Year: 2014

In December last year, Microsoft released version 2.0 of its User Environment Management solution called User Experience Virtualization (UE-V). The solution is delivered as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) which is available for Microsoft customers which use a Software Assurance subscription. Now Microsoft has announced a beta for the upcoming 2.1 version of the UE-V product. Once released UE-V will ship with an upcoming new version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP)

Version 2.1 will provide the following new features:

• Support for Microsoft Office 2013 shipped with the UE-V Agent, which enables you to personalize >1500 Office 2013 settings across your devices. UE-V 2.1 will also integrate with Office 365.
• Support for More Windows 8/Windows 8.1 settings and Windows 7 Credential Manager & certificate settings.
• Synchronization of OS and Windows Store settings via UE-V.
• Control of settings that are backed up vs synchronized across devices. These backed up settings can then be automatically or manually be restored to a user’s device.

While VDI solutions are starting to attract a wider audience in the enterprises, the challenge is moved to provide 3D graphics-enabled virtual desktops.

Yesterday NVIDIA launched its NVIDIA GRID Test Drive, available now for Windows in North America, with Asia Pacific and European deployments available soon, VMware on its side published two videos that show Horizon suite’s ability to provide Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration (vSGA) and Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA) solutions.

To be clear with a vSGA solution you are sharing server-side GPU resources (from one or more video cards) through multiple virtual machines, with a vDGA solution you are dedicating a specific video card or GPU to a specific VM via DirectPath I/O.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3VDWqr3DfA#t=114[/youtube]

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This week VMware has provided access to the Technology Preview 2014 of its desktop virtualization platforms: Workstation 11 and Fusion 7.

The main highlights of this preview on both platforms are:

• VMware Hardware Version 11 that allows the creation of VMs with up to 16 virtual CPUs, fully supports Intel Haswell and AMD Jaguar and is compatible with Intel Broadwell and AMD Steamroller. This new version is also compliant with xHCI 1.0 specification and have a better support for USB 3.0 and introduces the ability to configure dedicated graphics memory for each guest operating system.
• Better support for Windows 8 / 8.1 virtual machines.

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After releasing a beta version in March this year, VMware today announced the release of version 2 of its vCenter Log Insight. vCenter Log Insight is VMware’s product for log aggregation, management and analysis. Introduced in June 2013, Log Insight is kept updated with a fast pace in order to be competitive on this market where Splunk, which provides similar functionalities, is still considered the leader.

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Last week Oracle has quietly announced to have reached an agreement for the acquisition of GreenBytes, a company founded in 2007 and specialized in storage deduplication, replication and virtualization.

GreenBytes, developed with funding from investors such Battery Ventures and Generation Investment Management, can claim active partnerships with vendors like Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM and its products, based on an improved version of ZFS technology (also acquired by Oracle back in 2010) have also become Citrix Ready and VMware certified.

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In 2006 the ConVirt team started an ambitious project: develop an open source, multi-host management console for Xen.

Initially called XenMan, the tool was then renamed ConVirt and its roadmap was enriched with several highly desirable features that led to the multi-hypervisor management platform that the company offers today.

In January this year Convirture added the support for Microsoft Hyper-V, in addition to existing support for major virtualization platforms like KVM, Xen and VMware.

ConVirt Enterprise also has a Cloud version that adds the support for public cloud platforms like Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus and OpenStack.

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While cloud datacenters like Google and Amazon have been using server attached storage for a while, enterprises are slowly starting to see the advantages of it. Costs, the ability to scale capacity and performance and simplicity of management are just a few of the benefits.

Many Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions have emerged the last three years or so. To name some: VMware Virtual SAN, Nutanix, Maxta MxSP, SimpliVity and Scale Computing.

Sanbolic enters this market now as well with a solution named Scale-Out Platform. It cannot be compared however to the other SDS solutions named at the start of this blog. Those are relative simple: take a bunch of local disks in a server, aggregate those by software running either in the hypervisor kernel or in a virtual machine, distribute the data over mutliple nodes for availability and present volumes.

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Dell has released a paper titled:"Dell Wyse Datacenter for Microsoft VDI and vWorkspace". The paper which contains 104 pages contains a reference architecture for covering the architecture design, configuration and implementation considerations for the key components of the architecture required to deliver virtual desktops via Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 RDS or Dell vWorkspace 8.0 MR1 on Microsoft Hyper-V.

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CloudLinux, the company responsible for developing the CloudLinux OS has released a new product called KernelCare. KernelCare is capable of automatically patching Linux Server security updates without having to reboot the servers. KernelCare loads patches using a module for with no impact on performance since those take only nanoseconds.

KernelCare is available for CentOS 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, CloudLinux OS 6 and OpenVZ (64-bit only). CloudLinux plans to add support for Debian and Ubuntu, as well as CentOS 5, RHEL 5, CloudLinux OS 5 within the next 60 days. In addition, RHEL 7 will be supported once it is out of beta. KernelCare is available via monthly subscription of $3.95 per server.

CloudLinux has its headquarters in Princeton, N.J. and development based in Donetsk Ukraine.

Siris Capital, research & investing information firm, headquartered in New York and founded 2011, announced to have completed the acquisition of Stratus Technologies, the producer of fault tolerant systems famous for its Stratus’ 99.999% uptime.

Siris Capital Group is acquiring Stratus Technologies for approximately $352 million, a transaction that was already announced on March 31, 2014.

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