Year: 2011

Virtual Computer has released service pack 1 for its client hypervisor NxTop version 3.0 which was released in September last year. NxTop consists of two tiers, NxTop Client which is a Xen-based client hypervisor and NxTop Center, its centralized management component. Even though Citrix made a marketing investment in Virtual Computer in order to promote its XenClient NxTop still uses its own Xen-based client hypervisor and didn’t adopt the Citrix XenClient hypervisor, because NxTop considers its own hypervisor more robust and mature at this point.

NxTop hypervisor is also available in a Workstation edition, which is a scaled down free version of the platform, including a centralized management solution, capped to a maximum of five managed computers.

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Last week, Microsoft announced the release of the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target for free allowing a Windows Server to host an "cheap" iSCSI SAN, for use with failover clustering for example. Before that, the iSCSI Software Target was available with Windows Storage Server.

Aidan Finn, a Microsoft MVP for Hyper-V has published a step-by-step guide on how to build a Hyper-V Cluster using this iSCSI Software Target.

The paper covers the following topics:

• Installation and Configuration of the Storage
• Building a standalone host to run System Center VMs
• Building a 2 node Hyper-V cluster

Last week InfoWorld published the results from a test comparing the solutions from Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware held at the Advanced Network Computing Lab at the University of Hawaii. Each solution was tested on the same hardware and network topology. Real-world and synthetic Linux and Windows performance benchmarks were run, and subjective management and administration tests were performed.

The following products were compared:

• Citrix XenServer 5.6.1
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers 2.2
• VMware vSphere 4.1

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Quest and MokaFive have announced a partnership in which Quest will bundle the MokaFive client virtualization solution with its own VDI connection broker software, calling it the vWorkspace MokaFive Suite. The solution will be able to provide a local Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution, which will be able to manage, secure and deliver virtual desktops to Windows and Mac. With this combined solution Quest now has the opportunity to support client based VMs running on top of VMware Player or Fusion, Virtual Box or Parallels Workstation, or even the MokaFive BareMetal hypervisor which MokaFive is developing when it will be released.

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LiquidWare Labs has released version 4.8 of Profile Unity, extending support with enhanced multi-session login capabilities and Office 2010 support. This version is the follow-up of version 4.7 which was released in December last year. ProfileUnity is a profile migration and management tool which works with Windows XP/2000/Vista and Windows 7 profiles. It provides migration of Windows native user data to Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, Windows 7 environments and VMware ThinApp keeping the profiles in the native Windows format.

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With a post on the Invisible Things blog, Joanna Rutkowska announced the availability of the first beta of Qubes, one year after the first announcement.

The XEN based desktop oriented project designed to be extremely secure has finally reached a stable state and a feature freeze: while the Open Source community version will continue adding new experimental functionalities, a commercial version will be produced from this release, focusing on stability and performance. It currently runs a flavour of Fedora Linux: a new beta will probably be available in 2 months.

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Icomasoft, a Swiss startup led by Diego Boscardin, announced today the release of opvizor, a software-as-a-service solution designed to identify, diagnose and eliminate performance, security and configuration issues in VMware environments.
virtualization.info covered the first announcement of opvizor last December, inserting the company in our radar with a “Worth Watching” rating which seems to be confirmed today.

At its core, the platform retrieves encrypted versions of logs from the target infrastructure, analyzing and correlating them to identify root causes of misconfigurations and issues while also allowing easy information sharing with consultants and troubleshooters.
Opvizor is available for 1.500 EUR per user per year, but a freeware version – limited to two ESX hosts and a data volume of 1GB per year – is also available for evaluation and small-scale deployments.

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Veeam has released a survey, fielded by Vanson Bourne, an market research company which surveyed 253 CIOs from organizations across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France that employ more than 1,000 people and use VMware vSphere. The surveys topic is VMware Management with Enterprise Management Systems from the Big 5: Microsoft, HP, IBM, CA and BMC.

According to the survey the predominant management framework used in the enterprise today is Microsoft System Center (55 percent). This is followed IBM Tivoli (20 percent) and HP OpenView (11 percent).

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Kaviza has released version 4.1 of their connection broker software VDI-in-a-Box. This version is the follow-up of version 4.0 which was released in January this year. Kaviza offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers. Customers just have to deploy the Kaviza virtual appliance on their hypervisor of choice and they are ready to go.

New features include:

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In February this year, Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, introducing Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and RemoteFX for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) features. Besides providing Hyper-V as a role in Windows Server Microsoft also provides a free stand-alone version version of its hypervisor, comparable with the VMware ESXi hypervisor and Citrix XenServer in the OEM pre-installation options.

Today Microsoft released a new version of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 containing the same virtualization feature set as the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

Thanks to Hyper-V.nu for providing the news.