Year: 2012

Release: Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2

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Oracle announced yesterday, September 13th, a new release for its open source, cross-platform virtualization software: VM VirtualBox 4.2.
Oracle VM VirtualBox was originally created by German software company Innotek GmbH, later on purchased by Sun Microsystems and after the acquisition passed on to Oracle to be part of its virtualization products.
The solution allows to manage a large amount of virtual machine, running different operating systems, on the same computer at the same time, it can be installed on an existing host operating system as an application and can be run on various operating systems, including: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Solaris, and OpenSolaris; Since release 3.2.0, also on of Mac OS X
This release introduces some new features added, for instance VM Group, intended to improve network capabilities and provide support for new host and guest OS platforms.
Among the new details of this new release:
  • Increased efficiency:
  • More flexible VM startup options:
  • Networking improvements:
  • New platform support

IBM Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) networking

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IBM is developing its own network virtualization to compete with VMware and Big Switch Networks.
One of IBM’s values is innovation and Big Blue doesn’t want to be left behind with network virtualization programs, therefore IBM is investing in Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE): a network architecture for building virtual networks infrastructures, that allows to abstract the physical network infrastructure from hypervisor hosts, to make network changes in software rather than hardware, creating endpoints across the underlying network infrastructure.
DOVE current versions works only with vSphere, but apparently there are future plans to expand support for other hypervisors, among the others KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V

Stromasys New CEO: Ling W. Chang

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Stromasys, a privately owned Swiss company specialized in cross-platform virtualization solutions, communicated a change in management and corporate structure, announcing the retirement of CEO Jean-Paul Bergmans, based in Geneve, Switzerland and revealing its New CEO from October 1, Ling W. Chang, who will based in New York, USA.
Stromasys new CEO has an important curriculum, she covered both engineering and account management roles, being based in NY would lead to new connections and favorable circumstances as many of its customers are based in US.
The company, founded in 1998 was formed from a management buyout of Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) European Migration and Porting Centre during the HP/Compaq merger. The acquired knowledge conduct to the development of CHARON products. Virtualization with CHARON would allow to increase performance and reduce energy costs, enabling users to keep their existing applications.

General Dynamics has acquired Open Kernel Labs, Inc

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Yesterday, September 10, General Dynamics declared its acquisition of Open Kernel Labs.
General Dynamics Information Technology, a business unit of General Dynamics, an US aerospace and defense company, provider of mission-focused IT services to defense, intelligence and civilian agencies partnered with Chicago-based Open Kernel Labs, company creator of virtualization software for securing wireless communications, applications and content for mobile devices.

Paper: Implementing Microsoft Windows Server 2012 on HP ProLiant Servers

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Now that Windows Server 2012 is available for download, hardware vendors are announcing on which hardware they are going to support the new OS coming from Microsoft. HP has released a whitepaper titled: Implementing Microsoft Windows Server 2012 on HP ProLiant Servers. The paper which contains 13 pages provides guidelines on installing Microsoft Windows Server 2012 on supported ProLiant models.

The paper addresses the following topics:

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Microsoft releases beta of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1

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We already reported today that Microsoft released a beta version of Service Pack 1 for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (SCCM) which provides configuration management, hardware/software asset management and patch deployment tools for Windows desktops and servers.

Microsoft today also released other betas for the upcoming Service Pack 1 for the other System Center products making up the Microsoft Private Cloud solution stack.

The Beta which will provide support for installing the components on top of Windows Server 2012 and the SQL Server 2012 also includes updates and enhancements to the following System Center 2012 components:

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Microsoft releases beta of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Service Pack 1

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Microsoft yesterday announced the release of beta 1 of the upcoming service pack for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (SCCM). SCCM provides configuration management, hardware/software asset management and patch deployment tools for Windows desktops and servers. Service Pack 1 will allow customers to install on top of and manage Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, both products already released last month.

Besides support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Service Pack 1 will provide the following additional functionality:

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Microsoft releases RC of User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) solution

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In April this year, Microsoft announced a new solution called User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) in a first Beta. In June Microsoft released a second beta and now Microsoft has announced the Release Candidate of UE-V, meaning that its now feature complete.

UE-V is a so called user environment management (UEM) product capable of applying settings when applications are opened, and save those settings when the applications is saved, in contradiction with already existing solutions like roaming profiles and folder redirection which only work at logon and logoff of a user. Besides application settings UE-V is also capable of roaming system settings across devices.

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Release: VMware Fusion 5.0.1

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After two weeks from 5.0 release, VMware has released a minor update for its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion.

Update 5.0.1 introduces the following fixes:

  • Addresses an issue that affected Ivy-Bridge based Macs that were unable to startup older operating systems
  • Fixes the detection of Windows 8 media downloaded from MSDN
  • Improves handling of USB devices
  • Fixes an occasional problem when entering snapshot view using Command-S shortcut