Year: 2010

MokaFive today announced version 3.0 of its security wrapper for hosted virtualization platforms called Suite, introducing full support for Windows 7. This version is the follow-up of version 2.8 which was released in May this year.

MokaFive has a slightly different approach in providing virtual desktops to end-users, called a Live-PC in the MokaFive suite. A Live-PC is managed centrally, but runs locally on Macintosh or Windows based computers after users downloaded their Live-PC via a Web link. The VM runs inside software virtualization environments like VMware Player or Fusion, Virtual Box or Parallels Workstation. MokaFive is still expected to release a client Hypervisor called the MokaFive BareMetal in 2011 as reported by virtualization.info in June this year.

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Symantec has announced that its endpoint security, messaging security and endpoint management solutions have been optimized for density and performance in virtual environments.

By randomizing virus definition updates and scheduled scans across the VM’s hosted on the virtualization platform, Symantec minimizes the impact of these tasks on the hardware resources. This randomization feature is available from Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 Maintenance Release 3 making Symantec the last Security Software vendor providing a VDI friendly security solution.

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While Microsoft releases more and more details about the next version of Virtual Machine Manager 2012 , Microsoft will also make available Service Pack 1 for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 Release 2, which is now in Release Candidate status making it feature complete. Upgrading from this Release Candidate to the eventual Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version will be supported.

Service Pack 1 will add support for the new features which will be included into Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, like Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.

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Quest has released a paper titled: Maximizing Virtual Machine Performance – An introduction to performance tuning. The paper which contains 10 pages is written by Mattias Sundling who is Evangelist at Quest Software and comes from Vizioncore which was acquired by Quest in January 2008.

The paper provides an introduction to performance tuning on VMware ESX(i) 4.1 environments, illustrated by how vFoglight gives insight into peformance and linking to external articles which give more insight on specific topics.

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Not long after releasing VM VirtualBox version 3.2.12, Oracle announced the first beta for VirtualBox version 4.0, which will be a new major release. As of this version VirtualBox will introduce Extension Packs which Oracle and 3rd parties can use to delivers additional functionality to the product. Oracle will release the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack which adds support for USB 2.0, RDP Server and the PXE bootloader with E1000 support.

Also intoduced with version 4.0 is a different licensing mechanism, the H reports . Both the product source code and the binaries will be licensed under GPLv2, The Extension Pack mechanism will be licensed under the VirualBox Personal Use and Evaluation Licence (PUEL), which means that distributors shipping the Open Source Edition of VirtualBox no longer need to build from the sources themselves.

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Now that even 2010 is about to end, VMware is getting ready to disclose more about its strategy for mobile and how exactly it plans to deliver the Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) on customers’ handsets and possibly tablets.

In mid September, virtualization.info reported about the state of the project, originally announced in November 2008: ignited by the acquisition of Trango Virtual Processors, and delayed by at least one year, MVP is still alive albeit VMware has made significant changes to its architecture over time.

Even without a confirmation from competitor Open Kernel Labs, it was pretty obvious that VMware’s only choice to deliver at the moment is through the Android mobile OS. This would imply a direct partnership with Google and/or its ODM partners. 
The confirmation arrives today: VMware and LG Electronics announce a partnership to deliver MVP on Android.

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In September 2008 a new European startup entered the virtualization market: icomasoft.

The company raised some popularity rather quickly thanks to a relatively simple plug-in for VMware vSphere clients that leverages the VMware PowerShell Toolkit:  VI PowerScripter.
The product can be used to automate any kind of task inside a VMware virtual infrastructure, but icomasoft has been smart enough to provide predefined workflows for mass provisioning, resource consumption graphs generation, hosts/VMs configurations export, etc.

Yet, VI PowerScripter shouldn’t be considered the company’s flagship product. It has been just labelled legacy, despite it’s still actively developed to current customers.
icomasoft has more ambitious plans, which start to become evident this week, with the public beta release of opvizor, a performance analysis platform that approaches the troubleshooting from a completely new perspective.

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According to Linux-KVM.com, Red Hat has recently started the development of a GTK client for Linux that leverages the open source SPICE remote desktop protocol.

The project still is in its very early stage, as version 0.2 for 64bit Fedora 14 is the only binary available at the moment.

SPICE too is far away from reaching version 1.0, expected not earlier than in H2 2011.

VMware has released version 1.5 of its vCenter CapacityIQ product. CapacityIQ is a capacity management solution for vSphere and this version is the follow-up of version 1.0.4. which was released in August this year. VMware released the first version of the product in October 2009 as an expansion to the company’s effort in the capacity management market. Before CapacityIQ, VMware first released Capacity Planner, acquired from AOG in 2005, as a hosted service for partners only, and then the Guided Consolidation module for vCenter.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables users to analyze, forecast, and plan the capacity needs of their virtual datacenter environment. With this VMware competes with several of its partners providing the same functionality, like VKernel, which probably started supporting Hyper-V environments for its product for that exact reason.

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Today Juniper Networks enters the virtualization market with the acquisition of Altor Networks for $95M, one of the most interesting startup working on virtual data center security.

Altor’s flagship product, Virtual Firewall (VF), which reached version 4.0 in Q3, blends together firewall and intrusion detection system (IDS) technologies. 
The former is a stateful filtering engine developed in house, which features very interesting capabilities like VM-level security policies, integration with VMware VMsafe APIs, dynamically-generated rulebases, and more.
The latter comes from the inclusion of the worldwide popular open source IDS engine Snort and an OEM agreement with SourceFire to resell their commercial attack signatures.

In March the startup closed a new round of funding, equal to $10M, led by DAG, Accel Partners, Foundation Capital and Juniper itself. Overall, Altor raised over $16M.
The $95M are net of Altor shares already owned by Juniper.

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