virtualization.info Editors

As most virtualization.info readers and VMware customers know, VMware currently has two CTOs: Stephen Herrod, one of the very first engineering directors that joined the company in its early days (Herrod also is the Senior Vice President of R&D) and Scott Davis, co-founder and former President and CTO at Virtual Iron, who was promoted CTO of the Desktop Virtualization business unit at VMware in September 2009.

During the summer VMware appointed a third one, Paul Strong, as confirmed by Herrod in a video interview recorded earlier this week at the VMworld Europe 2010 conference in Copenhagen (read virtualization.info live coverage here).

Strong, appointed as CTO of the EMEA region (can we expect an APAC CTO too?) in August, comes from eBay, where he has been a Distinguished Research Scientist for almost five years.
He was responsible for research into Enterprise Grid Computing, driving eBay’s long term Enterprise Grid strategy/vision.
At the same time, Strong has been involved in the Open Grid Forum activity as Chairman first and then Secretary of the board of directors for almost three years.

Read more



The VMware vCloud Software Development Kit (SDK) for PHP provides programming interfaces to the VMware vCloud Director. You can use the PHP language binding to interact with the VMware vCloud Director.

The current version of VMware vCloud SDK for PHP beta is based on VMware vCloud API version 1.0.

Features:

Read more

VMware has released AppSpeed version 1.5. The product was acquired from B-Hive in May 2008, and soon became part of the VMware product suite.

AppSpeed is a performance analyzer tool that sniffs the network traffic and learns how the applications inside virtual machines usually perform, so it can help to understand the reason of performance issues.

Read more

eG Innovations released version 1.0 of its eG VDI Monitor. eG VDI Monitor which is part of the eG Enterprise Suite is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) end-to-end service monitoring solution capable of monitoring all involved components in a VDI infrastructure. The product supports the Citrix, LeoStream and VMware View connection brokers. Besides that eG VDI Monitor supports all three major hypervisors and VDI solutions from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, but also mixed configuration environments consisting of products from these vendors.

As mentioned before, the product provides end-to-end monitoring , which means that it tracks performance inside the guest OS giving details about the user activity, at the Virtual Machine (VM) level and outside the VM, which consists of the Virtual Infrastructure, but also components like firewalls, network switches and routers.

Read more

Brian Ehlert, who is a Senior Software Test Engineer at Citrix Labs posted a blog article on how to migrate a Citrix XenDesktop environment from VMware to Hyper-V.

This blog article provides a step by step guide on how to migrate from VMware to Hyper-V as the virtualization platform for the XenDesktop VDI Solution.

Read more

At the beginning of this week Microsoft announced the public beta program for Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) 2.0.

The technology, acquired from the US startup Kidaro in March 2008 and originally called Workspaces, is what virtualization.info calls a platform wrapper: a remotely managed layer that envelops a virtual machine, defining things like the network access policy, the expiration time, the virtual hard drive encryption, etc.
With MED-V Microsoft has a very limited number of competitors, including VMware, Virtual Computer, RingCube and MokaFive.

The product was rebranded just a couple of months after the acquisition but Microsoft took an entire year to re-release it. MED-V 1.0, released as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) in April 2009, didn’t introduce any new feature compared to the Kidaro original solution and it is safe to say that the product got only a minor .1 update in more than two years. 
The lack of active development seen so far raised concerns about the Microsoft commitment on enterprise desktop virtualization.

Read more

At the end of September Citrix announced the upcoming availability of XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 (codename Cowley). This is a significant release as it finally includes the Open vSwitch technology and the distributed virtual switching capabilities that come with it, as well as the VMLogix technology acquired in August 2010.

A couple of weeks after the opening of the beta program, a number of key details emerges about the product, including a number of limitations that is worth reporting:

Q: Which edition of XenServer will be required for Distributed Virtual Switching?
A: The Open vSwitch will be included in all editions of XenServer, including Free XenServer. The vSwitch Controller functionality will be a licensed part of a premium XenServer edition.
…
Q: Will the Open vSwitch support Link Aggregation?
A: Not in the first release. We are looking into this kind of functionality for a future release.

Read more

Paul Wilson, architect working in the Citrix Worlwide Consulting Solutions team, hosted a webinar “Designing Scalable XenDesktop Farms” on 22 September. This webinar is still available on Citrix TV.

Based on this webinar he created a blog post giving answers to the questions he wasn’t able to answer at that time.

Here is a snippet from that blogpost:

Read more

VMTurbo, who entered the virtualization market in April this year announced the availability of VMTurbo Planner and VMTurbo Watchdog, both offered in the same Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) based virtual appliance, which already contains VMTurbo Monitor and Host Reporter.
 
VMTurbo Planner is the key piece of the suite, it can use the statistics which are collected and information about under and over-utilization from to offer Capacity Management recommendations.
 
VMTurbo Planner is capable of:

Read more

Oracle has released VM VirtualBox version 3.2.10. This version which is a maintenance release, is the follow up of version 3.2.8. which was released in August this year.

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a hosted desktop virtualization platform and used to be known under the name Sun VirtualBox, and was renamed after Sun was acquired by Oracle in April 2009.

Features:
• Bugfixes
• Support for Ubuntu 10.10
• Support for Fedora 14