Year: 2011

VMware has made available update 1 for vSphere ESX/ESXi and vCenter, providing patches and enhancements, like support for additional guest operating systems and processor support. This update can be applied to vSphere 4.1, which was released in July last year.

ESXi now provides support for using Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) from Intel and available now on Intel Xeon 5600 series processor types. TXT can protect ESXi in some cases where system binaries are corrupted or have been tampered with.

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In June last year Microsoft made available a public beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, introducing the long awaited Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and RemoteFX for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) features. In October last year Microsoft released the Release Candidate adding support for using Dynamic Memory on the Standard and Web editions of Windows Server. Now Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

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VMware has updated it Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification to version 4. The VCDX certification was introduced in August 2008 for virtualization architects. The VCDX is the highest level of VMware certification available for design architects highly-skilled in VMware enterprise deployments and veteran professionals who want to validate and demonstrate their expertise in VMware virtual infrastructure.

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In December last year Veeam made available a Release Canditate of version 5.6 of the nworks Smart Plug-In software for monitoring and management of VMware from HP Operations Manager. Now Veeam has released version 5.6. of the Smart Plug-In (SPI) and also released version 5.6. of the nworks Management Pack for monitoring and management of VMware using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM).

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Hytrust the company providing access control and configuration management solutions has hired John de Santis as their new chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), tmcnet reports. De Santis comes from VMware where he was Vice President Cloud Services since August last year. Before that he was Chairman and CEO at TriCipher for 4 years which was acquired by VMware in August last year.

De Santis was also President and CEO of Sygate Technologies (acquired by Symantec) from July 2000 until December 2005, and Senior Vice President Worlwide Sales, Marketing and Service at Network Computing Devices from 1997 until 2000. He also worked for Cincinnati Bell Information Systems (now Convergys), Data Switch Corporation and Channelnet Corporation.

In July 2008 virtualization.info reported about Diane Greene leaving as CEO of VMware and being replaced by Paul Maritz coming from Microsoft. Now networkworld reports that Maritz has given up his title of president to be filled in by four new co-presidents, Richard McAniff as Co-President Products and Chief Development Officer, Tod Nielsen as Co-President Applications Platform, Mark Peek as Co-President Business Operations and Chief Financial Officer and Carl Eschenbach as Co-President Customer Operations. Maritz will still serve as CEO.

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Beginning December last year, VMware released version 2.0 of its benchmark framework VMmark 2.0. Where version 1.0 of the VMmark tool was focusing on the performance of a single virtualization host, the 2.0 version is focusing on measuring the performance of a whole virtual data center.

Cisco was the first OEM to publish its scores online on the website of VMware, with a score of 6.51 at 6 tiles, using the Cisco UCS B200 M2 hardware platform running on top of VMware ESX 4.1.0 build 260247.

Now Fujitsu posted a score of 6.81 at 7 tiles, using a Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX200 S6 configuration running VMware ESX 4.1/ vCenter 4.1.

In July last year, virtualization.info reported that the first details about HyperV 3.0, which appeared online on a French publication. According to that publication, the Hypervisor will not run a full copy of Windows in its parent partition, but a minimal part of the OS, which Microsoft internally calls codename MinWin.

Also details appeared on how Microsoft will integrate its application virtualization solution App-V in Windows so that customers can run XP, Vista, 7 and Linux applications on the same environment.

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Michel Roth, who works for the desktop virtualization division of Quest and runs the Thincomputing.net blog wrote an article titled: “A closer look at the new “Dynamic Memory” feature of Hyper-V: is it worth it for VDI? “. The article details what Dynamic Memory is and especially on what it can do for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI). Michel earlier wrote an article about the upcoming RemoteFX functionality which will also be released with SP1.

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In October last year Quest released beta 2 of vRanger 5.0, now Quest has released version 5.0 of its backup and recovery product following up version 4.5 which was released in May last year.

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