VMware results for Q4 2014 and full year

On January 27, VMware released the financial results for the third quarter and full year 2014.

The revenues for the fourth quarter were $1.70 billion for an increase of 15% compared to Q4 2013. Licenses revenues were $777 million, with an increase of 13% from same quarter in 2013.

Operating income was $344 million and non-GAAP operating income was $567 million, respectively a decrease of 8% and an increase of 7%.

VMware annual revenues were $6.04 billion, an increase of 16% from 2013

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Paper: Cisco Unified Computing System with VMware Horizon 6 with View and Virtual SAN

Cisco and VMware have released a paper titled: "Cisco Unified Computing System with VMware Horizon 6 with View and Virtual SAN". The paper which contains 59 pages describes a reference architecture for running VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution Horizon 6 with View and Virtual SAN on top of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware.

The purpose of the reference architecture is to provide guidance about the following aspects of deploying this joint solution:

  • Scalability and performance results while hosting 800 VMware Horizon 6 with View virtual desktops using industry-standardized benchmarking of real-world workloads
  • Design and implementation best practices covering Cisco UCS configurations, VMware Virtual SAN storage policies, and data-store-sizing guidance for hosting VMware Horizon 6 with View virtual desktops.
  • Availability and resiliency considerations related to proper maintenance procedures and the handling of various failure scenarios with VMware Virtual SAN

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Release: Xen Project Hypervisor 4.5

The Xen Project, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) last week announced the availability version 4.5 of the Xen Hypervisor. With major contributions from AMD, Bitdefender, Cavium, Citrix, Fujitsu, GlobalLogic, Intel, Oracle, as well as several individual and academic institutions the product has been enhanced with several new features and capabilties.

The following new capabilities and features are available in version 4.5.:

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Citrix announcements from its annual Summit partner conference

Before and during its annual Summit partner conference, held on January 13 and 14, Citrix made several announcements. First of all Citrix announced the acquisition of Sanbolic, which virtualization.info already covered, also the next version of its Hypervisor platform XenServer version 6.5 was announced. But also serveral other announcements were made, which we will summarize in this post.

First of all, Citrix announced version 10 of its enterprise mobility management solution XenMobile. XenMobile provides both Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM). For more information about what is included in this release please read the following blog post on the Citrix Blog. The new XenMobile client is available for XenMobile customers to download today. The server enhancements will be available in Q1 2015.

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Citrix announces XenServer 6.5 – UPDATED

Citrix today announced the next version of its virtualization platform XenServer which is a commercial product based on the open-source Xen Project hypervisor. XenServer 6.5 will be the follow up of version 6.2 which was released in June last year. Unfortunately Citrix doesn’t provide any details on when they expect this version to become generally available.

Citrix states that XenServer 6.5 will offer a full 64-bit kernel architecture with support for Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). The release will also offer asset tagging to enable workload geo-tagging which provides the ability to restrict the ability for workloads to run in a particular location. Also support for NVIDIA GRIP vGPU will be provided. Due to the 64 bit architecture also improvements will be made to the workload balancing and distributed virtual switch controller functionality.

Update on availability: XenServer v6.5 has been officially announced today,as well as being released-to-web (RTW). What this means is that it is available to existing customers for download, so they can upgrade their existing XenServer infrastructure. Software Assurance on any existing XenServer infrastructure is a re-requisite to be able to use this new release.

New customers or additional purchases by customers can happen once the release becomes generally available, which will happen in February.

Citrix Acquires Sanbolic

Citrix today announced that its has completed its acquisition of Sanbolic. Sanbolic which has a product called Sanbolic Scale-Out Platform which can be seen as an aggregation of both local storage plus legacy SAN storage (EMC, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems) as well as cloud storage (Amazon Web Services) managed as a single resource by software using a single management console as described in more detail in this article published on virtualization.info in May last year.

The Sanbolic team will join the Citrix organization immediately. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Survey: State of the VDI and SBC union 2015

Two years ago, Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) started a survey asking participants to provide more insight in the non-technical issues related to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Server Based Computing (SBC) deployments. The outcome of the survey which was filled-in by over 1000 people was detailed in a paper later on. Last year the project continued with a new survey for 2014.

For this year, the survey wants to check how the industry has changed compared to the last years. The questions of this survey are both functional and technical and range from “What are the most important design goals set for this environment”, to “How are the VM’s configured?”. The survey will be closed February 15th this year.

Click here to fill out the Project Virtual Reality Check “State of the VDI and SBC union 2015” survey.

Paper: VMware Mirage 5.0 Reviewer’s Guide

VMware has released a reviewers guide for its End User Computing solution Horizon version 5. The paper titled: "VMware Mirage 5.0 Reviewer’s Guide" contains 209 pages and allows readers to evaluate the VMware Mirage solution which provides a management solution for physical desktops, virtual desktops and mobile devices.

The guide covers what VMware Mirage is, its key features, packaging and licensing, components and architectures, installation and configuration and provides hands-on evaluation excersises.

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Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Power

As we know IBM and Red Hat have a story of collaboration behind its back and they have been working lately together on various projects, the latest announcement they made together last December was about a new collaboration to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to IBM’s Power systems through Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Power.

Last year IBM declared its commitment to invest $1 billion in Linux and open source technologies for Power Systems, and it has accomplished with the next – generation Power Systems server integrating the POWER8 processor, designed for Big Data which allows to deliver the highest level of performance.

This announcement means that users can take advantage of IBM’s next-generation Power Systemes technology and the features of Red Hat Virtualization, which will enable enterprises to build a flexible infrastructure based on open source hardware and software solutions.

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