Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Last week Microsoft released the second beta of its offline patching solution for virtual infrastructures, dubbed Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST) 3.0.
Less than a month ago the first beta came out. What’s changed since that release is just a fixed issue in the Template VHD update feature.
Earlier this week Gartner published a new version of its its first Magic Quadrant for x86 virtualization. It’s extremely interesting for a number of reasons.
First of all, VMware is the only major player considered a leader in the market, with the best capability to execute and the best completeness of vision. Its position seems unreachable no matter how you look at the graph.
More interesting than that, because unexpected, is that Gartner considers both Citrix and Oracle having the same capability to execute, despite the former is well ahead in terms of vision and alone in the Visionaries category.
Microsoft is the only “challenger”, and yet it has nor the capability to execute of VMware, which is surprising considering that VMware is now led by two former top Microsoft executives, neither the vision of Citrix.
In Febrary Citrix published a 21-pages paper titled XenServer Performance Monitoring for Scalability Testing that may be useful for some customers and researchers.
It provides an overview of the different ways to retrieve performance metrics, including XenCenter and the CLI (through specific scripts that are provided as examples).
Microsoft just published a huge poster showing multiple aspects of the Hyper-V 2008 R2 architecture.
It includes the following components: virtual networking, virtual machine snapshots, live migration, storage types, storage locations and paths, import and export, and of course the core architecture elements.
Thanks to Virtual PC Guy for the news.
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The analysis firm Burton Group, recently acquired by Gartner but still operating as an independent subsidiary, recently published its Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria.
The document, that has been created as a guidance for enterprise-scale VDI deployments, includes over 100 features, divided in Required (over 50%), Preferred and Optional.
Both Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 and VMware View 4.01 have been measured against the criteria and a couple of extremely interesting things emerged.
The first one is that XenDesktop beats View in every category, surpassing the competitor even in the Required feature-set.
By now virtualization.info readers should know that Microsoft is planning to extend its Azure cloud computing platform in a way it can rival with Amazon EC2 (public claims and multiple evidences confirmed this).
Today EC2 features an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architecture, while Azure is based on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture.
Ironically, while the latter is working to have a IaaS piece, the former may be well looking around to be a PaaS cloud too.
Azure is a highly optimized version of Hyper-V, stripped down of unnecessary components and drivers to reduce the platform footprint / surface attack and improve performance. Or at least this is the official high-level description of the architecture that Microsoft recently offered to virtualization.info.
VMware has just released the first minor update for all its hosted virtualization platforms: Workstation / Player and Fusion.
Workstation, Player and ACE 7.1 (build 261024) include the following new features:
This week Vizioncore released the first major update for its backup/recovery product vRanger Pro since the 4.0 version made available in July 2009.
With this release, still part of the Data Protection Platform effort, Vizioncore is clearly going after PHD Virtual, as two key new features are part of competing products or have been announced to be part of them.
Specifically, we are talking about the support for vSphere vStorage APIs and the Change Block Tracking (CBT) technology, that provides the list of blocks that have changed inside virtual disks, avoiding to rescan the VMDK file and thus reducing the time to complete the incremental and differential backup.
PHD Virtual introduced this support in Backup for VMware ESX (formerly esXpress) 4.0.
Veeam released today version 5.5 of its nworks Smart Plug-In (SPI) for HP Operations Manager.
The add-on integrates VMware monitoring capabilities in the HP management platform, and supports vSphere since version 5.0.
The new SPI 5.5 introduces three new features:
This week the Linux distribution Fedora reaches version 13. As reported in January, it brings a number of additional capabilities for KVM, including: