Year: 2010

Just in case you missed it, XenServer is now open source.
It’s confirmed by the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management division Simon Crosby, who answered a question about this topic on virtualization.info.

Citrix XenServer is a commercial implementation of the Xen open source hypervisor, as much as Oracle VM Server and Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Xen.
XenSource, the company which sponsored the Xen project in its early days and that developed XenServer, has been acquired by Citrix in August 2007 for $500M.

Citrix first decided to give away XenServer for free (February 2009) and then announced its plan to release it as open source (October 2009).

The source code is now part of the XenServer 5.5 Update 2 download package that is available online.
To see the source code ISOs you have to log on:

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As soon as it received the green light to complete the Sun acquisition, Oracle moved on and acquired AmberPoint.

AmberPoint is a US company that offers application management and application performance measurement solutions.
It provides a real-time view into performance and runtime behavior of distributed applications, and raises alerts when SLA limits are approaching or when transactions fail to complete, or when certain business parameters are violated.

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In July 2008, the VMware Board of Directors voted to remove the founder Diane Greene as CEO of the company. Greene was offered another position that she declined, leaving the company that she created and led through one of the most impressive IPO in the IT history.

Two months after her departure, his husband Mendel Rosenblum, left too.

Rosenblum co-founded VMware and was the Chief Scientist declining the company vision.

The board immediately replaced her with Paul Maritz, a long-time Microsoft executive that joined the EMC ecosystem after his startup Pi was acquired in February 2008.

Under the Maritz leadership VMware took an unexpected direction, extending beyond virtualization and cloud computing, to the realm of development frameworks and software-as-a-service applications.

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At the end of January Microsoft silently updated its Linux Integrated Components package to version 2.0, introducing the long awaited support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) guest operating systems in Hyper-V.

Microsoft announced future support for Red Hat operating systems in July 2009, since the open source vendor joined the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).
Customers had to wait no less than seven months to finally have a version of Hyper-V Linux Integrated Components that supports RHEL 5 (including 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 versions, both 32 and 64bit).

Like for Novell SUSE Linux, Microsoft doesn’t include in the package the optimized drivers for mouse. To have those customers need to rely on Citrix, which is offering them as open source through the Project Satori.
On top of that Linux Integrated Components still only supports Linux virtual machines with a single virtual CPU.

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Leostream announces today a new minor version for its Connection Broker that arrives over five months after the 6.2 release.

In this update the company introduces a number of new features:

• support for the open source version of Xen (the one released by Xen.org)
• support for Sun Secure Global Desktop Software
• support for Ericom Blaze (which comes from the technology partnership signed in November 2009)
• a web client to access virtual desktops over HTTP/S connections
• control over the remote desktop protocol used by remote clients when multiple protocols are available
• a more granular set of roles and permissions that separate end users and administrators rights

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A couple of weeks ago Citrix published a new architecture blueprint for its VDI platform XenDesktop.

The 38-pages document provides guidance to design scalable virtual desktop infrastructures based on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005, Citrix Provisioning Server 5.1 and of course XenDesktop 4.0 (which includes the hypervisor and XenApp 5).

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Last month VMware lost Ganesh Mahabala, its Regional Director for India and SAARC region, CRN reports.

Mahabala has worked in VMware for almost three years and now has joined the system integrator Valuepoint Systems.

This is the third major change in the Indian executive team that virtualization.info reports.
In July 2009 VMware hired T. Srinivasan as its new Managing Director and in October 2009 Shrimathi Ambastha as its Director of Technology.

At the beginning of January Microsoft launched its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing offering: Windows Azure.
Despite the company’s Chief Architect Ray Ozzie said that Azure will be able to compete with Amazon EC2 and similar Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, this component is not yet accessible, or at least we couldn’t find it, and Microsoft didn’t even officially confirm it exists.

A couple of months ago virtualization.info suggested that the IaaS component of Azure may appear in March, because Microsoft is going to release a cloud toolkit that month. 
It seems that Azure will indeed start hosting virtual machines in March 2010 according to TechTarget:

…Microsoft has announced plans to add support for Remote Desktops and virtual machines (VMs) to Windows Azure, and the company also says that prices for Azure, now a baseline $0.12 per hour, will be subject to change every so often.

Prashant Ketkar, marketing director for Azure, said that the service would be adding Remote Desktop capabilities as soon as possible, as well as the ability to load and run virtual machine images directly on the platform. Ketkar did not give a date for the new features, but said they were the two most requested items…

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At the end of January VMware revealed that is working to increase its virtual machines density up to 16 VMs per core, mostly for VDI environments. That is twice the average amount of VMs that customers seems able to accommodate today, and VMware suggested that this record depends on new Intel Xeon 5500 (codename Nehalem) CPUs.

Anyway, that number came out during an interview, with no additional details, so there’s a lot of analysis to do before getting excited.
Nonetheless, the claim generated much interest (and skepticism), at the point that Citrix decided to answer.

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In September 2009 VMware announced an OEM agreement with RTO Software to offer its Virtual Profiles product as part of View.
Virtual Profiles is a mandatory piece to manage the so-called persona (the user data and customization of the applications and the system environment) in a virtual desktop infrastructure.

The most interesting part of this deal is that RTO Software has the same agreement with Symantec, which competes in the VDI space with VMware.

Now Brian Madden is reporting that Symantec has suddenly stopped selling Virtual Profiles (called Workspace Profiles in their portfolio) and that every reference to the product disappeared from the corporate website.

Madden suggests that this is a sign that VMware acquired RTO Software. The standard answer he received from the company PR department is that the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.
Of course not.