Year: 2010

VMware announced the client edition of its hypervisor in September 2008. Dubbed Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), the product’s launch was planned somewhere in Q4 2009 but, like its competitor Citrix, VMware missed its own deadline.

In September 2009 the company updated the roadmap, suggesting that CVP won’t arrive before H1 2010.
In March VMware postponed the release again, this time to the end of 2010.

Now, in a new interview with a company executive, it seems that VMware is no more committed to any specific date. This either means that CVP is finally ready and the vendor wants to surprise its competitors, or that the technical challenge is more significant than expected and the vendor doesn’t see the project as a priority anymore to justify additional investments on it.

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virtualization.info first appeared online September 11, 2003. Over the last seven years, we’ve tracked the birth and the evolution of a completely new, billion dollar market, the rise and fall of over 100 vendors, and the mainstream adoption of this disruptive technology that is virtualization.
In doing so, virtualization.info has been visited by millions of readers, from all continents, from all industries. Today most Fortune 500 and Global Fortune 2000 companies read our daily news, along with hundreds of thousands of smaller firms all around the globe, from US to Japan (did you know that Japan visits virtualization.info JP more than UK visits virtualization.info EN?).

The evolution of this market is all but complete.
Virtual infrastructures can mature in so many different areas, from orchestration to security, that we really have just started. While the industry continues to make progress in these segments, and prepares to enter the next big phase with application virtualization, another completely new, billion dollar market is forming these days: cloud computing.
We want to track the birth and evolution of this market in the same way we did for virtualization. So today virtualization.info announces a sister publication: cloudcomputing.info

While virtualization.info will continue to track hardware, OS and application virtualization technologies, cloudcomputing.info will focus on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) markets.
There will be some overlap around the IaaS market, as IaaS clouds are built on top of virtual infrastructures, and so you’ll see some cross-posting between the two sites.
Beyond that, cloudcomputing.info will expand our coverage, discussing new vendors and technologies that didn’t find a place here so far.

Feel free to visit the new website, subscribe the RSS feed or the email newsletter, follow the Twitter account, or like the Facebook page.

We hope you’ll enjoy our expanded coverage at cloudcomputing.info. Thanks to everyone for their support of virtualization.info over the last seven years!

P.s.: Just in case you are wondering:

1. we are hiring writers, for both publications. If you are interested please send a resume and a writing sample.
2. we are evaluating early sponsorships. If you are interested please send an inquiry.

A few weeks after the release candidate status, the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) reaches version 0.5.

As virtualization.info reported at that time, even if not marked as 1.0, the Xen.org team informs that “XCP-0.5 is intended to be a *stable* release, suitable for long-term production use.”

The new build include the following components and features, including:

• Xen 3.4.2
• Linux kernel 2.6.27
• Open vSwitch 1.0

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Yesterday Vizioncore released a new major version of its physical to virtual (P2V) / virtual to virtual (V2V) / virtual to physical (V2P) migration tool: vConverter.

The previous milestone, vConverter 4.0, arrived in November 2008, with just one minor update released in September 2009, so this is a long overdue refreshment.

vConverter 5.0, priced at $299 per physical system, introduces P2V migration support for Microsoft Hyper-V and V2V migration support between VMware and Microsoft virtual machines.

The new capability is part of the Quest grand plan to support Hyper-V in all its Vizioncore product portfolio. A plan that became evident in March 2009 and that involved vControl first and vFoglight later.

While the Apple iPhone and iPad devices continue to conquer market share (and the favor of more and more enterprises), the number of business applications for them is still limited.

Excluding the Citrix Receiver and the Wyse PocketCloud, the virtualization vendors’ effort to embrace these new devices has been minimal.

Independent developers seem much more active. After Gamma VNC, which supports the VMware Fusion native VNC server, today we mention iXen, a XenServer management console for the iPad.

The app supports Citrix XenServer 5.5 and performs most basic tasks:

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The US startup Desktone, which entered the VDI market in April 2008 with a very interesting platform for hosting providers, just lost its Vice President of Strategy: Jeff Fisher.

Fisher arrived at Desktone from Softricity, acquired by Microsoft in May 2006.
After three years at Softricity as Director of Business Development, Fisher remained in Microsoft for less than one year and a half, and then joined Desktone.

He already landed at RES Software, where he’s the new Vice President of Business Development.

After years of silence, the startup RingCube relaunched its flagship product in March, replacing the MojoPac brand (and its focus on the consumer market) with vDesk and a new effort to win the enterprise segment.

vDesk acts like a wrapper for hosted virtualization platforms, which can enforce corporate security policies and that can be centrally managed. It competes against products like Microsoft MED-V (formerly Kidaro Workspaces), Sentillion vThere (acquired by Microsoft too) and VMware ACE.

The company just achieved the OPSWAT OESIS OK interoperability certification for vDesk 3.0.

OPSWAT is a very small US company founded in 2002 which develops and sells OESIS, a software framework that developers can adopt to manage third party security applications.
OPSWAT also maintains a certification program, the OESIS OK, that verifies the compatibility between these security applications, including antivirus, antispyware, personal firewalls, hard disk encryption, VPN clients and much more.

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In March Microsoft announced the upcoming released of a new remote desktop protocol technology called RemoteFX, acquired by Calista in January 2008.
RemoteFX which can be considered an accelerator for RDP over the LAN, will arrive with Windows Server R2 Service Pack 1 and will be integrated in Remote Desktop Services (RDS), possibly by the end of this year.

Immediately after, a number of players in the server-based computing market announced their upcoming support for the technology, including AMD, AppliedMicro, Citrix, DevonIT, HP, Quest, ThinLinx, Via and Wyse Technology.

Ericom joins the group today, announcing full support for RemoteFX within its PowerTerm WebConnect:

Ericom has just completed verifying that Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect supports this new and innovative Microsoft protocol. In fact, PowerTerm WebConnect is the only available connection broker for VDI and Terminal Services today that supports Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and RemoteFX.

Customers that are interested in trying the solution can send an email to the company.

The Canadian startup CiRBA has been quite under the radar for a long time now. Excluding a minor update for its flagship product Data Center Intelligence (DCE), released in May, the company didn’t show much progress (DCE 5.0 was released in June 2008).

So it’s a positive news that the company is working to enter new markets. CiRBA in fact just signed an agreement with Hitachi to offer DCE as a service for the Japanese market. For those customers that want the product on premises, Hitachi can resell it too.

This move is also trying to counter the competition coming from vendors like Lanamark or Liquidware Labs, which initially preferred to approach the market through a network of managed services partners and only now are starting to approach end-users with direct sales.

Just a couple of weeks ago virtualization.info announced that Cisco selected Rent-A-Lab (RAL) to host all Unified Computing System (UCS) road shows and bootcamps arranged in Europe for this year. But there’s much more happening at our busy on-demand data center in Zurich.

Today we are happy to announce that NetApp joined the list of prestigious sponsors that are powering RAL.

Thanks to NetApp, the infrastructure now features two FAS3140v arrays, each with four 4GB FCP ports, six 1GB NICs, one dual-CNA for FCoE and 10GB Ethernet, and one Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) II with 256GB of SLC flash memory.

The PAM II (aka Flash Cache) is an array controller resident, intelligent 3/4 length PCIe card with onboard memory that is used as a read cache and is integrated with DataONTAP via FlexScale which is software that provides various tuning options and modes of operation.
It’s a especially desirable component in VDI environments and we can’t wait to try it with the virtualization platforms we have here.

The two arrays come each with a grand total of 24 300GB SAS 15K RPM drives and a boatload of software: ASIS, CIFS, Cluster, FCP, Flex Clone, iSCSI, Multistore, NearStore Option, NFS, pammii, snapdrive_windows, snapmanager_hyperv, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, SnapVault ONTAP Primary, SnapVault ONTAP Secondary, V-Series (Gateway).

The last feature, V-Series, which defines the “v” in the FAS3140v name, means that these units are able to manage 3rd party arrays (from IBM, HP, HDS, EMC, Fujitsu and 3PAR) and put their storage intelligence on top.

On the side you can see a picture of the new gear already in place in the virtualization.info Rent-a-Lab racks.