virtualization.info Editors

In October, VMware updated its virtualization platform Workstation and Player and its platform wrapper ACE to build 301548. Now VMware has updated the products to build 324285 which is a maintenance release for the three products.

Workstation version 7.1.3 is a so called maintenance which only contains bug fixing, detailed in the release notes.

VMware player version 3.1.2 also contains bug fixes as detailed in the release notes and VMware ACE 2.7.2 only contains bug fixes as detailed in the release notes as well.

During Microsoft’s educational event Teched Europe in Berlin beginning this month, Bernard Tritsch, CTO of Immidio presented a session called: RDP, RemoteFX, ICA/HDX, EOP and PCoIP – VDI Remoting Protocols Turned Inside Out. The session presents the outcome of unbiased testing of different remoting protocols in LAN and WAN situations. These testings and findings were performed together with Shawn Bass an independant consultant, who is very active in the server based computing community.

The session starts with explaining the desktop composition, which consists of different ways to present graphics and multimedia, namely GDI, DirectX, PDF, OpenGL, Windows Presentation Foundation, Flash, Silverlight, videos and animations, and what makes up the desktop remoting architecture.

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Ben Armstrong, Virtualization Program Manager at Microsoft posted an interesting article about how time synchronization works in Hyper-V.

Concerning time synchronization there are a couple of problems, the first one is related to virtual machines which lose track of time. This problem is related to the fact that most operating systems use the hardware clock (RTC) at boot to determine time, and once booted based on that time have a mechanism which calculates time. Problem is that this calculation is based on assumptions which aren’t valid for virtual machines, this can cause a drift in time calculations.

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Pancetera, the company which provides management and optimization for virtual storage in VMware has released Pancetera Unite version 2.0.2. This version is the follow up of version 1.2.1. which was released in September this year.

The main new features in this release are integration with change block tracking from vSphere and SmartRead 2.0. Besides that an option is now provided to install an IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) client in the Pancetera Unite virtual appliance in order to backup VMware environments.

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Yesterday Novell finally announced a deal to sell its assets to Attachmate Corporation and another entity, CPTN Holdings LLC, created in early November and controlled by Microsoft for $2.2B. 
In September, virtualization.info tried to picture a scenario where VMware was the new Novell’s owner, according to rumors about a talk between the two. But just a few days later the company’s CEO ruled out the possibility while Reuters reported that potential buyers were not keen to own the NetWare business unit.

The closed deal involves no less than 882 patents, apparently assigned to CPTN Holdings for $450M, and a remarkable number of virtualization and cloud computing products.

The PlateSpin virtualization portfolio
First of all there is the whole PlateSpin product portfolio, which Novell acquired in February 2008.
Such portfolio includes physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migration tools, capacity planning tools and disaster recovery tools.
Despite Novell did a poor job in retaining the value of the brand, and the talents behind it, these products were once considered leading solutions by customers.

Unless Attachmate plans to become a virtualization vendor soon, these products are not appealing to them, while they may be extremely valuable to Microsoft.

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Besides releasing the OpenXenManager tool the XenseMaking project also provides the XenWebManager tool.

XenWebManager is a web-based open source clone of Citrix Xencenter. With XenWebManager you only need a browser for manage your server and virtual machines. With full packages you only need have installed python (2.4+). For console access you only need a browser with java plug-in or a browser with html5 websockets.

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OpenXenManager , which is part of the XenseMaking project is a Open Source clone of Citrix XenCenter which works on Linux, BSD, Windows and MacOSX. While Citrix XenCenter only runs on Windows, OpenXenManager basically runs on every platform which is capable of running python. The product is currently in alpha stage.

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Virtual Bridges has made generally available version 5 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform VERDE. This version is the follow up of version 4.2 which was released in August this year.

VERDE provides VDI connection brokers for KVM, and an offline VDI solution called Live Environment Access Format (LEAF), which is actually a lightweight Linux distribution featuring KVM.

New features in this version:

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Last week Oracle released the first rebranded version of Solaris since the Sun acquisition: Solaris Express 11.

The OS has a few, but interesting new features for its embedded OS virtualization platform, Solaris Zones (formerly Solaris Containers):

• Virtual networking
  Each zone can have its own virtual NIC, with quota and priority assigned.
• Support for Solaris 10
  An instance of Solaris 10 can be hosted inside a Solaris 11 zone after a virtual to virtual (V2V) or physical to virtual (P2V) migration, maintaining a fully independent network stack.
• Zone monitoring
  A new command provides resources usage statistics for any specific zone.
• Administration Delegation
  Specific administration tasks related to any zone can be delegated through a role-based access control (RBAC) model.

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Quest has made generally available version 6.5. of its monitoring tool for virtual infrastructures vFoglight. As reported by virtualization.info in March this year, this version now supports both Hyper-V and ESX. Support for XenServer is still expected as well.

This release of vFoglight will be part of the virtual infrastructure monitoring solutions suite together with vFoglight Storage 1.0, which was released in September and vFoglight Quickview, a free version of vFoglight announced in June this year which can manage a single vCenter server.

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