Apparently the diaspora from VMware is not finished yet. VMware Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Products, Bogomil Balkansky, left the company apparently about a month ago and has been replaced on his role by John Gilmartin, who was previously VP of VMware’s storage business.
Year: 2013
Release: VMware Horizon View 5.2 Feature Pack 2
VMware has released Feature Pack 2 for its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product View. Feature Pack 2 is the follow up of Feature Pack 1 which was released in March this year. The two new features being introduced in Feature Pack 2 are “Real-Time Audio-Video” and “Flash URL Redirection” for live webcast video also improvements were made to Unity Touch. Also the View clients have been updated to support the new features.
”Real-Time Audio-Video” enables Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) users to have broader application support for real-time audio and video when using devices such as microphones and webcams on their local clients. By encoding audio and video using industry standard codecs, the upstream bandwidth for a single webcam session can be reduced by up to 100x versus using general USB redirection for webcams.
Paper: Hypervisor Top-Level Functional Specification: Windows Server 2012
Microsoft has released a paper titled: "Hypervisor Top-Level Functional Specification: Windows Server 2012". The paper which contains 375 pages provides a top-level functional specification (TLFS) for the third generation hypervisor by Microsoft. It specifies the externally visible behavior of the hypervisor, which is a component of the Hyper V virtualization role in Windows Server 2012.
The specifications can be used to understand the functions of the hypervisor and implement a compatible solution.
Release: Xen 4.3
The Xen Project, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) and which is now transferred from Citrix to the Linux Foundation, today announced the release of version 4.3 of the Xen hypervisor. This version is the follow up of version 4.2. which was released in September last year.
Xen 4.3 is the work of just over 9 months of development, with 1362 changesets containing changes to over 136128 lines of code, made by 90 individuals from 27 different organizations and 25 unaffiliated individual developers.
Rick Jackson, former CMO at VMware joins Rackspace
On July 8, Rackspace announced its new CMO, Rick Jackson, who joined the company officially on July 1st, Jackson is an expert in the IT industry with over 25 years of experience and former CMO at VMware. The new Chief Marketing Officer is going to manage Rackspace’s marketing strategy, probably planning to approach the market furthermore with its hybrid cloud.
Jerry Chen, former VP of cloud services at VMware joins Greylock
On June 25, Jerry Chen, former vice president of cloud services and apps at VMware joined Greylock, as a general partner.
Jerry Chen, worked in VMware for the last eight years, being in charge of the Product Management & Product Marketing teams creating cloud application platform products for VMware. He will now be managing the cloud and application infrastructure and new enterprise applications.
He is only another of the members of VMware who recently left for another company, last month Javier Soltero former CTO of SaaS and Application Services in the Cloud Services business unit and Kevin Henrikson former Sr. Director R&D, left WMware to join Redpoint Ventures and founded a cloud infrastructure startup called Acompli.
Gartner releases its 2013 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure
Gartner has released its annual Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, positioning VMware and Microsoft in the leaders Quadrant. Leaders in this market have a clear strategy and road map for their offerings, understand virtualization’s role in infrastructure and operations transformation, and have a clear vision with respect to cloud computing.
Paper: HP BladeSystem for Client Virtualization
HP has released a paper titled: "HP BladeSystem for Client Virtualization". The paper which contains 25 pages provides best practices for a client virtualization converged infrastructure. It hightlights five common deployment examples, coverign common storage and networking configurations in the context of stateless and stateful client virtualization implementations.
The paper covers the following configuration examples:
Release: Citrix VDI-in-a-Box 5.3
At the beginning of June, Citrix announced version 5.3 of all-in-one Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution VDI-in-a-Box. Now Citrix has released version 5.3.
Version 5.3 will share technologies with XenDesktop 7, which was also released recently. Version 5.3 will provide full Windows 8 support with HDX connections, personal desktops (PVD) on Windows 8, Single Sign-On for remote users through Citrix NetScaler/Access Gateway, and a new wizard-based SSL certificate installation and management.
Citrix releases XenDesktop 7 and XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack 2
Beginning this month, during its annual Synergy event, Citrix announced version 7 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product XenDesktop. This week Citrix announced the release of XenDesktop 7 and the release of Feature Pack 2 for its desktop and application virtualization product XenApp 6.5.
XenDesktop provides the following new functionality (among others), detailed here: