Year: 2010

When Citrix announced the launch of the Open Virtual Switch project in May 2009 it raised a lot of attention.

The early bits of Open vSwitch appeared online in August 2009, along with a technology roadmap that clears the intention to compete against the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch architecture and the Cisco Nexus 1000V software switch.

It took almost an entire year to reach version 1.0. Meanwhile Open vSwitch became a key component of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) networking infrastructure, another project supported by Citrix.

Customers are waiting to see a commercial implementation of the Open vSwitch and how Citrix will integrate it in XenServer and XenDesktop.
Maybe the time has come: Citrix briefly announced that a new beta cycle for its hypervisor is about to begin and that the new build will feature a distributed virtual switching technology.

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Despite the acquisition of Qumranet happened in September 2008, Red Hat remained silent for long time. But a few months after the launch of its new, KVM-based virtualization platform (just updated to version 2.2) the company started to push pretty hard the marketing message, and VMware is its main target.

The company’s CEO Jim Whitehurst is becoming increasingly aggressive: in March he said that VMware customers look at Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) as a parallel hypervisor to have. Now he’s promising that RHEV will leapfrog the the vSphere platform just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) leapfrogged Sun Solaris for SPARC.

The change in tune may depend on the massive criticism that VMware expressed on the RHEV platform.

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So far application virtualization vendors had a hard time to win the market. Even the biggest players like Microsoft, VMware and Symantec have been extremely slow in developing their platforms and the marketing effort to push them to the mainstream audience has been practically non-existent.
There’s even a doubt that the market really needs application virtualization.

Despite that, there are new players brave enough to enter the market.
The last one is a German firm called Dögel IT-Management.

Dögel IT-Management is a solution provider focused on desktop management and application virtualization, currently offering the solutions of most of its future competitors: VMware, XenoCode (now renamed in Spoon), InstallFree and Endeavors Technologies (recently resurrected with a new Chairman).

There is not much more about the company, founded in 2005, except that its founder and CEO is Mathias Dögel. He released an interview explaining the desire to enter the application virtualization market to fix the many shortcomings of the solutions above.

Two weeks ago, the company launched a public tech preview of its new application virtualization engine called Evalaze.

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While most products that work well in physical infrastructures can be ported inside virtual machines, a number of them are not really optimized to work in virtual data centers.
It’s the case of all agent-based solutions that perform tasks on the virtual machines’ hard drives without any knowledge of the concurrent access to resources happening behind the scene.

It’s the case of anti-virus solutions, for instance: right now leading vendors like McAfee and like Trend Micro are developing new version of their products, optimized for virtualization (and specifically for VDI environments) that can coordinate the agents activity to avoid that every protected virtual machine tries to scan its vHD or tries to download the vaccine update at the same time, killing the I/O channel.

But it’s also the case of disk defragmentation solutions.

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Oracle continues to release minor updates for its hosted desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox at a crazy pace.

In mid May the company released VirtualBox 3.2, after just a few weeks of beta. In June the product was updated again two times, with version 3.2.2 and 3.2.4. And now we have the 3.2.6.

Like for the previous builds, this one too is primarily for bug fixing, but there’s a key addition: the support for 64bit guest operating systems on 32bit host OSes (assuming Intel VT or AMD-V are available and enabled at chipset level).

Last week, at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform 2.2

The new version, in beta since March, introduces a number of new features. The most important one is the inclusion of the Qumranet technology to manage a KVM-based VDI environment, dubbed Red hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktop.

Red Hat also announced that RHEV 2.2 is supported on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), which means that now Red Hat has an additional playground to compete with VMware.

What’s new in details:

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The presentation virtualization firm 2X a couple of weeks ago released a new minimal Linux distribution called CloudClient OS (CCOS) which basically embeds the company’s ThinClientOS.

The free (and still in beta) operating system can be installed in a 512MB USB stick. It comes with pre-configured connection to popular cloud services like Google Apps and Microsoft Live, but most of all it comes with several VDI and presentation virtualization clients: Microsoft RDP, Citrix XenApp, VNC, of course the 2X VirtualDesktopServer Client, and even VMware View.

CCOS seems very much what Chrome OS may become if Google decides to target corporate users rather than just the consumer market.
Maybe, since Chrome OS is fully open source, 2X will be able to leverage that platform rather than developing its own.

Here’s an introductory video:

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Last week Parallels announced the upcoming availability of its hosted server virtualization platform: Server for Mac 4.0

Parallels launched the first version of Server in June 2008. At that time virtualization.info wrongly reported the news saying that it was the bare-metal hypervisor that the company initially announced in 2005 and that appeared only in October 2009.
Parallels Server instead is a type-2 virtual machine monitor (VMM) that could compete with VMware Server, to be discontinued by June 2011, if VMware Server would be available for Mac OS X. But it’s not, so Parallels is basically the only player in this niche market.

virtualization.info couldn’t track any version of Parallels Server beyond 1.0, so this new build actually is the second release and not the fourth one.
It introduces a number of new features, including:

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Ruben Spruijt, one of the two authors of the Virtual Reality Check (VRC) Project, the independent benchmark validated by both Citrix and VMware, is back with a new project: VDI Smackdown.

The 33-pages free report is a feature comparison of the four major VDI platform available on the market: Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 1, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services, Quest vWorkspace 7.1 and VMware View 4.0.1.

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Microsoft recently released a new paper titled Remote Desktop Virtualization Host Capacity Planning in Windows Server 2008 R2.

The 30-pages document provide guidance on how to properly size a VDI environment powered by Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 R2 connection broker:

This document presents some preliminary guidance and data around capacity planning for RD Virtualization Host and should be regarded as an update to the “Remote Desktop Session Host Capacity Planning in Windows Server R2” document. As such, it focuses mostly on the RD Virtualization Host-specific aspects of the capacity planning exercise, and briefly summarizes most of the facts that are equally applicable to both types (virtual and session) of Remote Desktop Services deployments. For a more complete understanding of all the considerations and guidelines, it is highly recommended that you read the RD Session Host white paper. The results presented in this document are based on a few scenarios that use Microsoft® Office applications. The document also provides basic guidance on the hardware and software parameters that can have a significant impact on the number of virtual machines that a server can support effectively.

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