Year: 2012

Citrix yesterday released version 5.1 of its VDI-in-a-box product, the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution targeted at SMB’s it acquired after taking over Kaviza in May last year. This version is the follow-up of version 5 which was released in October last year.

VDI-in-a-Box offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers. Customers just have to deploy the virtual appliance on their hypervisor of choice and they are ready to go.

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While both Microsoft and VMware are working hard to convince existing and potential customers on why they should buy their products, it’s hard to find non-biased comparisons nowadays comparing the features of the current VMware hypervisor vSphere 5 and the just released Hyper-V 3.0 part of Windows Server 2012.

Marcel van den Berg has written a series of blog post making that comparison. And we recommend people who want to make the comparison to read these series of articles in order to get an idea of what each product can do.

You can read the articles here:

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Yesterday CRN reported that, according to their sources “familiar with VMware’s plans“, VMware is going to discontinue vRAM licensing program with the introduction of vSphere 5.1.

Abandoning the vRAM entitlement (that proved to be very unpopular among the community) for its previous CPU-based licensing model, VMware will keep vSphere competitive against the new release of Hyper-V 3 enriched with several enterprise-class features.

A lot of customers feel like they are being nickel-and-dimed on things, which hurts the cost model of virtualization, so VMware is going to aggressively bundle. That bundle scheme made little sense with vRAM.

said a source of CRN, who requested anonymity.

We expect the announcement during VMworld in San Francisco next week where VMware will unveil its official licensing plans, these could include bundled licenses and special package with cloud products.

Microsoft has announced that a beta version of its Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Plug-in for VMware vSphere Client version 1.0 is available on Microsoft Connect.

The tool which is a Solution Accelerator is a plug-in for the vSphere Client which works in conjunction with the Release Candidate of the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter tool which is also available through Microsoft Connect. Virtualization.info covered the release of the beta of the MVMC in April this year, providing an overview of its capabilities. In the RC Microsoft added Windows Server 2012 as target host platform.

The plug-in extends the vSphere Client (either 4.1 or 5.0) context menu in order to make integrate the conversion of VMware based Virtual Machines to Microsoft Hyper-V based Virtual Machines.

On August 8th oVirt announced release 3.1, this is the second official release of this free platform.

The oVirt project provides a fully featured management platform for virtual machines hosted on any supported backend, it is an open virtualization project for Linux-based KVM virtualization.

The release, now available to download, includes various changes in supports, such as the ‘all-in-one’ proof of concept mode that allows a single machine to both run the management engine and act as a virtualization host.
More informations on the changes made in areas such Infrastructure, User Interface, Storage, Virtualization, Network and Interfaces, could be found in the official release notes.

Today Linux-KVM published a post that shows the basics of a new feature coming with Fedora 18, the ability to take online snapshots of virtual disks with no downtime.

An online snapshotting feature, already available in libvirt with command line-only support, represents a fundamental element in a production environment and will help KVM to shorten the distance with the professional market.

This feature is partially available in Fedora 17 and will be fully supported in the next release.

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Microsoft has released a new version of its Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VSMT) solution accelerator. This tool is the next version of the VSMT 3.0 which was released in September 2010.

The VMST is a patch management solution which can be used to update stopped or saved state VM’s on a Hyper-V or Hyper-V R2 host. And also VM Templates, offline VM’s and offline Virtual Hard Disks(VHD) stored in the VM Library of System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). In order to achieve this, the tool applies updates to the VHD using so called Servicing Jobs.

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Microsoft yesterday announced that it now officially supports running FreeBSD version 8.2 as a guest OS in a Hyper-V Virtual Machine running on top of Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft already announced that it was working on this support in May this year and this announcement follows earlier support additions like the support for CentOS in May last year.

Microsoft together with NetApp and Citrix submitted 8,500 lines of code under the BSD license in order to enable FreeBSD to run on Hyper-V. The FreeBSD integration components provide support for:

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Microsoft has released an online virtualization comparison tool, targeted directly against VMware. The website hosting the Microsoft Server Virtualization Tool compares the software acquisition and support costs between Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and vSphere 5 based on published list prices.

Even though the website comparing Hyper-V to vSphere 5 can be considered dubious because it’s created by Microsoft self, it contains some good information and references to documentation which can help organizations make the comparison for themselves. On the other hand VMware already has a website, where it directly targets Microsoft, called Get the Facts, not the Microsoft Hyper-Bole.

The tool allows you to specify the amount of Virtual Machines in your environment, and the average consolidation ration in your environment: Low (3VMs/Proc), Medium (6 VMs/Proc) and high (12 VMs/Proc). Based on this input a cost comparison is made and presented to the user.

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