Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Yesterday, November 4, dutch hacker “Stun” tweeted a link that allows the download of VMware’s ESX source code files dated between 1998 and 2004.
The source code released is probably related to the leak that VMware itself announced in April and has already patched in May.
On the official Xen.org Community blog George Dunlap, Senior Engineer at Citrix posted two articles explaining the different types of virtualization, from full virtualization to full paravirtualized virtualization. Dunlap explains what the terms Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM), Para Virtualized (PV), Para Virtualized Hardware Virtual Machine (PVHVM) and PV in a HVM container (PVH) mean and what the differences, advantages and disadvantages of each of them.
With full virtualization the assumption in the early days was that the Virtual Machine (VM) was functionally identical to a real machine, meaning that it provided:
Libvirt a collection of software that provides a convenient way to manage virtual machines and other virtualization functionality, such as storage and network interface management has reached version 1.0.0. as announced by Daniel Veillard from Red Hat.
These software pieces include an API library, a daemon (libvirtd), and a command line utility (virsh) and is intended to be a building block for higher level management tools and for applications focusing on virtualization of a single node. The projects goal is to to provide a common and stable layer sufficient to securely manage domains on a node, possibly remote. The project is sponsored by Red Hat and started in December 2005.
Besides releasing version 5 of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) yesterday, Microsoft also released Service Pack 2 for App-V version 4.6.
Service Pack 2 provides support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, but more important allows for coexistence of the 4.6 client together with the App-V 5 client so that the 4.6 App-V packages can work side-by-side with the new 5 APPV packages.
Besides that SP2 also contains a rollup of all hotfixes released after Service Pack 1, which was released in March this year.
Citrix yesterday announced the availability of the tech preview of Excalibur .
Excalibur is part of project Avalon and provides one install, one architecture and one console for both Citrix’s Desktop and Application virtualization platform XenApp and Citrix’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution XenDesktop. Avalon covers the integration of several products which were developed and acquired by Citrix in the last couple of years and its intention is to create a platform to deliver desktops and applications as cloud services as announced in May during Citrix annual Synergy conference by Mark Templeton.
Dell has released a paper titled:"Sizing and Best Practices for Deploying VMware View 5.1 on VMware vSphere 5.0 U1 with Dell EqualLogic Storage". The paper which contains 51 pages and describes best practices to design, size and deploy Dell EqualLogic storage used by the VMware hypervisor platform vSphere running VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution VMware View.
The primary objectives of the tests conducted for this paper were:
Today Microsoft announced the release of version 1.0 of its User Environment Management (UEM) solution User Experience Virtualization, also known as UE-V. UE-V together with App-V 5.0 was first announced a public beta in April this year.
Up until now Microsoft’s solution for user environment management was called User Profile Virtualization, which was actually a combination of Roaming Profiles and Folder redirection. This solution isn’t very suitable though in environments where users access traditional desktops, terminal servers, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and other devices using the same account. Therefore Microsoft partners like Citrix, Appsense, Immidio, Liquidware Labs, Quest, Res Software and others filled in this gap by providing UEM solutions. Most of them still have far more superior features compared to UE-V, but many customers can be satisfied with the UE-V solution.
Microsoft today announced the release of version 5.0 of its Application Virtualization Solution, also known as App-V. App-V 5.0 together with UE-V was first announced a public beta in April this year.
App-V is the product which Microsoft acquired in 2006 after taking over Softricity which provided the product Softgrid.
App-V 5.0 provides deeper platform integration, which allows applications to work more like traditional installed applications, the so called Dynamic Suite Composition which allowed 2 or more Virtual Applications to interact with each other is now called Connection Groups.
IBM has released a paper titled: "IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure: IBM Virtual Desktop for Smart Business on IBM Flex System". The paper, which IBM calls a redbook contains 15 pages and describes a Refrence Architecture using the VERDE solution from Virtual Bridges running on top of the IBM Flex System blade enclosure.
VMs are hosted on top of the VERDE VDI hypervisor, which is based on KVM. Clients access the architecture using the RDP, SPICE or NX protocol.
Citrix has announced that at the end of this year it will release Project Accelerator, a new version of what used to be called the Desktop Tranformation Accelerator. Project Accelerator is now available as a beta.
Project Accelerator will provide guidance on Assessing, Designing and Deploying with improved Hardware Sizing functionality. Besides recommendations about sizing, the tool will also provide recommendations about which FlexCast model to deploy.