virtualization.info Editors

For years now, the virtualization community has discussed the partnership between Citrix and Microsoft around virtualization, started when the former acquired XenSource in August 2007.

At the end of last week, Simon Crosby, CTO of Data Center & Cloud division at Citrix, published a new post on his corporate blog, trying to clarify, once again, the dynamics of this partnership. 
Compared to the past attempts, the go-to-market strategy detailed in this new post is more explicit than ever (emphasis our):

…Neither company [Microsoft and Citrix] wants to monetize the hypervisor.

…The Citrix position is that the role of XenServer is to offer a compelling feature set that permits Citrix and Microsoft to compete successfully with VMware…

…If a customer chooses XenServer today because it offers features not present in Hyper-V, (such as IntelliCache) the customer can be sure that Citrix has no interest in locking the customer to that choice: XenServer is 100% compatible with Hyper-V and if the customer replaces XenServer with Hyper-V in the future, we have no issue with that whatsoever…

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Once upon a time, VMware and Oracle were great business partners. VMware probably spent a great amount of resources in fine tuning its hypervisor for a smooth execution of Oracle products, and it certainly spent a huge effort in educating the customers about the viability of such virtualized solution.

In mid 2006 Oracle publicly declared its frustration for the lack of standardization in the virtualization market. It eventually decided to enter the hardware virtualization market itself, and launched the Oracle VM virtual infrastructure just one year later. As the company immediately restricted support to its own hypervisor only, the partnership with VMware ended.

The acquisition of Sun and Virtual Iron virtualization technologies suggested that Oracle would never change its mind about the topic, using restricted support as a tool to gain market share.
Meanwhile, VMware continued, for years, to recommend Oracle products on ESX and Oracle’s competitor SAP has been more than happy to highlight its broad support for market hypervisors.

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Last week virtualization.info reported about the release of a paper titled: Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide by VMware.

On November 9th, the Microsoft Exchange product team responded on that paper with a blog post titled: Answering Exchange Virtualization Questions and Addressing Misleading VMware Guidance.

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Michel Roth, who works for the desktop virtualization division of Quest (previously known as the startup Provision Networks, which was acquired by Quest in 2007) and runs the Thincomputing.net blog wrote a great review about the upcoming RemoteFX functionality in Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

The review looks at what RemoteFX exactly is, what it can do (for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures and for Remote Desktop Session Hosts) and cannot do and how it works under the cover.

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HyTrust made generally available version 2.1 of its access control and change management applicance for VMware virtual infrastructures. This version is an update to version 2.0 which was released in March this year.

The HyTrust Appliance is available in multiple editions, including a free Community Edition that protects up to 3 hosts.

Changes in this update:

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While Citrix is playing in both server and desktop virtualization market with XenServer, XenDesktop and now with XenClient, it’s not a secret that the company’s primary focus is desktop virtualization. Citrix’s huge effort in competing with VMware on that front, helped its business partner Microsoft to gain some time and prepare a more VDI-friendly hypervisor.

Specifically, Microsoft had the time to develop two key technologies for VDI: the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) enhancement called RemoteFX (a technology inherited with the acquisition of Calista Technologies in January 2008) and the memory management capability called Dynamic Memory, which is already being promoted as a key enabler for virtual desktop infrastructures.
Microsoft has its own VDI solution, part of the Remote Desktop Services (RDS), but the ultimate goal to maintain control on the physical hardware gives priority to the development of Windows and Hyper-V. Improving Hyper-V for VDI reduces the chances that customers select an alternative back-end hypervisor, ceding control to competitors.

Now that Microsoft has more pieces at the right place, it is also expected to ease its position about licensing and actually start facilitating the VDI adoption.
The company first extended Dynamic Memory to both Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Standard and Web editions, and now it may be preparing a major price reduction for its Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license.

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Cisco, VMware, HyTrust, Savvis and Coalfire have released a paper titled: PCI-Compliant Cloud Reference Architecture. The paper contains 19 pages and details a reference architecture for constructing a cloud architecture meeting the requirements of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS).

PCI DDS defines a set of requirements to protect payment cardholder data, and the environments in which cardholder data is stored, processed or transmitted. The current PCI DDS standard, which is version 2.1 does not specifically address the risks associated with virtual machines and cloud computing, instead they empower PCI Qualified, Security Assessors (QSAs) and vendors to work collaboratively on providing guidelines. In the case of this specific paper, the QSA is Coalfire and the vendors are Cisco, VMware, HyTrust and Savvis.

The paper uses a case of an e-commerce merchant and details its reference architecture using the solutions from the earlier mentioned vendors.

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Microsoft has released version 2.0 of the Self Service Portal for its System Center Virtual Machine Manager product. The product which was announced in July this year during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, is an add-on for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.

The Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal (VMMSSP) is a stand-alone product which can coexist with the already existing self-service portal. The differencing functionality in this version 2.0 of the portal is that the self-service portal provides a way to delegate IT management to groups (called business units within the tool) within an organization while the central organization manages the centralized pool of physical resources (servers, networks, and related hardware).

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VMware has released a beta for a new training called: VMware vCloud: Architecting the VMware Cloud. The training, which will be instructor-led will have a duration of three days.

The course objectives of the training are:

• Install vCloud Director in an environment which the new cloud must co-exist with an existing vSphere environment

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Last week, during the TechEd Europe 2010 conference, Microsoft announced that the upcoming Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, thanks to the Dynamic Memory feature that will ship with it, will increase by 40% the Hyper-V virtual machine density in VDI environments.

Microsoft obtained the result testing Hyper-V R2 SP1 in its labs, running the hypervisor on HP and Dell servers against the now popular Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) benchmark tool offered by Login Consultants.
Thanks to Dynamic Memory, Microsoft has been able to pass from 85 VMs (with Hyper-V R2) to 120 VMs, running Windows 7 and served by a single physical host following specifications defined in the Dell’s Reference Architecture for VDI.

The company also reports that its TAP customers increased their VM density by a value between 25% and 50% for other server workloads and specific usage patterns, even if it doesn’t specify which ones. Hopefully these details will be exposed in an upcoming whitepaper that Microsoft promised to publish.