Year: 2010

Just a couple of weeks ago, PHD Virtual announced its intention to extend its support beyond VMware ESX, embracing Citrix virtualization platforms for the near future. The company even presented a preview of their backup/restore solution for XenServer called Backup for Citrix XenServer at the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco.

And now, just a few days after, the company announces that Citrix is investing in them.
The undisclosed sum is part of new round led by the virtualization vendor and Insight Venture Partner.

Last but not least, the flagship product esXpress is no more. To reflect the new strategy PHD Virtual just renamed it Virtual Backup for VMware ESX.

It’s with a lot of skepticism that today we reports about the Propalms entrance in the VDI space.

The company announced the same identical thing in January 2008.
At that time the pitched product was Virtual Desktop Manager, expected to arrive as a module of the flagship solution called TSE.

Virtual Desktop Manager was indeed included as part of TSE 6.0 beta, bringing in support for Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware ESX, but for some mysterious reason it only supported VMware Server inside TSE 6.0 GA.

With just VMware Server support, Propalms didn’t even bother to promote its connection broker and in fact failed to attract any interest from customers.

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Yesterday Novell announced the Service Pack 1 for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11.

The package seems strictly focused on virtualization, as it includes the new Xen 4.0 and introduces for the first time support for KVM.

More than that, SLES 11 SP1 ships with Linux Integration Services (LIS) for Microsoft Hyper-V, something that no other distribution offers today.
The most wanted version of LIS is the 2.1 which introduces support for 4 vCPUs per virtual machine, and despite it still is in Release Candidate status Novell may be in time to include it as this Service Pack 1 is scheduled for a June 2 release.

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Mark Pileski, former Vice President of Marketing at VMLogix, just left the company to take the same role at I Love Rewards.

Pileski came from PlateSpin, where he was Director of Marketing before the Novell acquisition. He remained at Novell for less than a year and then moved to VMLogix in May 2008.

Apparently, VMLogix didn’t replace Pileski yet as the only executive listed on the Leadership Team page, excluding the CEO and the CTO, is the Worldwide President of Sales.

In September 2008 a new US startup called BlueBear entered the virtualization space, previewing a promising management console, Kodiak, able to support VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.

Unfortunately, in more than two years, the company didn’t manage to deliver at least version 1.0 of Kodiak, and eventually went out of business.

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Microsoft is increasing its marketing effort in promoting its VDI platform since a few months now.

In early April the company published a bunch of Microsoft publishes Deploying Personal Virtual Desktops guides. Now it’s time for the Deploying Remote Desktop Connection Broker with High Availability paper.

The 23-pages step-by-step guide describes how to configure Remote Desktop Connection Broker (RD Connection Broker) in a Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise or Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter failover cluster, as part of a configuration that provides users with access to personal virtual desktops or virtual machines in a virtual desktop pool through RemoteApp and Desktop Connection.

After more than one year since the last version, Veeam releases this week version 4.0 of its performance reporting tool for VMware vSphere: Reporter (formerly Reporter Enterprise).

Reporter 4.0 introduces a number of new features:

• Web-based access interface to the reporting engine
  A new reporting engine, based on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), enables users to access reports via a web-based interface.
  The interface can be customized and integrated with third party tools like Microsoft SharePoint.
• New Change Management reports
  Improved change management reports, including new audit information for changed objects, enable users to see the “who, what, where, when and how” of every change. If a VM suddenly disappears, slows down or stops working altogether, users can quickly identify not only what changed but also who made the change.

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Yesterday Oracle released a new update for its hosted desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox, which is now officially called Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Version 3.2, in public beta since March, introduces a number of remarkable new features:

• Memory ballooning to dynamically increase or decrease the amount of RAM used by a virtual machine 
  (64bit host operating systems only)
• Page Fusion automatically de-duplicates RAM when running similar VMs thereby increasing capacity.
  (Windows guests OSes on 64bit host OSes only)

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virtualization.info already reported about several aspects (features, GA availability and strategy) of the new Citrix client hypervisor launched two weeks ago at Synergy 2010 (see event coverage).

Now, while additional feedbacks about the release candidate are being published by early adopters, and while Citrix is busy answering VMware on the value of client hypervisors for BYOC models, we are able to share additional details about its internals.

During the conference in fact, Ian Pratt (Chairman of Xen.org and Vice President of Advanced Virtualization Products at Citrix) and Tom James (Desktop Virtualization Manager of Business Client Platform Division at Intel) shared interesting details about the XenClient and Synchronizer internals.

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Open Virtual Switch (or Open vSwitch) is the open source answer (supported and sponsored by Citrix) to the Cisco Nexus 1000V and the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch architecture.

Citrix announced the project in June 2009, but the early, public lines of code didn’t appear before August.

It took almost one year to move from version 0.90.4 to version 1.0, which introduces a number of features:

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