virtualization.info Editors

After VMWare aquired the mobile virtualization startup Trango for which the outcome is now reflected in the VMware Mobile Virtual Platform (MVP) Architecture, Citrix invested in one of Trango’s biggest competitors: Open Kernel Labs in order to provide Windows virtualization for smartphones.

Open Kernel Labs has been very critical since on the VMware MVP architecture, detailed by virtualization.info in November this year, where Open Kernel Labs critizes the use of a type-2 architecture by VMware.

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Liquidware Labs has hired David Burke as the new Vice President of Sales. Burke comes from RTO Software, where he was VP of Sales as well for 2 years and 3 months. Before that he was VP of Sales at SPI Dynamics Inc. Part of HP Software for 5 years and 5 months.

Burke started his career in 1984 at XEROX where he was Sales Executive for 5 years and 7 months. After that he worked for the XEROX spinoff, The Sutherland Group for 4 years and 9 months. In 1994 he became Director of Sales Operations at Attachmate, where he worked for 2 1/2 years. After that he also was VP Sales Operations at Internet Security Systems for 5 years and 8 months.

Liquidware Labs was started by the man who founded VizionCore, David Bieneman after the company was sold to Quest.

The VMware Performance team has posted an blog article detailing the performance and use cases of using VMware DirectPath I/O. DirectPath I/O is a technology available since vSphere 4.0 to allow guests to directly access hardware devices trough hardware support, like Intel VT-D and AMD-Vi. A VM with DirectPath I/O can directly access the physical NIC instead of using an emulated/paravirtualized one, providing additional performance by saving CPU cycles and giving access to hardware features not yet supported by vSphere, like TCP Offload engine or SSL offload. VMware recommends using DirectPath I/O only for workloads with very high packet rates.

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Citrix just announced the general availability of Citrix XenDesktop 5. This version is the follow-up of the latest version available until now XenDesktop 4.1 Service Pack 1 which was released in August this year. virtualization.info already reported on the new features in October this year, mentioning release was expected in H4 of this year.

The following new features are included:

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Analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has released details about its forthcoming forecast on the server virtualization market called: Server Virtualization Market Forecast and Analysis, 2009-2014

The forecast is based on 10 In-depth interviews with IT directors in the U.S. which provides qualitative data and is supplemented with 400 quantitative surveys with U.S. and regional based IT directors.

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CRN published an article last month containing an interview with Jeffrey Hewitt, who is vice president of research at Gartner. The interview is based on the outcome of the quarterly server sales report which is released by Gartner, the report states that in the third quarter of 2010 worldwide servers shipments totaled about 2.2 million units, up 14.2 percent compared to the same timeframe in 2009. This resulted in a in a total factory revenue of $12.3 billion which is 15.3 percent more compared to that same period in 2009.

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Veeam announced that it has received the Certificate of Networthiness (CoN) from the U.S. army for the Veeam Backup & Replication product. The version certified is version 4.x and certification of the latest version, 5.0 which was released in October this year is on its way.

Receiving the CoN accreditation assures Veeam Backup & Replication meets strict U.S. Army and Department of Defense (DoD) standards for security, compatibility and sustainability. The CoN accreditation is required by all enterprise software products functioning within the U.S. Army Enterprise Infrastructure Network and applies to all Army Reserve, National Guard and DoD organizations that use this network, which means that Veaam can now sell their Backup & Replication product to those instances.

MokaFive today announced version 3.0 of its security wrapper for hosted virtualization platforms called Suite, introducing full support for Windows 7. This version is the follow-up of version 2.8 which was released in May this year.

MokaFive has a slightly different approach in providing virtual desktops to end-users, called a Live-PC in the MokaFive suite. A Live-PC is managed centrally, but runs locally on Macintosh or Windows based computers after users downloaded their Live-PC via a Web link. The VM runs inside software virtualization environments like VMware Player or Fusion, Virtual Box or Parallels Workstation. MokaFive is still expected to release a client Hypervisor called the MokaFive BareMetal in 2011 as reported by virtualization.info in June this year.

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Symantec has announced that its endpoint security, messaging security and endpoint management solutions have been optimized for density and performance in virtual environments.

By randomizing virus definition updates and scheduled scans across the VM’s hosted on the virtualization platform, Symantec minimizes the impact of these tasks on the hardware resources. This randomization feature is available from Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 Maintenance Release 3 making Symantec the last Security Software vendor providing a VDI friendly security solution.

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While Microsoft releases more and more details about the next version of Virtual Machine Manager 2012 , Microsoft will also make available Service Pack 1 for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 Release 2, which is now in Release Candidate status making it feature complete. Upgrading from this Release Candidate to the eventual Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version will be supported.

Service Pack 1 will add support for the new features which will be included into Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, like Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.

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