Year: 2010

Oracle has released VirtualBox 3.2.12 at the end of last Month. This release is a maintenance released for which the fixes are specified on the VirtualBox Wiki. This version is the follow-up of version 3.2.10 which was released in October this year.

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a hosted desktop virtualization platform and used to be known under the name Sun VirtualBox, and was renamed after Sun was acquired by Oracle in April 2009.

The software can be downloaded from the Oracle website and is available for Windows hosts in both 32 and 64 bit, for OS X hosts running on Intel, for Linux hosts supporting several distributions and Solaris hosts running on both 32 and 64 bit.

HP released a paper titled: A Comprehensive Framework for Securing Virtualized Data Centers. The paper which contains 8 pages addresses the following question: will moving to virtualization make security for the network easier or more difficult to achieve? And HP answers this question by referencing to their TippingPoint Intrusion prevention security solutions.

Tippingpoint comes from 3Com Corporation which HP acquired in November last year for $2.7 Billion, including the brands H3C, 3Com and Tippingpoint.

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Released as a public beta in August, the VMware benchmark framework VMmark 2.0 is finally available.

VMmark 1.0 was focused on measuring the performance of a single virtualization host, but now that the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) has finally released an industry standard tool for this, VMware is moving forward.

VMmark 2.0 focuses on measuring the performance of a whole virtual data center, including complex operations like manual and automated (or DRS-initated) vMotion, Storage vMotion, as well as virtual machines cloning and deployment.

This time each VMmark tile includes:

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Beginning last week of November, VMware started giving away free licenses of Alive VM to customers purchasing vSphere or other products.

Acquired from Integrien this September, Alive analyzes and correlates data across the monitored IT infrastructure in a pretty unique way: for each tracked resource, it can identify the normal behavior of every metric (which implies a dynamic adjustment of thresholds) and then automatically recognize an anomaly. Impressively enough, Alive can handle upwards of 10 million individual metrics every 5 minutes.

The free perpetual license allows to monitor up to 50 virtual machines and includes one year of Basic Support and Subscription (SnS). To have it, customers must purchase products above within March 1st, 2011.

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Intel’s recent acquisitions of Neocleus and McAfee generated a lot of questions around the new go-to-market strategy that the chipmaker is developing.
Among the others, one was specially importan from a virtualization perspective: is Intel moving to develop its own secure client hypervisor and cancel the partnership with Citrix on XenClient?

Before being acquired, in fact, McAfee started a two-phases plan to release VDI-friendly security solutions first (accomplished) and an out-of-band security solution for XenClient (still in development). At the same time, Neocleus was trying to sell a Xen-based client hypervisor with strong focus on security.

The idea of Intel becoming a virtualization platform vendor may sound odd, but it’s worth to remind that the company recently announced a virtual infrastructure for SMBs called Hybrid Cloud. That solution, originally planned to leverage Microsoft Hyper-V, is now shipping with Citrix XenServer.

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Egenera, the company which provides cloud-computing-in-a-box software called PAN Manager has released two whitepapers detailing a reference architecture for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) running on top of Dell or Fujitsu hardware.

PAN Manager is software which pools server, network, and storage resources providing management capabilities by virtualizing I/O and networking and providing simplified server re-configuration, availability and disaster recovery services. The solution provides what Egenera calls a Processing Area Network (PAN). PAN Manager is Citrix Ready validated and is offered on three platforms: Dell blade servers, Fujitsu Primergy servers and Egeneras own BladeFrame systems.

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Veeam has made available a Release Candidate of version 5.6. of its nworks Smart Plug-In (SPI) for VMware. The nworks SPI for VMware is part of the Veeam ONE solution for VMware management and provides distributed monitoring and management of VMware infrastructures which integrates into HP Operations Manager. General availability is expected within 60 days.

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Microsoft has released a paper titled: VDI TCO Analysis for Office Worker Environments. The paper which is 36 pages contains the outcome of a research on the costs of using VDI, resulting in a conclusion that overall VDI is 11% more expensive per user than well-managed PC environments for office workers. Although hardware and service desk costs are reduced, new software and engineering costs are causing the overall costs to increase.

Office workers provide key support functions for organizations, are moderately paid, and have a high turnover cost. Examples include employees that work in accounting, procurement, marketing, and could include specialists like financial traders and software developers.

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Systar, a company founded in 1984 and which provides performance and capacity management software for virtual infrastructures flew under the virtualization.info radar until now. Now that company is announcIng that it extended support for its OmniVision product to Microsoft Hyper-V and HP Integrity besides the already existing support for SUN/Solaris Logical Domain Servers and IBM Power 7 its clear that the company wants to become a serious player in the virtualization market.

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Paul Wilson posted on the Citrix blog an lengthy article sharing his insight in how to better estimate IOPS for VDI solutions. He states though that the only way to prevent under-sizing in the storage tier is by running a pilot and analyzing its results.

For estimation you would normally take the average IOPS of all users, which you multiply by the number of users in order to determine the storage requirements, but that is not sufficient Wilson states.

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