Year: 2010

Yesterday Citrix announced a couple of new certifications: the Citrix Certified Enterprise Engineer (CCEE) for Virtualization and the Citrix Certified Integration Architect (CCIA) for Virtualization.

The CCEE certification is focused on the ability to combine operational planning skills with tactical design expertise and integration know-how. Candidates must pass exams for Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp, and XenServer. On top of that there’s a last exam: the A15, Engineering a Citrix Virtualization Solution.

The CCIA certification instead is focused on best practices for virtualization analysis and design.  Candidates must have achieved the CCEE and pass one more final exam: the A16, Architecting a Citrix Virtualization Solution.

Citrix has multiple products to deliver applications from the data center to the user’s production environment. While this is a good thing because the offering can address the many different needs that customers have, it also represents a significant challenge in terms of communication: when XenApp makes more sense than XenDesktop? And when the two can be used together?

The company is trying to educate new and existing customers by providing some guidance with a new 17-pages paper: Technical Guide to Application Delivery Options for XenApp and/or XenDesktop.

The document, which is focused on XenApp 5.0 and XenDesktop 4.0, is not particularly detailed but outlines some useful application delivery criteria:

Today Microsoft officially announced the first beta of the Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.
The beta actually started in late June but the company today makes the bits publicly available.

As expected, the Service Pack 1 introduces the Dynamic Memory feature for Hyper-V and RemoteFX for the Remote Desktop Services (RDS).

While many server-based computing (SBC) players announced their support for RemoteFX, the real winner here is NVIDIA, which suddenly has a huge opportunity to enter the server market.

NVIDIA is working with Microsoft and the leading OEMs to ship its Quadro GPUs (including the existing FX 5800, the FX 4800 and the FX 3800) in upcoming servers tailored for VDI.

If RemoteFX gets some serious traction, NVIDIA may start producing VDI GPUs that other virtualization players want too. And this includes Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat and even VMware, which has an OEM agreement with Teradici but its business is definitively not producing graphic cards.

Just a few hours ago, during his keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010, Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business division, announced the release candidate of a new add-on for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2: Self-Service Portal 2.0 (VMMSSP).

VMMSSP is a stand-alone product and not an upgrade for the current version of the SCVMM self-service portal. The two portals can coexist.

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Microsoft just announced an on-premises version of its Azure cloud computing platform that will be available to hosting providers and customers through an appliance (or better: a large number of racks of appliances).

Microsoft is still mum about the Azure capability to run as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, and there’s no trace of this feature in the online version of the platform, at the point that there are doubts about the company’s plans to compete against Amazon EC2 as previously announced.

But a new confirmation arrives exactly from this new Azure appliance. The just published FAQ page about the product in fact, clearly mentions the IaaS capability:

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After vConverter, Vizioncore finally updates another product of its portfolio: vOptimizer.

Sometimes in the H1 2007 Quest Software acquired the US startup Invirtus, merging its offering with the Vizioncore’s one in September of the same year, and turning Invirtus VM Optimizer into Vizioncore vOptimizer.

Vizioncore released just one major update of vOptimizer at that time: version 4.0.
The product was then renamed as vOptimizer Pro 2.0 in early 2009.
It received a further, minor update in June 2009, introducing a new infrastructure scanning capability.

vOptimizer Pro reaches today version 3.0, which sports support for Linux virtual machines (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and 5.4 only at this point) and thin provisioned virtual machines. Pricing is set at $299.

The way Vizioncore shaped the marketing message clarifies how the company is going VKernel with this product. This shouldn’t surprise much considering that vFoglight too is in direct competition with the VKernel offering.

SPICE is the high performance protocol developed by the Israeli startup Qumranet. More than one year after the startup has been acquired by Red Hat, SPICE has become an open source project.

In April 2010 the remoting protocol has been included in the freedesktop.org project, an 10-years old effort to promote the X Window System.

This week SPICE reached version 0.5.2, showing some progress.
Despite 0.5.x is the unstable branch, this version brings in the first stable API.
It also introduces full support for off-screen surfaces and a 80% integration with QEMU.

The project homepage features a rich roadmap:

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The 2010 edition of the VMware’s conference VMworld is approaching fast. The company already published the session catalog which, easy to guess, has a strong focus on private cloud computing and the upcoming vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly codename Project Redwood).

virtualization.info recommends a few sessions:

• DV7180 – ThinApp : What’s New and Future Vision
  This session will detail new features and enhancements to the ThinApp product since VMWorld 2009, including the 4.0.3, 4.0.4, and 4.5 releases as well upcomming releases that occur between now and VMWorld 2010. The second half of the session will present part of our vision for the future of application virtualization and demonstrate some demos of possible future technology.
• MA7140 – vCloud Architecture Design Strategies and Design Patterns
  This session focuses on the building blocks for a vCloud architecture. Using Design Patterns is fundamental for a successful design and deployment. We will provide a Conceptual Model including the requirements and constraints and conceptually represents what we are trying to produce. The Logical Design shows the relationship of the components.
  This session uses the experience of the VMware TS Cloud Team for deployments with Enterprise Private Cloud and with Cloud Providers.

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The announcement of vSphere 4.1 is officially set for next week, July 13, virtualization.info has learned.
We cannot confirm yet if the product will be actually shipped that day or just announced.

virtualization.info already published the list of features that will be shipped with this new major release, as well as a VMware report about the performance improvements of many components.

An additional interesting detail is how VMware has enriched the offering for the SMBs. 
The new Essentials Plus edition in fact will include more features:

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus—This kit includes all the features of vSphere Essentials, plus High Availability and Data Recovery to automatically recover your data and restart your virtual machines in the event of system failures; with vMotion technology, now you can completely eliminate planned downtime during server maintenance.

The first details about the third version of Hyper-V and the overall Microsoft vision for it appeared online yesterday on a French publication.

Apparently, Hyper-V 3.0 will be integrated in Windows 8 too, working as a client hypervisor (an interesting scenario considering the new VMware’s position about type-1 VMMs for offline VDI).

According to the article, Hyper-V 3.0 will not run a full copy of Windows 8 in its parent partition, but a minimal part of the OS internally codenamed MinWin.
MinWin is subset of Windows that exists since Vista. It includes the OS kernel, the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), the file system and the networking support. In one of its iterations it had a disk footprint of 25MB and a RAM footprint of 40MB, according to several information released by Microsoft in 2007 and 2008.
Codename MinWin is smaller than the Windows Server Core edition.

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