Year: 2010

In mid March Microsoft officially announced the upcoming introduction of Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V, a feature for memory overcommit that will arrive as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

Early information about how Dynamic Memory works were published a couple of weeks ago by a company evangelist but promptly removed.

Microsoft is receiving heavy criticism from VMware supporters about Dynamic Memory after downplaying the value of VMware overcommit techniques for years. So it is trying to be as careful and detailed as possible in explaining its approach to memory management in virtualization.

To do so Jeff Woolsey, Lead Program Manager, Windows Virtualization, is publishing on the corporate blog a series of very long posts that aims at explaining the different approach between Microsoft and VMware to memory overcommit.
The most relevant piece to date is the one appeared yesterday, where he talks about page sharing, one of the techniques used by VMware.

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Do you remember Joanna Rutkowska, the security researcher behind the controversial BluePill attack against hypervisors?

The company she founded and currently controls, Invisible Things Lab, just launched an open source project dubbed Qubes.

Pitched as a new operating system, Qubes really is a client hypervisor based on Xen, which isolates multiple environment in dedicated Linux-based virtual machines.

The architecture has some interesting characteristics. For example the networking subsystem has been moved from the dom0 to a a dedicated, unprivileged VM that leverages the most modern I/O virtualization techniques (AMD IOMMU and Intel VT-d). The same thing is planned for the storage subsystem in a future release.

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When Cisco announced the first 3rd party virtual switch for VMware ESX, it raised a lot of interest. Not just because the product was (and still is) an interesting attempt to address the limitations of native dvSwitch shipped with vSphere, but also because it was the first time that Cisco didn’t sell a physical box. 

Almost one year after the general availability of Nexus 1000V, the company seems to have slightly changed its mind about being all virtual.

At the beginning of this week in fact Cisco introduced a new 1U physical appliance dubbed Nexus 1010V Virtual Services Appliance. Its purpose is to host up to four Nexus 1000V Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) outside the VMware vSphere environment, which means that a single device can handle up to 256 ESX hosts.

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Microsoft just published a series of four technical documents called Deploying Personal Virtual Desktops, which provides step-by-step guidance to install and configure a VDI environment based on Hyper-V, the Remote Desktop (RD) Connection Broker, the Session Host server the Web Access server, and Windows 7 virtual machines:

• Deploying Virtual Desktop Pools by Using Remote Desktop Web Access Step-by-Step Guide
• Deploying Personal Virtual Desktops by Using RemoteApp and Desktop Connection Step-by-Step Guide
• Deploying Virtual Desktop Pools by Using RemoteApp and Desktop Connection Step-by-Step Guide

Thanks to Bink.nu for the news.

Yesterday Vizioncore announced that Evelyne Bourderioux joined the company as new Sales Director for Southern Europe.

Bourderioux comes from NEC Computers where she was the EMEA Sales Director, and from VMware, where she has been in charge of France Strategic and Named Accounts for over four years.

The US startup Kaviza announced yesterday a “strategic investment” by Citrix. The two companies didn’t disclose the sum or the terms of the deal (round of funding, technology partnership, etc.).

Kaviza offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require a shared storage and dedicated, load balanced connection brokers.
The customer just has to deploy the vendor’s virtual appliance on its hypervisor of choice and he’s ready to go.

This VDI-in-a-box appliance uses the virtualization host local storage (and any other DAS device attached) to store the virtual desktop golden images and their linked clones. 
When deployed in multiple instances, it works as a cluster, replicating/synchronizing its configuration, distributing the virtual desktops across all the available virtualization hosts, and brokering the incoming connections thanks to a patent pending grid architecture. 
Last but not least, it includes a management console for virtual desktop administration: kMGR.

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This week Microsoft finally released Service Pack 1 for its Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V, formerly Kidaro Workspaces) platform, introducing support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

This Service Pack comes exactly one year after the release of MED-V 1.0 and unbelievably, the product is still featuring the ancient Virtual PC 2007 SP1. 
Virtual PC 2007 was released in February 2007, and its only service pack was out in May 2008.
Considering the amount of time needed to release MED-V 1.0 since the Kidaro acquisition (13 months), and the time needed to release this first service pack (additional 12 months), Microsoft could at least replace the virtualization platform with the “new” Windows Virtual PC which is included in Windows 7.

The effort that Microsoft has put in this product still seems less than acceptable and six months ago there already were enough elements to wonder if the company is really committed to enterprise desktop virtualization.

MED-V 1.0 SP1 is now available as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2010 refresh.

This Monday Leostream released version 6.4 of its VDI connection broker.

The new build introduces a number of interesting features:

• a new skinnable web interface (for both the client and the administration consoles)
• resource assignment by policies and authentication
• threshold metrics tracking by SNMP
• support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Previous version of the Connection Broker was released in early February. It seems that Leostream is back with a rapid development lifecycle like in summer 2009.

A few virtualization.info readers may remember that Parallels (formerly SWsoft) has its roots in open source.
Its OS virtualization platform Containers (formerly Virtuozzo) in fact has an open source counterpart called OpenVZ (formerly Open Virtuozzo), which is continuously developed since 2005 thanks to the Parallels sponsorship and support.

OpenVZ requires a tight integration with the Linux to work, so Parallels happens to be one of the top 10 kernel contributor in the world (#9 actually, just behind well-know leaders like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, Intel and Oracle).
Yesterday the company further increased its involvement with the open source community by joining The Linux Foundation.

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MokaFive (formerly moka5) is a US startup that launched in May 2006, targeting the consumer market with a wrapper for hosted virtualization platforms (VMware Player first, Parallels Workstation then) called LivePC.

The idea was to leverage hardware virtualization for mobile productivity by adding interesting features like virtual machines streaming, live updating and sharing through a content catalog.
The consumer market didn’t really embraced the concept and after two years the company decided to shift its focus to the corporate market with additional features around networking and security, like the ones that VMware ACE, Kidaro Workspaces and Sentillion vThere (both acquired by Microsoft) were offering since a while.

In the middle of this transformation the company lost two brand names (SkyBlue Technologies first, moka5 then), two CEOs (including the founder Monica Lam), one Vice President of Marketing, and one Vice President of Engineering.

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