Year: 2011

In April last year, virtualization.info reported that Citrix made a strategic investment in Kaviza, for an undisclosed sum and no details about the terms of the deal. Citrix is now taking this to the next level, because during the annual Citrix Synergy conference, Citrix announced that it has acquired Kaviza known for its connection broker software VDI-in-a-Box.

Kaviza offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers, making it a less complex solution to implement compared to Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View. Customers just have to deploy the Kaviza virtual appliance on their hypervisor of choice and they are ready to go.

Both companies also posted a FAQ for its customers.

Beginning this month, virtualization.info reported that VMware removed the download links to VMware ESX, moving them to another page. With this VMware clearly stated that organizations should move to ESXi, it’s small footprint hypervisor. VMware vSphere 4.1 is the last release to support both het ESX and ESXi hypervisor.

To further support this VMware has released the VMware ESXi 4.1 Operations Guide, the paper which contains 22 pages describes the architecture of VMware ESXi and then explains how various management tasks are performed in it, and the VMware 4.1 ESXi Migration Guide, containing 11 pages providing guidance on how to make the transition to ESXi, along with several recommendations to help ensure a timely and seamless migration. VMware also makes available Migration Checklists and a Host Configuration Worksheet.

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VMware labs has released a technical preview, a so called “fling” of a new tool called InventorySnapshot. Inventory Snapshot alows a user to take a snapshot of a given vCenter inventory configuration, and apply that snapshot to another environment.

The inventory includes the Datacenter folders, datacenters, clusters, resource pools, vApps, hierarchy, roles and permissions, configuration settings, and custom fields. The tool needs Java and PowerCLI in order to work.

Thanks to Eric Sloof for providing the news.

At the annual Microsoft Management Summit, in March this year Microsoft announced that Opalis, which Microsoft acquired in December 2009, would be renamed to System Center Orchestrator.

System Center Orchestrator (SCO) 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 SCO workflow designer, and so called Integration Packs are provided to interact with Microsoft and non-Microsoft products, which run on so called Action Servers.

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Major update released for Trilead VM Explorer, which reaches version 3.5. This is the new stable version.

The backup solution for VMware virtual machines gets some new features and some bugs fixes.

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VMTurbo has released its May update for its capacity management solution appliance, the Virtualization Management Suite. This update is the follow up of the April update which virtualization.info covered last month.

New features in this release:

• Inclusion of 2 additional monitored metrics, Input/Output operations per second (IOPS) and the associated latencies.
• Addition of time selectors, which enable data retrieval and display for any discrete time, upto the retention limits in several new areas of the Monitor.

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Oracle has released a maintenance update for their desktop virtualization solution VM VirtualBox, version 4.0.8. The update, which is considered a maintence release, is available for version 4.0 of VirtualBox which was released in December last year.

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In November last year, VMware released a paper titled: Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide, on which Microsoft responded the week after by stating that Microsoft does not support combining Exchange high availability with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability or migration solutions which automatically failover mailbox servers.

Now Microsoft has announced enhanced hardware virtualization support for Exchange 2010 stating that it is now supported to combe Exchange 2010 high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers. The updated support guidance applies to any hardware virtualization vendor participating in the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), which includes VMware as well.

To further support this Microsoft released a paper titled: Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V. The paper which contains 38 pages details how to implement these scenario’s using Microsoft Hyper-V.

Citrix has released a public Beta of the next major version of XenServer dubbed “Project Boston” (version 6.0 when released), providing private cloud self-service tools and platform, networking, performance and scalability improvements designed to create a multi-tenant environments.

XenServer “Project Boston” features:

• StorageLink and Site Recovery are now fully integrated within XenServer and managed from XenCenter.
• All virtual appliances are now Linux-based, only one Installation ISO as the Linux Supplemental Pack has been removed and Supplemental Pack are now available in virtual appliance format.

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VMware has announced that it acquired Shavlik Technologies, a company which provides software (SaaS and on-premise) that prevents, detects and removes critical security threats from corporate networks.

VMware already OEM’ed the Shavlik solutions for its VMware Update Manager (VUM) – and together with Shavlik developed Go Pro, a hosted web-based console that can be used to manage on-premises vSphere Hypervisor hosts and their virtual machines targeted for SMBs.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be completed later this quarter.