Year: 2013

HotLink has released version 2.0 of its multi virtualization platform management tool SuperVISOR. This version is the follow up of version 1.5 which was released in April last year. SuperVISOR is software which abstracts the virtualization platform from the management tools used to manage them. By using this technology it is possible to manage a hybrid hypervisor environment using a single management tool solution running within VMware vCenter. SuperVISOR is able to manage Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat Enterprise Linux KVM.

When HotLink announced its product for the first time, it also mentioned that it would supply a plugin for Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Since Microsoft’s latest version of SCVMM now already supports multiple virtualization solutions, apparently HotLink decided to stop the efforts to offer a solution for SCVMM.

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Oracle has released version 3.2 of its enterprise virtualization solution. Oracle has rebranded the until now separate releases of Oracle VM Server for x86 and Oracle VM Server for SPARC into a new combined release Oracle VM. From this release forward Oracle VM Manager can now manage both Oracle VM server running on x86 and VM Server running on SPARC based servers.

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On January 17 Parallels announced that Cisco has made a not yet quantified equity investment in the company.

Parallels, well known for its desktop virtualization software, said that the investment is intended to accelerate costumer adoption of Parallels cloud service delivery products in synergy with Cisco cloud and data center solutions.

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Sven Huisman, technical consultant at PQR, Dennis Geerlings, Consultant at Login VSI, Jeroen van de Kamp, Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants and Ruben Spruijt, Technology Officer at PQR just announced a new paper titled: Project VRC: Phase V Antivirus impact and best practices on VDI. The paper which contains 80 pages gives some valuable insight on the impact of using Antivirus solutions in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment.

The tests were conducted using the following products: Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection (ForeFront), McAfee Enterprise, Move Multiplatform, Move Agentless and Symantec Endpoint protection.

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Citrix released CloudGateway 2.5 and together is releasing Citrix Access Gateway 10-0-71.6014 e

Citrix CloudGateway is the Citrix Enterprise Mobility offering and Citrix Access Gateway provides remote access to the whole infrastructure.

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Dell today released version 6.3 of Dell vOPS Server Explorer. vOPS Server Explorer originally developed by VKernel provided assessment tooling for virtualization administrators. VKernel was acquired by Quest in November 2011, and since Quest now owned by DELL, VKernel assets are now part of DELL as well. vOPS Server Explorer is delivered as a fully configured virtual machine, which can be installed on either VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

Version 6.3 of vOPS Server Explorer, which is provided as freeware adds two new utilities, Storage Explorer and Change Explorer. Dell also provides a paid version called vOPS Server Standard providing additonional value with capacity and performance monitoring capabilities. Environment Explorer now also displays VM Density, Zombie VMs, Rightsizing savings and Changes.

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On January 9, Stratus Technologies announced the availability of the new Stratus ftServer systems with vSphere 5.1

The fault tolerant system company, founded 1980 and headquartered in Massachusetts, launched, in September 2012, the sixth generation ftServer that integrates into existing infrastructures and the vendor says that is able to provide uptime of 99.999% for the server and equivalent to 5.26 minutes of downtime annually, using the vSphere hypervisor apparently with very few staff oversight.

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Even though the newest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is currently at version 6.3, and Red Hat is working on version 6.4 it still releases updates for RHEL 5 according to its 10-year lifecycle promise. Last week it released version 5.9 of its RHEL Linux distribution.

Version 5.9 introduces Microsoft Hyper-V drivers so that RHEL can be installed in a Virtual Machine running on top of Hyper-V natively.

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On January 7, Brian Gammage, brought to our attention, through a blog post, an interesting video.

David Davis, Virtualization and Cloud savvy at TrainSignal, Author and vExpert, discussed on the vmWare blog of a recent Google+ Hangout about cost and business benefits of Virtual Desktops.

Davis explored the financial and technical benefits of desktop virtualization, still using the concept of cost saving as a trigger, he gave examples of how an organization can have centralized control and application consistency increasing security.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM9YXmaTo4Y[/youtube]

Andreas Groth, virtualization and cloud architect working for IBM has created a website comparing the virtualization features from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. This week his virtualization matrix was updated to include Windows Server 2012 with its Hyper-V version 3.0 hypervisor and System Center 2012.

The reference matrix, allows you to select and compare license specific capabilities of selected x86 server virtualization technologies, seperated by feature category (General, Management, Hypervisor and Extensions). The comparison is available at the following website: http://www.virtualizationmatrix.com/