Year: 2011

Last year, during VM2010, Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Senior VP of R&D at VMware announced Project Horizon, a single-sign-on (SSO) portal for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), powered by the TriCipher technology, which VMware acquired around that time. Horizon is capable of federating SaaS applications with the on-premise Microsoft Active Directory service or other directory services and can be considered a key component of the long-term VMware desktop virtualization strategy.

In May this year, VMware released version 1.0 of the Horizon App Manager, the first product in the suite of product to be released under the Horizon brand. Horizon App Manager is a SaaS application hosted by VMware, sold on a per-user subscription. Using a so called Consolidated Horizon Connector, federation is accomplished. At that time cloudcomputing.info branded the solution 1.0, but as it turned out VMware released several updates branding it in a monthly release, the last update being in July this year.

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In November last year, virtualization.info covered the release of a paper titled:"Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1" , providing performance tips covering the most performance-critical areas of vSphere 4.1.

Now that vSphere 5.0 has been released, also this paper has been updated, titled: "Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.0". The paper contains 76 pages and covers the new vSphere 5.0 features from performance perspective including:

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Parallels has released version 7.0 of its Desktop Virtualization platform for Mac; Desktop. Desktop provides a type-2 hypervisor for running Windows or OS X Lion virtually on top of OS X Leopard 10.5.8 or later, Snow Leopard 10.6.8 orlater or Lion 10.7 or later.

This version also provides an improved Parallels Mobile App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch which allows remote management and use of Parallels Dekstop VMs and is available from the iTunes App Store.

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Microsoft has released a public beta of its backup product,System Center Data Protection Manager 2012. This version will be the follow up of Data Protection Manager 2010 which was released in April last year.

Data Protection Manager 2012 will contain the following new functionality:

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In April this year, virtualization.info announced that Quest started a partnership with MokaFive to bundle its client virtualizations solution, with its own VDI connection broker software, calling it the vWorkspace MokaFive Suite.

The combined solution is capable of providing 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 released in May this year.

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During VMworld in Las Vegas last week, VMware announced the availability of version 5 of its disaster recovery tool for vSphere environments, Site Recovery Manager. Site Recovery Manager enables you to build, manage and execute automated distaster recovery plans for your vSphere infrastructure. This version provides support for vSphere 5 which was released at the end of last month.

VMware also announced that some of its partners will provide the SRM functionality in a Software as a Service (SaaS) scenario, partners include FusionStorm, Hosting.com, iland and VeriStor.

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Virtual Computer has released version 4 of its client hypervisor NxTop.

NxTop consists of two tiers, NxTop Client which is a Xen-based client hypervisor and NxTop Center, its centralized management component. It combines network-based storage with a stateless client-side hypervisor.

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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As part of the release of vSphere 5, VMware also released version 4.2 of its runbook automation software, called vCenter Orchestrator. This version is the follow up of version 4.1 which was released in August 2010. This version provides mainly bug fixing, mainly because VMware focussed more on releasing more plugins for Orchestrator, which are 7 at this moment.

When you install vCenter Server 5.0 this version will already be installed, if you want to install Orchestrator on another system, you can use the standalone installer.

During VMworld in Las Vegas VMware announced the availability of version 5.0 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform View. This version is the follow up of version 4.6 which was released in February this year.

VMware claims that View 5 consumes up to 75 percent less bandwidth over LAN and WAN connections. This version also introduces the profile management technology for stateless desktops which VMware acquired from RTO Software in March 2010, and originally expected to be released with VMware View 4.5.

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VKernel has announced version 4.0 of its vOperations Suite. vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and Chargeback functionality for VMware and Hyper-V environments. Support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) which VKernel announced earlier this month will be added in Q4 this year.

vOperations Suite 4 provides the following new functionality:

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