Year: 2011

PacketMotion, a company focusing on User Activity Management and Network Visibility, announced the availability of its VM-to-VM traffic monitoring solution, PacketSentry Virtual Probe.

The lack of visibility on VM-to-VM traffic is a key issue when considering the security of virtual machines: it makes impossible or extremely difficult to actually monitor very relevant network traffic, and to correctly satisfy some requirements for security compliance or internal audit. The “black hole” of VM-to-VM has been pointed out multiple times, and various vendors gave different answers to this issue.

PacketSentry Virtual Probe has been implemented as a guest VM sitting on the virtual network and connected to promiscuos mode ports on the virtual switch. It will then monitor and secure traffic on VMware clusters leveraging the extensive PacketSentry database: such systems should always be managed by the network and security teams rather than the virtualization administrators, ensuring segregation of duties and allowing security management to be executed by the people in charge of it.

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With another move likely to add gasoline on the fire of the recent Provider or Enabler discussion VMware announced the acquisition of SlideRocket, a SaaS-based business presentation provider.

SlideRocket is a tightly focused company, delivering presentation solutions with a modern and cloud-oriented approach, directly aimed at business but with a range of solutions also covering personal or SMB usage.

it is very interesting to note how this last move fits in the global VMware’s strategy and its renewed focus on end users – even more stressed by the fact that CTO Steve Herrod wrote a lenghty piece himself on the “Post PC era”. The terms of the acquisition, however, were not disclosed.

In December last year, Quest released version 7.2 of its VDI connection broker solution vWorkspace adding support for VMware vSphere 4.1 and adding a PowerShell Module and other new features. Now Quest has announced the availability of Maintenance Release 1 for vWorkSpace 7.2 adding support for Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 adding integration and capabilities for RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory.

Maintenance Release 1 adds the following new features:

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Veeam has announced that it is working on a Capacity Planning Report pack for Veeam Reporter and to be included with Veeam ONE with an expected release in May. With this release Veeam is entering the capacity planning market seeking direct competition with vKernel and other vendors in the capacity planning market including VMware’s vCenter Operations.

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VMware has released a technical preview of PXE manager for vCenter, which is available from the flings section from the VMware Labs website . PXE Manager is a management tool, supporting automatic PXE boot and customization of large numbers of ESXi systems. It also provides ESXi state mangement and patch management.

PXE Manager for vCenter provides the following functionalities:

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NetApp has released a whitepaper titled: Deployment Guide for Citrix XenDesktop 5 on VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer on NetApp Storage. The paper which contains 62 pages, provides guidance on how to install Citrix’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution XenDesktop 5 on top of either the VMware vSphere 4.1.0 or Citrix XenServer 5.6.0. virtualization solutions using NetApp Storage.

The document focuses on hosted VDI desktops providing a step-by-step guide and best practices for leveraging Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) and the NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) 2.0.1P1. Focus is at achieving multiple levels of storage effiency and performance acceleration and not on maximizing the number of virtual desktops that can be placed on a storage controller.

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In July 2009, Harry Labana joined Citrix as the new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Desktop and Application Virtualization division. Now Atlantis Computing, a company which provides Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions has announced that Labana will join the companies advisory board. It’s obvious that with this position, Citrix is showing interest in the products of Atlantis Computing which could possibly lead to an acquisition in the near future.

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Oracle has released an update for its destkop virtualization solution VM VirtualBox. The release, which is considered a maintence release can be installed on top of version 4.0 of VirtualBox.

While some bugs are fixed, Oracle reports that there is still a bug with running VirtualBox on top of Mac OS X containing new i7 CPU’s leading to very slow and host OS Freezes, Oracle is still fixing this issue and once fixed will release a new version.

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Last year April, virtualization.info started following a new startup called VMTurbo, which entered the capacity management solutions market. A few months later, the company launched its first product called the VMTurbo platform. Later that year, the company released as several other products to complement its offering, all becoming available within the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) based virtual appliance it offers to host its products.

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Pano Logic has announced the release of version 4.5 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform Pano System. This version is the follow-up of version 4 which was released in January this year, extending support to Citrix XenDesktop 5 which was released in December last year and providing support for Windows 7 64 bit.

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