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Virtual Bridges has made generally available version 5 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform VERDE. This version is the follow up of version 4.2 which was released in August this year.
VERDE provides VDI connection brokers for KVM, and an offline VDI solution called Live Environment Access Format (LEAF), which is actually a lightweight Linux distribution featuring KVM.
New features in this version:
Last week Oracle released the first rebranded version of Solaris since the Sun acquisition: Solaris Express 11.
The OS has a few, but interesting new features for its embedded OS virtualization platform, Solaris Zones (formerly Solaris Containers):
Quest has made generally available version 6.5. of its monitoring tool for virtual infrastructures vFoglight. As reported by virtualization.info in March this year, this version now supports both Hyper-V and ESX. Support for XenServer is still expected as well.
This release of vFoglight will be part of the virtual infrastructure monitoring solutions suite together with vFoglight Storage 1.0, which was released in September and vFoglight Quickview, a free version of vFoglight announced in June this year which can manage a single vCenter server.
VKernel has hired Tom O’Connell as Exective Vice President of Customer Operations. O’Connel comes from Vertica Systems, a company which develops a database management system for data warehousing and anlytics. He worked there for three and a half years and he was responsible for worldwide sales.
Before that O’Connel was President and member of the Board of Directors of XOsoft for four years. XOsoft provided disaster recovery and application-based high availability solutions and was acquired by CA Technologies in July 2006. Before that O’Connel held several positions at companies like: Kada Systems, Exchange Applications, Sybase and Oracle.
Last week virtualization.info reported that Opalis 3.6 was expected for November 25, apparently Microsoft already announced the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of the product which will serve as the automation layer for Hyper-V virtualization and Azure cloud computing.
Opalis is Run Book Automation (RBA) software, which can be used to define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows. The workflows are defined in the Opalis workflow designer, and so called Integration Packs are provided to interact with Microsoft and non-Microsoft products, which run on so called Action Servers. Microsoft acquired the product from Opalis Software in December last year and eventually integrate the software with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 for which more and more details are starting to emerge as well.
In September this year, Oracle announced the release of Oracle VM Server for SPARC version 2.0.The version initially supported only the T3 processor range, but now Oracle announced that also the T2 processors are supported as well.
The product used to be known as Sun Logical Domains (LDoms), but was rebranded after Sun merged into Oracle. The product allows creation of up to 128 virtual machines per physical server, and each can boot a restricted selection of guest operating systems, including Solaris 10 and 11, OpenSolaris , Ubuntu Linux Server Edition and OpenBSD.
Thomas Bittman, analyst at Gartner published an article in CIO UK Magazine covering six misconceptions about server virtualization.
He states that there will be more virtual machines deployed on servers during 2011 than in 2001 through 2009 combined and that by next year, the penetration of server virtualization in midsize companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees will exceed that of the Global 500.
Earlier this week, virtualization.info quoted an article published by Marcel van den Berg about the some of the new capabilities that System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 will provide. Microsoft publicly discussed them during its TechEd Europe 2010 conference a few weeks ago.
Now van den Berg has published a valuable follow-up post, focusing on what is new in SCVMM 2012 about storage and networking. Here’s a few key points:
Citrix has made available a new tool which supports moving xend based Virtual Machines to Citrix XenServer and the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP). The tool is written in Python and can work either through using command line options, or by parsing a Xen guest configuration file. The tool is capable of outputting to an xva file, or when connected to a remote XenServer/XCP host stream the VM directly. It supports both paravirtualized and Hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) based VMs.
The Xen Cloud Platform which was announced in August last year is a set of tools, of course distributed as open source, which extends the capability of the hypervisor as a cloud computing platform. It is supported by all the members of the Xen.org advisory board, including Citrix, HP, Intel, Novell and Oracle and now at version 0.5 and was released in July this year, to be available as a stable release suitable for long-term use.
In September this year, PHD Virtual released the first version of its Backup for Citrix XenServer product. Apparently they decided later to release this first version as version 5.0. Yesterday PHD Virtual announced the start of the beta for PHD Virtual Backup 5.1 for Citrix XenServer. PHD Virtual expects to make the product generally available this month as well.
The product is delivered as a virtual appliance, and integrates directly into XenCenter offering a "single pane of glass". It can backup running and powered down VMs and VM Templates, without compromising hypervisor performance or impact Dom0.