Year: 2011

VMware releases vSphere Licensing Advisor tool

by

VMware has made available a tool which can help users who currently run vSphere 4 or Virtual Infrastructure 3.5. to calculate and determine their current vRAM usage and vRAM capacity as if they upgraded to vSphere 5.0.

The tool lets you connect to your current environment which it analyzes, based on that data the tool provides the vRAM capacity and usage for each vSphere 5.0 equivalent edition.

More information about the new licensing can be found in the whitepaper titled:"VMware vSphere 5.0 Licensing, Pricing and Packaging whitepaper"

Citrix acquires Ringcube

by

Citrix today announced the acquisition of RingCube, provider of the OS virtualization platform called vDesk, which recently shifted from management of hosted virtualization to providing so called Containers for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) on top of VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

This acquisition follows the recent acquisition of Kaviza by Citrix in May this year, further extending the VDI solution portfolio. With the technology of RingCube, Citrix will be capable of providing personalization of virtual desktops, without providing a dedicated Virtual Desktop to each user which Citrix currently provided as a solution for this requirement.

vDesk provides a personal vDisk for each user, which only contains apps, data and settings unique for that user, providing users with their own unique desktop experience.

Paper: Citrix Reference Architecture for Multi-Tenant Desktop as a Service

by

Citrix has released a paper titled: Citrix Reference Architecture for Multi-Tenant Desktop as a Service. The paper which contains 56 pages details how to use Citrix XenApp 6 and the Citrix Service Provider Automation Pack to enable the delivery of Microsoft Windows based Desktop as a Service (DaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), based on the Microsoft Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) and Citrix Service Provider (CSP) licensing program to small and medium businesses. (50,000 or fewer active users).

Read more

Release: Trilead VM Explorer 3.6.009

by

Trilead has released version 3.6.009 of its VM Explorer, a backup solution for VMware Virtual Machines. VM Explorer Backups can be stored on ESX, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD based storage platforms or directly to a SAN.

This version fixes an issue when creating a folder on iSCSI drives and some other bugs.

The main new features of VM Explorer 3.6.009 are:

  • Support for ESX & ESXi 4.1.0.433742
  • Notification message for VM Explorer updates

VMware updates vSphere 5 Licensing and Pricing

by

Last month, VMware introduced version 5 of their product suite, introducing new features for their product line and a new licensing model based on the amount of memory allocated for a virtual machine when it is powered on. This new licensing model caused a lot of discussion in the VMware community, and of course competitors of VMware used the new license model to promote their own solution.

Now VMware has announced an update to the license model, making some changes based on the feedback which they massively received.

Read more

Release: Linux Integration Services for Microsoft Hyper-V 3.1

by

Microsoft has released version 3.1 of the Linux Integration Services for its hypervisor Hyper-V, providing support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 and 6.1 and CentOS 6.0, for which support was announced in May this year, in both 32- and 64-bit versions up to 4 vCPUs. Microsoft now also provides the Integration Services in Red Hat Package Manager format (RPM)

The other supported distributions RHEL 5and Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 are still supported with the 2.1 version of the integration services, which were released in July last year. This version doesn’t provide support yet for Ubuntu and Debian distributions, which Microsoft announced in June this year.

Read more