Year: 2010

As expected, Virtual Bridges recently released version 4.0 of its VDI platform VERDE.

The new product introduces a least a couple of interesting additional capabilities:

• Support for the NoMachine NX remote protocol
• Bi-directional user data synchronization in offline VDI scenarios

On top of that VERDE 4.0 introduces the much expected web management console, while retaining the command line interface that exists since early versions.

VERDE 4.0 is available for on-premises installation or through the RackSpace Cloud, thanks to a recent agreement between the two companies.

At the beginning of April, MokaFive secured its third round of funding, collecting almost $40M in four years.

Just one month after, the company finally releases a new version of its security wrapper for hosted virtualization platforms: Suite 2.8

The MokaFive foundation engine included in Suite, Live PC, leverages a hosted virtualization platform to control and secure a virtual machine.
At the beginning the product used VMware Player. Then MokaFive decided to switch the engine to Parallels Workstation. Then back to VMware Player and VMware Fusion.
Now Suite 2.8 introduces beta support for another virtualization engine: Oracle VirtualBox (not clear what version).

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This week, during the Management Summit (MMS) 2010 conference, Microsoft showed some of the features that customers will see in the next version of System Center product family, due in 2011.

virtualization.info followed the live keynotes (day 1 and day 2) and reported a few notes on Twitter.
One of the most significant things said on stage is that next version of Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will introduce support for the upcoming server-side version of App-V, apparently officially titled Server App-V.
It’s quite safe to assume that Server App-V won’t come out before next year if its management console is due for that timeframe.

Microsoft summarized some of the key information provided during the event on its corporate blog Dynamic Data Center Alliance:

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When Red Hat announced its plan to focus on KVM, and subsequently acquired Qumranet, the startup that maintained the virtualization platform, it was clear that its implementation of Xen couldn’t survive much longer.
In Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 and 5.5 Xen and KVM coexisted, but the former is going to disappear in RHEL 6.0.

The first public beta of the new operating system in fact doesn’t have it anymore, according to ComputerWorld.

Quite interestingly, ComputerWorld also quotes Simon Crosby, the Citrix CTO of Datacenter and Cloud division, who said “Red Hat has not contributed to the Xen code base for several years”, also suggesting that Red Hat is now five years behind the market because of its decision to support KVM.

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The interest around Enomaly and its management console for Xen and KVM, Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) is rising as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing continues to be pushed forward by the large majority of IT vendors.
Earlier this month, the product has been featured in an Intel guide titled Intel Cloud Builder Guide to Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel Xeon Processor-based Platforms.

Enomaly just released two new editions of ECP 3.2, one for service providers and one for high-security environments.

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In June 2008 Veeam acquired nworks, a 14-years old company focused on management plug-ins for major enterprise management platforms.

So far Veeam released a couple of updates for the nworks management packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to manage VMware environments, but the company is now extending its focus to System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Earlier this week in fact Veeam announced its first PRO Pack for SCVMM, to automate virtual machines workload distribution across VMware hosts managed by Virtual Machine Manager.
The pack leverages the SCVMM support for ESX and the Microsoft Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) technology.

The PRO Pack will be part of the nworks management pack 5.5 for SCOM, currently in release candidate and due within the end of this quarter.

Almost five months since version 2.0, the US startup Hyper9 is ready to launch a new upgrade for its flagship product Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO).

VEO 2.5 introduces the following new features:

• Application-aware capacity/performance visualization
  It projects when resources will run out (CPU, memory, shared storage), how many more workloads can be added, shortage forecasts and performance hot spots.
• Storage I/O analysis
  It gives visibility into storage bottlenecks; provides detailed storage metrics such as latency, throughput, IOPS (input/output operations per second) across all storage types including FC, iSCSI and NFS.

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After a few weeks since the first public draft, Microsoft released its new Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide dedicated to the so-called Dynamic Data Center.

As virtualization.info reported in a previous article about the draft, the 46-pages blueprint includes design recommendations for several aspects of the infrastructure, from the virtualization hosts to the network infrastructure:

• Determine the Dynamic Data Center Scope
  This part helps to define the scope and determine the workloads that will be included in the Dynamic Data Center project.
• Design the Virtualization Hosts
  This part helps to design hosts that meet the capacity, performance, placement, and fault-tolerance requirements of the organization.

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Now that Office 2010 has reached the GA status and Microsoft prepares to distribute it, many customers are looking for the new Click-To-Run (CTR) version: a special edition of the productivity suite virtualized by App-V 4.6. 

To simplify the evaluation, and to promote the Desktop Optimization Package (MDOP) which includes App-V, Microsoft released this week a very interesting Proof of Concept Jumpstart Kit.

The massive package (10GB) includes resources and trial versions of multiple products needed to setup and run a lab where to evaluate the migration to Office 2010 in enterprise scenarios:

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In January VMware released the first public draft of its vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide.
Last week the document finally reached the GA status and it’s available for download.

The 110-pages must-read document all aspects of a virtual infrastructure, including:

• The virtualization hosts (both ESX and ESXi)
• Configuration of the virtual machine container (NOT hardening of the
  guest OS or any applications running within)
• Configuration of the virtual networking infrastructure, including the
  management and storage networks as well as the virtual switch (but NOT
  security of the virtual machine’s network)

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