Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
CRN reports that VMware just hired a couple of new sales executives in Australia and New Zealand.
The first one is Duncan Bennet, former Managing Director of ANZ region at Sun.
Bennet, who worked at Sun for almost 10 years, is now Director of Sales at VMware.
The second one is Steve Coad, former Sales Leader of ANZ region at XIV, a storage vendor acquired by IBM in January 2008.
Coad now is the VMware Enterprise Sales Director for Australia.
virtualization.info reports today about another couple of high level departures at VMware: Wendy Perilli, former Director of Cloud Computing Product Marketing and Jeffrey Engelmann, former Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.
Perilli arrived in VMware in 2006, with the acquisition of Akimbi Systems. She has been in charge of the SMB product marketing first, moving to the Cloud Computing business in January 2007.
She left in December to join OpTier, a company focused on business transaction management, as Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing.
Engelmann has been in VMware at least since 2005 (we don’t have a complete curriculum about him).
He joined now EazyBusiness, a provider of cloud-based business applications, as its new Chairman and CEO.
At the beginning of this week the company Satcon, a company focused on clean energy, announced that Donald Peck joined the company as its new CFO.
Peck was Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer at Egenera, where he worked for three years.
Peck has been replaced by Kevin Kerrigan, who is at Egenera since February 2008, as Vice President of Finance.
One hour before starting a joint webcast with Citrix about its new virtualization strategy for desktops, Microsoft briefly announces a number of new initiatives, upcoming technologies and licensing changes.
About hosted desktop virtualization:
The new version is available now as a hotfix.
About bare-metal server virtualization:
In perfect sync with the release of Citrix XenApp 6.0, VMware announces ThinApp 4.5, the application virtualization platform that acquired from Thinstall in January 2008.
After the acquisition VMware released only one major update for ThinApp: version 4.0, in July 2008.
Version 4.5 (238809) released today introduces a number of new features that the former CEO of Thinstall, Jonathan Clark, discusses in details on the corporate blog. The list includes:
The popular security firm Core Security yesterday disclosed a serious security vulnerability found in all Microsoft hosted virtualization products, including Virtual Server 2005, Virtual PC 2007 (with and without SP1) and Windows 7 Virtual PC.
While Core Security is using the “hypervisor” terminology, this bug doesn’t affect any bare-metal virtualization platform Microsoft has, including Hyper-V and Hyper-V R2.
The vulnerability affects the virtual machine monitor (VMM) memory management.
It makes memory pages mapped above the 2GB available with read or read/write access to user-space programs running in a Guest operating system. By leveraging this vulnerability it is possible to bypass security mechanisms of the operating system such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Safe Structured Error Handling (SafeSEH) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) designed to prevent exploitation of security bugs in applications running on Windows operation systems.
Earlier this week, CA announced its support for Oracle/Sun Solaris Containers (aka Zones) OS virtualization technology in a number of products:
CA calls then its virtualization management platform but the technologies above primarily support physical servers and over time added support for VMware ESX and now Solaris Containers.
Earlier this week, Citrix published an interesting article about average bandwidth consumption for different XenDesktop 4.0 remote sessions.
While the purpose of that post was to promote its Branch Repeater technology, which may or may not be interesting for you, the provided graph is valuable as a reference for VDI planning:
Yesterday Intel launched its new quad-core/hexa-core Xeon 5600 CPU series (codename Westmere).
The always amazing AnandTech already published an extensive review, including some very interesting benchmarks, measured on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V with VMmark and vApus Mark I frameworks.
First of all, some of the new processors have six cores,: X5650, X5660, X5670 and X5680, as well as the L5638, L5640 and the E5645. Additionally, the new silicon supports up to 288GB DDR3 RAM @ 1066Mhz.
This obviously helps to increase the VMs / core density in virtualization hosts, assuming there are no additional bottlenecks.
More importantly, Westmere CPUs decrease latency of VMs and the hypervisor transitions (VMexit) by 12% compared to Xeon 5500 (codename Nehalem) CPUs, and 50% compared to Xeon 5400 (codename Penryn) CPUs:
April 21, 2010 I’ll be at the Catalyst 2010 conference in Prague, hosted by Burton Group (recently acquired by Gartner), presenting a lecture titled Securing the Internal Cloud.
2010 is considered the year of cloud computing. Vendors like VMware, Citrix, Red Hat and Microsoft are releasing new solutions that turn virtualization platforms into Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
There are new parts of the equation: side-by-side with the hypervisor and the management layer, there’s automation, billing, self-service provisioning, service catalogs, application SLAs, multi-tenancy and more.
Across the globe, customers are looking at this offering and evaluating the conversion of their data centers in private clouds, and security is one of the first aspects that should be assessed.
How do the new elements of a private cloud impact security?
In this session, we’ll explore the differences between a virtual infrastructure and a private cloud, trying to figure out if and how they extend the data center attack surface, and what can be done to handle any new threat that IaaS architectures introduces.