Integration with ThinApp 4.6 to deploy applications to VMware View desktop pools
• Integration with vShield Endpoint to provide optimized antivirus protection
• Support for Microsoft Windows 7 guest operating systems (32bit and 64bit)
• Role-based authentication and administration delegation
• Unified log system (with support for 3rd party tools reporting)
• New management interface (based on Adobe Flex)
• Inclusion of a Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM)
• Support for tiered-storage in View Composer (read-only gold master image, redo log snapshots and guest OS paging file can be stored onto separate storage LUNs)
• Support for Microsoft Sysprep-ed images in View Composer
• Support for autonomous Persistent Disks (they can be detached, migrated, reattached or archived)
• Support for FIPS 140-2
• Support for Microsoft PowerShell scripting
• Support for Apple Mac OS X in View Client as host operating system (no support for PCoIP protocol)
• Support for offline VDI, through a hosted virtualization platform on end-user workstation and laptops (Local mode)

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During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. A very interesting one is Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for VMware.

In mid June VMware and Novell announced an OEM agreement to offer a copy of SLES for each licensed copy of vSphere 4.1.
More than that, the SLES license includes patches and updates. But the two companies didn’t include technical support: that one may be purchased separately from VMware: pricing starts at $600 for 12×5 phone support for one year.

Now the distribution is officially available but, surprisingly, you have to download it from Novell.
The current version is SLES 11 Service Pack 1, available for both 32 and 64bit, which Novell reports to be “tailored to run on VMware vSphere”. 
Access to the ISOs requires to register a free account with Novell, so the reason why VMware is not distributing itself the Linux OS may be to give Novell enough visibility on the account database, as part of the OEM agreement.

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A couple of weeks before VMworld (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware released a new minor update for its application virtualization platform ThinApp.

Despite the version number, ThinApp 4.6 (build 287958) introduces major new components and capabilities:

• Converter (a P2V migration tool that automates creation of ThinApp packages)
• ThinReg (allows to execute virtualized services at operating system boot time and expose to non-virtualized applications)
• ThinDirect (allows to associate specific web pages to virtualized browsers)
• Support for virtualized Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows 7 operating systems (both 32 and 64bit)
• Management COM object (for package inspection and control of package inspection, registration, streaming, and updates)
• Integration with View 4.5

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At the end of July virtualization.info exposed an upcoming new product, part of the VMware vShield security porftolio called codename Seraph. The company officially unveiled and released it last week at VMworld (see virtualization.info live coverage) under the name of vShield Endpoint.

Endpoint 1.0 (build 287872) is the last piece of the new vShield security family. The other components are Zones 4.1 (the first product, acquired from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008), App 1.0 (see virtualization.info coverage) and Edge 1.0 (see virtuaization.info coverage). 
The four pieces are all centrally managed by vShield Manager 4.1.

Compared to the others, Endpoint is not a real product. It rather is a security framework that leverages the VMware VMsafe APIs and allows third party anti-virus vendors to scan and remediate infected virtual machines in a new way.
The interaction between the anti-virus solution and the target VMs happens at the hypervisor level, in a transparent way, through a process known as introspection.
In this way 3rd party security engines can be deployed only on a single, dedicated VM, offloading the protected guest operating systems from the execution of resource-demanding endpoint agents.

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During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is vShield App 1.0.

VMware acquired the vShield security technology from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008. The only product offered so far has been Zones, a virtual firewall that uses stateful inspection and application layer gateway approaches to monitor and filter virtual network traffic between multiple virtual machines deployed on the same virtualization host.
vShield Zones didn’t mature much in almost two years, and VMware is offering it for free as part of vSphere Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

vShield App is an enhanced version of Zones. At the moment App doesn’t replace Zones but customers can purchase an upgrade so it’s likely that over time VMware will fade away Zones entirely.
Like Zone, App too must be deployed per virtualization host as a Loadable Kernel Module (LKM). The key difference between the two products is the introduction of Flow Monitoring and Security Groups.

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During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is vShield Edge 1.0.

VMware acquired the vShield security technology from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008. The only product offered so far has been Zones, a virtual firewall that uses stateful inspection and application layer gateway approaches to monitor and filter virtual network traffic between multiple virtual machines deployed on the same virtualization host.
vShield Zones didn’t mature much in almost two years, and VMware is offering it for free as part of vSphere Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

A major limitation of Zones is the inability to filter traffic entering and leaving the virtual network, which is a critical need in multi-tenant cloud computing environments like the ones created by the new vCloud Director.
VMware overcame this limitation by releasing extending the vShield product family with this new solution called Edge.

Zones and Edge share the same firewall engine, but while the former is attached to a specifc virtualization host, the latter is attached to a specific portgroup.
In this role, the engine has been enriched by a few key new capabilities:

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