Year: 2010

In February, Citrix published the results of an internal benchmark about virtual machines density of a single XenServer 5.5 physical server part of a XenDesktop 4.0 environment.
The measurement was performed using the independent workload simulator Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) and Citrix reported up to 130 concurrent Windows XP virtual desktops served by a a 72GB, dual socket, quad-core Intel Xeon x5570 (codename Nehalem) host.

A few months later VMware published its own result after running the same simulator with a slightly different configuration on a similar hardware (so no identical scenario) hosting ESX in a View 4.01 environment.

The machine with more RAM and same CPU scored 170 concurrent virtual desktops, while the machine with less RAM and less powerful CPU scored 142 concurrent virtual desktops:

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tuCloud is a UK startup that entered the cloud computing market in September 2009.
While the world was waiting for top players like Verizon and IBM to launch their desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) cloud computing offerings, this little company came out of nowhere and started offering Windows Vista and 7 virtual desktops (with VMware/Teradici PCoIP remote protocol, preloaded Windows applications and 100% uptime SLA) before anybody else on the market.

While it’s not exactly clear how tuCloud is able to do so without breaking current Microsoft licensing, the company seems to have made interesting progress in the last six months.

So far in fact tuCloud closed deals with Virtual Computer and Kaviza, two promising startup in the virtual desktop management space.
Thanks to the deal with Virtual Computer, on-premises virtual desktops across multiple continents will be centrally manageable by NxTop on tuCloud servers.
Kaviza VDI-in-a-box instead is used as the primary VDI architecture to keep the offerings costs as low as possible.

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In November 2009 Cisco, EMC and VMware announced a massive alliance dubbed Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition that shook the server market and impacted on the strategy of top players like HP, Oracle, Dell, HDS and others.

Just a few months later, while the three are still busy forming the consulting arm Acadia, Cisco and VMware already intensify their already tight partnership, announcing a new joint channel program.

The initiative of course targets partners of both companies and encourage them to sell the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and the Nexus 1000V with VMware vSphere through a number of benefits like free online training, reduction in the number of VMware certifications required, cheap bundles, discounted physical demo equipment and free online demo equipment, and financial help to purchase hardware.

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Last week IDC published its Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker for Q4 2009, reporting an increase in the amount of servers used for virtualization.

18.2% of all new servers shipped in the last quarter of last year in fact were virtualized, compared to 15.2% in the same period of 2008.
Despite that, the total amount of virtualized servers in 2009 was 5% less than in 2008, with a 14% decline in spending for virtualization hosts.

Virtualization software revenue didn’t go much better:

Worldwide virtualization software revenue for all CPU types declined 10% year over year in 4Q09 to $447 million, thanks primarily to economic pressures and an increasingly competitive marketplace. Virtualization licenses increased 13% year over year and 21% sequentially in the quarter but declined 7% for all of 2009.

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VMware developed a workload simulator to test VDI environments with View and Windows virtual desktops called Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Simulator (RAWC).

The company recently released version 1.1. which introduces Windows 7 workload simulation along with Windows XP, Office 2007, Windows Media Player and other technologies that are common in today’s Windows desktop environments.

Unfortunately the very interesting tool is not available for end-users but just for VMware Partners.

Thanks to Yellow Bricks for the news.

The adoption of cloud computing implies facing and solving a number of remarkable challenges. The security aspect is probably the most discussed ever but another key point that ISVs, cloud providers and customers have to agree on is licensing.

Licensing of guest operating systems and their applications in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms is a critical aspect to consider when evaluating the economics of this technology. And really a few players are actively discussing it.
So it’s with a lot of interest that virtualization.info reports about the activity around Amazon and its Xen-based EC2 IaaS cloud.

Last month Microsoft and Amazon announced a new pilot program that allows their customers to extend their existing Windows Server Enterprise Agreement (EA) licenses, plus Software Assurance (SA), to the instances they have inside EC2.

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Last week Oracle announced the availability of VirtualBox 3.2 beta 1 (build 60785).

The upcoming new version is going to introduce a remarkable number of new features, including:

• Support for memory overcommit (ballooning only, 64bit guest operating systems only)
• Support for CPU hot-plugging (Linux guest OSes and Windows Server 2008 Data Center Edition 64bit) and hot-removing (Linux guest OSes only)
• Support for Large Pages

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After releasing version 2.1 in December 2009, Microsoft is preparing to launch a major new version of its virtual machines patch management tool: Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST).

VMST 3.0, currently in beta, introduces a number of interesting features like:

• Patching of offline virtual machines in a System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) library
• Patching of stopped and saved state virtual machines on a host
• Patching of virtual machine templates
• Support for manual copy of update packages into offline virtual hard disks in a SCVMM library
• Support Hyper-V Live Migration (requires Windows Server 2008 R2 failover clusters)

For most of its back-end server products Microsoft also offers a so called Best Practices Analyzer (BPA): a scan tool that examines the environment and returns the list of configuration mistakes that could be fixed.

There’s one for App-V 4.5, and now there’s one for Hyper-V 2008 R2 too (at least for the version that is included in Windows Server 2008 R2).

The free tool analyzes the configuration of Windows, of Hyper-V (including its virtual networking and virtual storage) and of existing virtual machines:

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At the beginning of March VKernel released an interesting free tool called Capacity View.

The idea is to provide an extremely simple dashboard for Windows that summarizes the virtual infrastructure elements, the resources allocation and the amount of alerts that VMware vCenter is raising at any given moment.

This is not something that VMware administrators can’t have in other ways, but the value is in the way the data is presented, which makes information access faster.

Last week VKernel decided to use the same approach to solve another problem: understanding what’s happening inside the virtual machines.

The free dashboard AppVIEW 1.0 in fact displays information about just five virtual machines, listing the status of applications inside them over a month period:

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