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Now that CloudShare is getting some traction thanks to the involvement in the VMware and Salesforce partnership, the company is expanding.
They’ve just hired a Vice President of Global Sales: Steven McDermott.
McDermott comes from Panasas, where he covered the same role for two years. Before that, he has been Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Topio before the acquisition from NetApp at the end 2006.
He remained in NetApp just five months.
TechTarget recently published an article about the involuntary information leak on VMware’s corporate website, revealing the roadmap for the upcoming vCloud Service Director (codename Project Redwood) that virtualization.info extensively described in January.
Apparently, vCloud Service Director (vCSD), which is in private beta right now, will be formally announced at the end of August, during the VMworld 2010 conference.
Much more interesting is the fact that vCSD will leverage the jclouds Java library to access 3rd parties public clouds and mesh them with vSphere-based on-premises private clouds, creating what the industry now calls a hybrid cloud.
The guys at Windows8beta.com made a scoop discovering a new job announcement from Microsoft about a career in the Remote Desktop Virtualization team for the upcoming Windows 8 platforms wave.
The Software Development Engineer in Test II job announcement says:
…Remote Desktop team has taken on the fight for hosted desktops with first version of the Microsoft VDI released in Windows Server 2008 R2. In Windows 8, we plan to take it to the next level with different roles like Remote Desktop Web Access (RDWA), Remote Desktop Connection Broker (RDCB), RemoteApp and Desktop Publishing (RADC), Remote Desktop Virtualization (RDV) and Remote Desktop Publishing working together to create a very easy to setup and robust solution for small and medium business and a very promising platform for our partners to build solutions for large organizations…
A little more than two years ago, virtualization.info covered an emerging project called OpenNEbula (formerly GridHypervisor) which was one of the earliest open source solutions to manage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing architecture built on Xen.
The project, based on a research started in 2005 by Ignacio M. Llorente and Rubén S. Montero, matured a lot in these years. It now offers cloud management capabilities for most virtualization platforms, including Xen, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, VMware Server and any other virtual machine monitor that supports the libvirt libraries.
Plus, it offers capability to manage hybrid clouds, through the support for public clouds like Amazon EC2 and ElasticHosts.
Version 1.4 of OpenNebula was released in December 2009, and an upcoming 1.4.2 is expected to introduce support for Oracle VM VirtualBox.
A new interesting paper recently appeared online: The Impact of virtualization on Network Performance of Amazon EC2 Data Center.
The 9-pages document, produced by the Department of Computer Science at the Rice University, analyzes how hardware virtualization (EC2 is based on the Xen implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) impacts on network behavior and performance, specifically focusing on processor sharing, packet delay, TCP/UDP throughput and packet loss.
The conclusions are surprising:
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The time has finally come: more than two years after Quest completed the acquisition of Vizioncore, it’s about to drop the brand.
Starting end of August (exactly in time for the VMware VMworld 2010 in US) Vizioncore will become Quest Software Server Virtualization Management Group.
In a similar fashion, after the acquisition of Provision Networks, Quest renamed it Quest Software Desktop Virtualization Group.
Finally the company recognized the complexity and the confusion that carrying on two brands implies. Mostly when the two brands have separated sales channels that often overlap and compete for the same account to sell each other solution.
At today most public cloud infrastructures are sort of black boxes. There’s not too much that cloud providers are happy to disclose about, including their architecture internals, internal and 3rd parties software layers, or security defenses.
Customers have to blindly trust the provider as there’s no way yet to plug-in monitoring agents or on-demand assessments without a major pain (assuming a provider would permit them).
So the idea of measuring the performance of these public clouds is rather interesting. CloudHarmony, a new project focused on cloud benchmarking and taxonomy of public clouds, is providing some insight and early reports that are worth a check.
Benchmarking is a challenging discipline. In this scenario seems almost impossible, as the cloud platforms are distributed across worldwide datacenters and the abstractive nature of the cloud implies that the underlying hypervisor or even the underlying physical hardware may change without notice, in any moment.
While waiting for VMware to release its much awaited vCloud Service Director (formerly project Redwood), and possibly to invest much more resources in its existing vCenter Orchestrators, customers are coming out with their own solutions to bridge the gap between a virtual infrastructure and a private cloud through automation.
It’s the case of Peter Rudolf, at Mightycare Solutions, who just released an interesting plug-in for VMware vCenter called vCOPlugIN.
The idea is to define a number of actions workflows, called Services, that can be executed against one or more virtual machines in the vCenter inventory with a single click.
These services include things like the creation of new VMs following predefined templates configurations (virtual servers, virtual desktop, development workstation, etc.), the VMs deployment using different techniques (cloning, PXE delivery, etc.), the deployment of certain application packages, the VMs backup, and more.
Starting today Parallels has begun selling a special version of its desktop virtualization platform for Windows, Desktop for Windows, that addresses Windows XP/Vista users migrating to Windows 7.
Simply, the guest operating system has to be Windows XP or Vista while the host operating system has to be Windows 7. The presence of seamless window technology dubbed Coherence helps the application of the two platforms to coexist in a nice way.
CNet is highlighting how this offers may be not compliant with legal terms of Windows 7 EULA. Actually, it’s a no news.
Since ever, a customer that wants to run one or more guest operating systems on top of a certain host operating system has to own the license of all OSes. This applies to any hardware virtualization platform (both type-2 and type-1) which includes Parallels Workstation and its competitors, like VMware Workstation or Oracle VM VirtualBox.
There’s no reason why it should be different in this specific case.
XenoCode, the application virtualization vendor that launched its platform and application packaging tool, Virtual Application Studio, in July 2008, is no more.
The company mysteriously decided to rename itself in Spoon, despite a growing awareness of the original brand (mostly thanks to the OEM agreement with Novell).
Accordingly, Virtual Application Studio becomes Spoon Studio, which is part of the product portfolio along with a brand new Spoon Server, which allows to distribute virtualized applications in a streamed fashion, just like it already happens over the Internet for Spoon.net pre-packaged software.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.
