Year: 2011

VKernel, provider of performance and capacity management products, has announced its acquisition by Quest Software. VKernel will operate as a independent subsidiary of Quest.

VKernel entered the virtualization market in October 2007, releasing VKernel 1.0 a product capable of providing chargeback functionality integrated with VMware VirtualCenter. VKernel further evolved its products resulting in the release of the vOperations Suite providing Performance Analisys, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and Chargeback which is currently at version 4 and which now supports Microsoft Hyper-V environments besides VMware environments as well.

Lanamark has released a new version of its Capacity Planning platform Suite, this version is the follow up of version 2010 which was released in March last year.

Suite 2012 introduces two new modules:

• Lanamark Central using Multipoint Data Access which enables IT Solution Providers to stream encrypted IT asset data into their public or private cloud for analysis

• Lanamark IQ, which provides Asset Intelligence normalizing and enriching raw hardware and software asset data with actionable business information.

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In November last year, started releasing Solaris 11 Express, the development version eventually leading to the release of Oracle Solaris 11 which was released last week. Solaris is one of the assets which Oracle acquired from Sun in April 2009.

Solaris features so called container virtualization called Solaris Zones, which stands for virtualization on the OS level creating multiple isolated containers on a single server making sure applications do not conflict. Besides that Oracle also supports running Solaris on top of Oracle VM Server for x86 or SPARC based systems, the products providing hardware virtualization.

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Pano Logic has announced the release of version 5 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform Pano System. This version is the follow-up of version 4.5 which was released in April this year.

Version 5 now provides monitoring of the Pano Zero Client device by introducing Pano Maestro, providing a single pane of glass for monitoring these devices. It integrates with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, vCenter Server or XenDesktop Studio.

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Oracle has released version 4.1.6 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version is considered a maintenance release which can be installed on top of any version 4.1.x, fixing some display and networking issues.

Some of the fixes in version 4.1.6 include:

• Fixed rare Windows 7 guest hangs, either at boot time or when reconfiguring the network card in unusual setups
• Fixed the problem with duplicate packets when bridged to a wireless interface on Mac OS X hosts.
• More WDDM fixes for Vista and Windows 7 guests
• Directory, file mode and mask options for shared folders on Solaris

Even though ESXi 5 is already released, VMware stil releases updates for ESXi 4, in this case Update 2. This version is the follow up of Update 1 released in February this year.

Update 2 adds the following new features:

• Support for AMD Opteron 6200 Series and 4200 Series processors

• Support for Ubuntu 11.10

The update also delivers a number of bug fixes, which can be found in the resolved issues.

Thanks to Jason Boche for providing the news.

Microsoft has released the release candidate for System Center 2012 Orchestrator, the follow up version of System Center Opalis, which was acquired by Microsoft in December 2009 and integrated into its System Center portfolio. For this release Microsoft decided to integrate the Opalis code into the Microsoft codebase, and to drop support for running the Opalis DB on Oracle, the console will now be based on IIS and Silverlight.

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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Citrix has announced the release of version 2.1. of its client hypervisor XenClient. This version will be the follow-up of version 2.0 which was released  in August this year.

Version 2.1 provides the following new features:

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VKernel has released a new tool called vScope Explorer. vScope Explorer is

a free tool for VMware admins which visualizes the performance and capacity health for all VMs, hosts and datastores in an environment.

The tool installs as a virtual appliance and is delivered in OVF format.

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During its annual Citrix Synergy event, held in Barcelona Citrix announced that it has acquired App-DNA, the company offering the AppTitude product which primarily assists in assessment and migrations from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Citrix is planning to integrate the AppTitude technology in the Citrix Desktop Transformation Model, offering assessment functionality, remediation of compatibility issues which arise and automated application packaging to MSI, App-V or Citrix XenApp formats.