Year: 2010

At the beginning of the week Citrix released the Service Pack 1 for its VDI platform XenDesktop.
Burton Group, a Gartner subsidiary, named it the first enterprise-ready solution for VDI on the market.

So what’s new in the update that is worth such recognition?

The SP1 (build 5010) contains upgrades to the Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) that improve the reliability of virtual desktops with almost 50 fixes, but the two key new features are related to the connection broker component, the Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC):

• Role-based access control (RBAC) model for administration delegation
• Change logging for administrative tasks

On top of that, now Citrix provides enterprise support agreements (minimum 3 years) for all XenDesktop 4 Platinum Edition components.

With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware also updated a number of related products. One of them is vCenter Orchestrator (vCO).

vCO (formerly VS-O) comes from the acquisition of Dunes Technology in September 2007. VMware decided to include it for free in the vSphere 4.0 Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

The new release (build 581) introduces a few but important features:

• Native 64bit architecture for both client and server tiers
• Optional stand-alone 32bit client
• Engine upgrade to Java 1.6
• Support for vSphere 4.1
• Data migration tool for vCO 4.0 customers
• Extended configuration limits:

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With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware also updated a number of related products. One of them is vCenter Server Heartbeat.

In March 2009 VMware decided to address a serious concern related to its virtual infrastructure: the lack of native fault tolerance for vCenter Server.
To do so, the company closed an OEM deal with NeverFail, rebranding its partner’s product in vCenter Server Heartbeat 1.0 and selling it against 3rd party solutions like the ones offered by CA, Double-Take or Steel Eye.
Somewhere during the last 16 months VMware decided to align the version number of its OEMed product with the one of NeverFail: so today we have Heartbeat 6.3 (build 4316).

The update introduces a number of new features:

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With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware also updated a number of related products. One of them is Studio.

VMware Studio has been launched in September 2008 as a free authoring tool to create and maintain OVF packages.
Exactly one year later VMware launched Studio 2.0, introducing support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) 1.0 specifications and the ability to manipulate its next-generation virtual appliances (VAs): the vApps.

Studio 2.1 (build 1318-268792) introduces a boatload of enhancements:

• Capability to digitally sign an OVF (vSphere 4.1 verifies the certificate before importing)
• Capability to create VAs from VMs that were not originally created with VMware Studio, based on a discovery phase
• Capability to run concurrent builds
• Capability to analyze the list of RPM and DEB packages to locate unused items and reduce the VM’s footprint

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At the end of July VMware published an interesting benchmark about its new vSphere 4.1 platform: over 171,000 concurrent users for a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server environment hosted by a single physical server.

The virtualization host was a Dell PowerEdge R710 2U rack server, powered by two Intel Quad-Core Xeon X5570 CPUs and 96GB RAM.
The SAN was an EMC CX3-40 SAN with two storage processors and 60 146GB hard drives (15K RPM).

vSphere 4.1 hosted five virtual machines: three Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition R2 IIS web servers, a SQL Server 2008 SP1 and SharePoint Server 2007 SP2.
The SQL Server VM was configured with 2 vCPUs and 16GB vRAM, the other VMs with 2 vCPUs and 4GB vRAM.
The workload, a mix of 80% read, 10% search, and 10% modify transactions, was generated by Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Agent.

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In mid April the Microsoft Dynamics division published an interesting internal benchmark: CRM 4.0 deployed on 20 Hyper-V 2008 R2 virtual machines able to serve up to 100,000 concurrent users.

The virtual infrastructure was built on top of two Dell PowerEdge R9100 4U rack servers, each with two Intel Quad-Core Xeon 7560 CPUs.
The first host, featuring 256GB RAM, served 5 virtual machines loaded with SQL Server 2008 R2. The second one, featuring 192GB RAM, served 5 VMs loaded with IIS and 10 VMs loaded with CRM Asynchronous Service.

This system handled 100,000 concurrent users, divided in five organizations, each with four VMs (one web server, two asyncronous servers and one database server).
The users’ activity, generated by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance Toolkit, was equal to 5.1M web requests per hour, and 778,000 business transactions per hour. The average response time was 0.29 seconds.

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Today VMware/SpringSource released the first update of Hyperic (formerly HQ) since the acquisition of SpringSource in August 2009.

Hyperic was an infrastructure management firm that offers products (HQ and IQ) for every major operating system (from Microsoft Windows to IBM AIX), every major application platform (from LAMP to Microsoft .NET) and every major enterprise service (from Microsoft Exchange to Oracle Database) on the market. 
The Hyperic solution also monitors VMware and Citrix virtual infrastructures and the Amazon implementation of Xen. 
For each supported product Hyperic can do a wide array of activities, from auto-discovery to real-time health monitoring, from capacity planning to event tracking and alerting, up to granular reporting.

SpringSource acquired Hyperic just three months before announcing the deal with VMware.

Easy to expect, the new version introduces a tighter integration with vSphere through a new plug-in for vCenter that uses built-in java plugin classes, the HQ API, and the vCenter SDK.

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After the acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008, Red Had decided to offer its SPICE remote protocol for free, under the open source GPL license.
It’s unclear if this will accelerate the development of SPICE or not: at the moment SPICE 1.0 hit the market before the second half of next year

The company plans to deliver it on non-x86 architectures and today we have the first taste: a SPICE client is now available for the N900, the first Nokia device based upon the TI OMAP3 microprocessor with the ARM Cortex-A8 core.

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VMware recently lost another very high profile executive: Dane C. Smith, its former Global Vice President of Systems Integration and Outsourcing.

Smith has been Vice President of Field Operations for Americas region for just three months in 2008, and then he moved in his last position for almost two years.
He just landed at ClearEdge Power as Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Business Development.

In early June virtualization.info reported that Hyper9 (formerly InovaWave) lost its founder and CTO Dave McCrory. McCrory first founded Surgient (just acquired by Quest) and then co-founded InovaWave, which started from scratch as Hyper9 in February 2008, working at both companies as CTO.

McCrory just landed at Dell, as he confirms on his personal blog, with the role of Cloud Solutions Architect or similar.
Considering the Windows Azure appliances that Dell is about to use and resell for Microsoft, McCrory will be really busy for the time ahead.