Year: 2011

Microsoft has released Windows Thin PC (WinTPC), a new Windows 7 version tailored for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) access, making it Generally Available (GA) at July 1st this year for customers who use Microsoft Software Assurance (SA).

Windows Thin PC, which was announced in January this year is a smaller foodprint, locked down version of Windows 7, which enables customers to install this windows version on existing PCs repurposing them as thin clients which can be used to access Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments. PCs with WinTPC installed do not require a Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license, in contradiction to regular clients who want to access a VDI environment. WinTPC is comparable with Windows XP Fundamentals, which was revealed in 2005.

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Ericom, the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) provider has launched a beta version of a HTML 5 Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Client. The client works with HTML 5 natively and doesn’t require any add-in like Java, Flash, Silverlight ActiveX. The client is called AccessNow and runs on Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer (with the Chrome Frame plug-in), Firefox and other browsers with HTML 5 and WebSockets support.

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VMware announced last week the beta phase for its virtual machine conversion tool VMware vCenter Converter Standalone. The previous stable version of vCenter Converter was released in 2009.

This tool provides a scalable solution to convert virtual (V2V) and physical (P2V) machines to VMware virtual machines. It is also possible to share virtual machines between products such as VMware Server, Player, Fusion and Workstation, in addition to virtual machines running on ESXi instances ( both managed and non managed by vCenter Server).

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VMware announced the availability of a maintenance release for its Mac desktop virtualization solution VMware Fusion, reaching version 3.1.3.

This minor release adds support for Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 (both 32 and 64bit) and Ubuntu Linux 10.10 and 11.04 (both 32 and 64bit).

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The Register is reporting that Microsoft is working on supporting the Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions as supported guest Operating Systems within Hyper-V. The information comes from an interview held with Sandy Gupta, General Manager for marketing strategy for the Open Solutions Group within Microsoft. Last month Microsoft already announced support for CentOS on top of the already supported Linux distributions SuSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Although several community efforts are being made to support other Linux distributions within Hyper-V, the fact that this eventually isn’t supported by Microsoft is what keeping companies to actually implement the solution. By supporting more and more Linux distributions, Microsoft is clearly challenging other companies by providing a solution for hosting Linux VM’s both on-premise on its Hyper-V virtualization solution, as off-premise on its Azure cloud platform.

Last week, the release candidate of Linux 3.0 was released, after being approved by Linus Torvalds. The final release is expected in seven to nine weeks. From a virtualization point of view, the interesting news is that this release now contains full Xen guest and management domain support the Xen hypervisor in the mainline kernel, which means that from now on, each Linux kernel from 2.6.39 and onwards can serve as guest or host in the case of KVM, which was already included or as Domain 0(host) or Domain U(guest) in the case of Xen.

Until now, there was a substantial Linux kernel patch which had to be applied in order to transform a Linux OS into a Xen host, the paravirtualized drivers for running Linux as a Xen host, were already part of the codebase. Xen itself uses Linux as its Management OS.

Update: We were contacted by Todd Deshane, who corrected a couple of things, this mainly has to do with the fact that Xen is a so called Type-1 hypervisor, and therefore it can’t be included in Linux because it runs under the OS, where KVM is a Type-2 hypervisor which runs in the OS.

AppZero, the company which provides application virtualization solutions, has announced that Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Data Center and Cloud Division at Citrix has been elected to its board of directors.

This news follows the recent hires of Ross Norrie as VP Engineering and Valerie O’Connel as VP Business Development & Marketing in January this year. In October last year AppZero hired Bill Cullen as its CTO, quite recently after Mark Striling and Nigel Stokes invested in the company.

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Unidesk has released version 1.3.1 of its Cachepoint solution. This version is the follow up of version 1.2,which was released in December last year. CachePoint decouples the operating system from the applications, and the applications from the user data and personalization without introducing an additional abstraction layer and file system/registry redirection like application virtualization solutions do.

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Hans Vredevoort, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional with the expertise Clustering wrote an article about fragmentation of a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV).

Cluster Shared Volumes is an enhancement, implemented as a file system filter driver introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 which allows multiple virtual hard disk (VHD) images to be mounted on a single logical volume, allowing migration of virtual machines from one physical host server to another with minimal downtime, called Live Migration within Hyper-V environments.

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Atlantis Computing virtualization consultant Jim Moyle released a white paper (28 pages) on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Input/Output operations per second (IOPS) for Windows 7 deployments.

Windows 7 IOPS for VDI is a very important topic – as Moyle points out – since:

many IT organizations planning a Windows 7 migration with VDI are unaware that the combination of Windows 7 and Anti-virus more than doubles the amount of memory and IOPS required per desktop compared to Windows XP

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