Year: 2010

Five months after the release of Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and Fusion 3.0, VMware is ready to launch the public beta program for .1 version of its desktop virtualization platforms.

New features included in this first beta build (240242) of Workstation 7.1 / Player 3.1 and ACE 2.7 are:

• OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests
• 8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size
• OVF 1.0 support
• Fedora 12 guest OS support
• Direct Launch (integration between guest and host OSes start menu)
• Guest OS autologon (for Windows guests only)

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Somewhere in Q4 2009 VMware lost a significant amount of people in PR and AR departments.

The first one is Melinda Marks, former Senior PR Manager, who left the company in October 2009, after 6 years in VMware.

Marks was one of the key interfaces with the press world and one of the early developers of the VMware’s Global Customer Reference program.
She now has a role as Director of Communications at Qualys, the security vendor that also hired Robert Dell’Immagine, former Director of Community Program at VMware.

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Microsoft has a free hypervisor: Hyper-V.
Citrix too (and it’s open source now): XenServer.

Microsoft has a virtualization management console: System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
Citrix too: Essentials for XenServer.

Microsoft has a VDI connection broker:  Remote Desktop Connection Broker.
Citrix too: Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC, part of XenDesktop 4).

Microsoft has an application and streaming virtualization platform: App-V (acquired by Softricity in 2006).
Citrix too: Application Isolation Environment (AIE, part of XenApp 6).

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Dave Convery, VMware vExpert and Virtualization Architect at Anexinet, published a short but very interesting report on current limitations of vShield Zones, the firewall that VMware acquired from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008 and that offers for free as part of vSphere 4.0 Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

He specifically mentions three shortcomings related to:

• Networking
  …there is an unprotected Port Group (ORIGINAL Network). This needs to be added to the vSwitch AFTER the vShield Agent is installed. If the ORIGINAL Network is already a part of the vSwitch, it will need to be removed BEFORE installing the vShield Agent. In order to avoid an outage, you will need to disable DRS and manually vMotion all VMs off of the ESX/ESXi host before installing the vShield Agent and modifying the port groups.

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VMware’s activity on competition is intensifying in this period of the year: after last month’s comments on Citrix HDX performance and Essentials for Hyper-V sales volume, as well as the cost of managing Hyper-V, they focuses on Microsoft hypervisor’s stability.

Eric Gray, Senior Engineer on the VMware Competitive Team, writes on the topic on its personal blog vCritical, suggesting that ESX has a critical advantage over Hyper-V (and Xen and KVM) because Microsoft relies on 3rd party general-purpose drivers while VMware offers hardened, stress-tested drivers — ready for your toughest enterprise workloads.

Gray mentions a presentation performed by the Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, who confirmed that Windows crashes largely depend (70%) by 3rd party driver code (while Microsoft code is responsible only 5% of times).

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BrianMadden.com recently published an extensive review of the VDI platform based on KVM that Virtual Bridges offers since December 2009: VERDE 3.0.

Some key points of the review:

• Almost 100% command line oriented (version 4.0, expected for April, will introduce a server management GUI).
• Supported protocols are RDP and Virtual Bridges implementation of RFB (used by VNC).
  VERDE’s RFB is pretty fast, Virtual Bridges claims it is superior to RDP 5.
  The open source version of Red Hat SPICE protocol is unusable, will be adopted in future if possible.

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Microsoft recently launched a new, free TechNet Virtual Lab where customers can install and try Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 with Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2.

Users will work through the steps to simulate deploying multiple virtual desktops, and will first capture a reference image using the Citrix Provisioning Server for Desktops. Next, the user will verify that the computer can be booted from a diskless client computer. The user will create multiple virtual machines using the reference computer as a template. Finally, the user will use the Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to create a group of virtual desktops and deploy them to end devices. At the end of this lab, the user will have worked through all the steps required to implement Citrix XenDesktop using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.

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Secure Network is an Italian consulting firm focuses on network and application security assessment.
One of its partners, Claudio Criscione, is a long time columnist here at virtualization.info.

Secure Network is working on the first security assessment toolkit for virtual infrastructures, VASTO, and Criscione announced today the public beta at the Troopers conference.

VASTO comes as a set of components for Metasploit, one of the most popular frameworks for penetration testing in the security industry.
The framework consists of tools, libraries, modules, and user interfaces. The basic function of the framework is a module launcher, allowing the user to configure an exploit module and launch it at a target system. If the exploit succeeds, the payload is executed on the target and the user is provided with a shell to interact with the payload. Hundreds of exploits and dozens of payload options are available.

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In December 2009 Microsoft acquired the run-book automation firm Opalis Software.
At that time the company anticipated that Opalis technology would be integrated in the System Center product family and that it would become the automation layer for Hyper-V and Azure virtualization.

Today Microsoft offers additional details about when the integration with happen: integrations packs for UNIX, Red Hat RHEL and Novell SLES Linux will be released in Q2 2010, while integration packs for Service Manager 2010, Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2, Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 will appear in Q3 2010.

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Now that VMware owns a technology that is far away from its primary business, the Spring Java framework and a couple of application servers, one of its primary challenges is building awareness among its customers.

To do so, the company is offering complimentary and perpetual licenses (2 CPUs) of its Tomcat application server called tc Server to any customer buying other VMware products, including vSphere and View.

VMware is not offering the existing editions of tc Server but a new one that integrates with the Spring framework and supports Spring applications.

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