Year: 2011

Lanmark has released a new addition to its Suite 2010, called Desktop Transformation Module (DTM). DTM which is available for customers using the services edition, extends the Suite capacity planning platform to enabling application and desktop delivery specification for multiple user groups supporting a multi-phase transformation design across Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft App-V, VMware ThinApp and VMware View.

DTM supports the Citrix Desktop Transformation Model, which is a repeatable method developed by Citrix for transforming desktop computing from today’s device-centric, distributed management paradigm to a user-centric, virtualized model.

Suite 2010 was released in March last year. It provides inventory and performance data collection across applications, users, workload and IT infrastructure, and based on that it can do analysis and with this latest addition define a target infrastructure.

5nine, the company which entered the market in June 2009, offering several solutions so far like Virtual Firewall, P2V planner, Optimizer and Migrator for Hyper-V now announced the release of Hyper-V Commander. Hyper-V Commander is designed to provide management for Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Windows Server 2008 core editions. It will work on the full Windows Server versions as well though.

Hyper-V commander is able to work in conjunction with Virtual Firewall for Hyper-V, which was released in July last year.

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In October last year Bill Cullen joined AppZero as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), quite recent after Mark Striling and Nigel Stokes invested in the company. Now the company announced that it has added Ross Norrie as Vice President Engineering and Valerie O’Connel as Vice President Business Development & Marketing.

Norrie started his career in 1991 working for Corel Corporation, in 2000 he founded AssetMetrix, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Within Microsoft he was Senior Program Manager for System Center Configuration Manager, Since January 2008 he held several positions, VP of Engineering at assetLabs, VP at LPI Level Platforms, Directory of Asset Management at Level Platforms and Consultant at Shavlik Technologies.

O’Connel started her career in 1998 as Managing Director at the Aberdeen Group, In January 2004 she became VP Unicenter Product Marketing at CA, and in January 2005 she started her own consulting practice.

Citrix has released version 2.3 of its physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion tool. XenConvert can convert a phyical server or desktop running Windows to a XenServer VM or provisioning services vDisk. It can also convert an offline VM or disk in the VHD, OVF, VMDK and XVA format, to a XenServer VM.

XenConvert 2.3 adds interoperability with XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1, which was released in December last year, interoperability with Provisioning Services 5.6 SP1, and fixes several defects affecting conversions from a physical machine and XVA.

Tim Magnan has released a free monitoring tool for Hyper-V environments called HyperV_Mon, currently in version 1.8. HyperV_Mon is a Gui tool for viewing CPU performance of a system running Microsoft Hyper-V. The tool can be downloaded from the Tmurgent Technologies website.

Although the tool isn’t intended as a regular monitoring tool, it can quickly help to understand what is going on at a Hyper-V host. The tool requires the .NET framework version 3.5 to be installed on the machine where you wish to start the GUI, and it leverages the Root Partition WMI provider of the server running Hyper-V. Further information about how to configure and use the tool is provided in the HyperV_Mon whitepaper.

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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 is the first OEM which published 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. Since Cisco is the first to publish their scores, we cannot compare the results yet. Probably other OEMs will follow shortly making it possible to compare the results.

Citrix has released Service Pack 1 for its client hypervisor: XenClient. Service Pack 1 is the first update to version 1.0 which was released in September last year as part of XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 2, and contains hundreds of updates to both the XenClient and the Synchronizer for XenClient.

Service Pack 1 includes support for the FlexCast technology which was introduced with the release of Citrix XenDesktop 5 released in September last year. The update can be downloaded from the Citrix website.

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EMC has released a white paper titled: Microsoft Hyper-V scalability with EMC Symmetrix VMAX, the paper which contains 17 pages highlights a Hyper-V scalability test performed by EMC during the creation of one of the largest Hyper-V environments in the world.

The environment consists of a 16-node Hyper-V cluster, using the Symmetrix VMAX storage arrays capable of scaling to 64 virtual machines per cluster node for a total of 1024 virtual machines, the goal was to see how well the Symmetrix VMAX storage array performs and how performance can be optimized.

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LucidLogix Technologies (Lucid) is a technology company from Israel providing solutions which provides an unique approach when it comes to using Multiple Graphical Processor Unites (GPUs), a technique expected to become more popular now that VDI vendors are announcing support for it, like Microsoft with its upcoming RemoteFX technology, a remote desktop protocol accelerator, which Microsoft acquired when they acquired Calista in January 2008.

Remote FX is currently in Release Candidate status and to be released with Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 which is still expected for H1 2011. These technologies require identical GPUs in the host though, as outlined in the Deploying Microsoft RemoteFX on a Single Remote Desktop Virtualization Host Server Step-by-Step Guide for example.

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Kerry McGowne, who was Vice President of Corporate Marketing has left Parallels in December last year. McGowne who started at Parallels in September 2009 was the follow-up of Kurt Daniel, who left Parallels in January 2009 to become COO for a Web 2.0 startup called WorkLight, as reported by virtualization.info beginning last year. McGowne worked for Parallels for 1 year and 3 months.

McGowne is now a Self-Employed consultant as his linkedin profile states. Before working at Parallels. McGowne was the VP of Corporate Marketing at ServiceSource before joining Parallels in September 2009, and before that he was the Director of Executive Communications and Director of Platform Strategy and Marketing at Microsoft.