Year: 2010

Citrix launches today the public beta of XenServer 5.6, which is released as open source since February, and Essentials for XenServer 5.6.

The list of new features includes:

• Dynamic Memory Control (DMC)
  This feature can increase the number of VMs per host by permitting the memory utilization of existing VMs to be compressed so that additional VMs can boot on the host. 
• Automated Workload Balancing & Power Management
  Workload balancing (WLB) offers the ability to reduce power consumption by consolidating workloads on the smallest number of hosts and powering off unused hosts.
  Power Management features include support for wake-on-LAN and vendor-specific implementations from HP, Dell, and others. WLB configuration now includes the option to exclude specific hosts from WLB algorithms.

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For a long time Microsoft decided to not enter the VDI market, leaving the competition with VMware to its trusted partner Citrix.
Over time, the strategy slightly changed: in January 2008 the company acquired the startup Calista, and in July 2009 it released its first connection broker as part of Windows Server 2008 R2.

Considering its position in the industry, virtualization.info speculated that Microsoft is just waiting for the right moment to enter the VDI space in a serious way.

Now several parts reports that this week Microsoft will make its move, by lowering the VDI cost with a more friendly license and by making VDI more powerful, with the merge of Calista technologies in the RDP code.

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VMware just closed an OEM agreement with Likewise to embed its technology in future versions of vSphere.

Likewise is a US company that offers several products for enterprise authentication. The most popular is simply called Open and it’s available free of charge as open source (GPL and LGPL licenses).
Likewise Open uses Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) and Name Service Switch (NSS) to authenticate non-Windows machines to Windows domains.
It supports Kerberos. NTLM and SPNEGO authentication. It also offers single sign-on for SSH services.

This partnership will allow Microsoft Active Directory users to seamlessly log-in on ESX/ESXi hosts.

virtualization.info received unconfirmed tips that this feature may appear within vSphere 4.1, currently in private beta.

Yesterday Gartner announced a new report about security in virtual infrastructures, publishing a list of six most common and well-known risks:

• Information Security Isn’t Initially Involved in the Virtualization Projects
• A Compromise of the Virtualization Layer Could Result in the Compromise of All Hosted Workloads
• The Lack of Visibility and Controls on Internal Virtual Networks Created for VM-to-VM Communications Blinds Existing Security Policy Enforcement Mechanisms
• Workloads of Different Trust Levels Are Consolidated Onto a Single Physical Server Without Sufficient Separation
• Adequate Controls on Administrative Access to the Hypervisor/VMM Layer and to Administrative Tools Are Lacking
• There Is a Potential Loss of Separation of Duties for Network and Security Controls

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In mid-February virtualization.info missed the release of View 4.0.1 (build 233023).

The maintenance version introduces support for VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5, but it mostly introduces new support for virtual printing.

VMware has an ongoing OEM agreement with ThinPrint which allows it to include its .print driver inside several products. One of them is View.

So far .print has been supported in View environments only when thin clients use RDP protocol. But with View 4.0.1 the ThinPrint technology support has been extended to thin devices that use PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol.

Citrix recently released a new open source tool to simplify virtual machines migration from the open source Xen hypervisor to its open source implementation XenServer and the upcoming Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

The virtual to virtual (V2V) migration utility is written in Python and can either perform an offline conversion of a Xen VM into that XVA format that XenServer and XCP understand, or live streaming the VM to the two target platforms.

The tool supports both para-virtualized and hardware-virtualization-assisted (HVM) virtual machines but it still is in its early stage and Citrix warns about issues and bugs.

Yesterday VMware announced that hired the founder and lead developer of Redis: Salvatore Sanfilippo.

Redis is an open source, journaled key-value data store.
By some degrees it can be considered a database server what can operate in two modes: it can keep its entire dataset in RAM and save it on disc asynchronously from time to time, or it can save every change in the dataset as it happens, using an append file.  

Redis is not yet fault tolerant. It should get clustering capabilities after version 2.0 is released.
It’s written in ANSI C and supported in a number of programming languages, including Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, C# and Java.

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Today IBM launches version 2 of a new cloud computing platform for software development and testing.
The offering seems similar to the virtual lab automation facility similar to the one that the US startup Skytap offers since April 2008.

CNET reports that this infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud is powered by the new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH), which is based on KVM.
If confirmed this would be the biggest and most important case study for the new Red Hat virtualization platform at today.

IBM published a short video to show how it works:

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Spiceworks is a private US-based company founded in 2006 that offers a completely free system management platform for hardware/software/licenses inventory, change management, helpdesk, OS remote control and network mapping.
The platform is aimed at the SMB market (over 1,000 monitored it starts to be slow) and is supported by advertising that is displayed inside the console.

Over the last four years the company made notable progress, extending its discovery capabilities to Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac OS X physical machines as well as network devices, supporting mission critical applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Active Directory.

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Some of our readers may be familiar with the virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab facility.
Operated by our trusted partner Kybernetika, Rent-A-Lab (RAL) is a cutting-edge data center located in Zurich, equipped with some of the latest and greatest servers, storage and network gears a virtualization professional may ever desire.

RAL is available for rent to worldwide customers. virtualization.info and Kybernetika offer unrestricted, on-demand (24/7) access to its bare metal since January 2007.
Customers can use it to install complex, multi-tier virtual infrastructures (our hardware is supported by every player in the market, including Citrix, Microsoft and of course VMware) and do whatever they want with them: training classes (the most common scenario), product evaluations, benchmarks, etc.

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