virtualization.info Editors

Last time we heard about Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) was in April, when the company release version 1.0 Service Pack 1.

Microsoft got MED-V (formerly Workspaces) from the acquisition of Kidaro, happened in March 2008.
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. So it’s safe to say that the product got only a minor .1 update in more than two years.

This translates in an enterprise platform that could remarkably change the way virtual desktops are deployed and secured inside the corporate environment, but that is still featuring Virtual PC 2007 SP1 as its underlying engine, a platform originally released in Q1 2007 and updated in Q2 2008.
Microsoft has been so slow and non-committed on this product that there are serious doubts about its plans for it.

Indeed there are, as the company finally unveiled something about MED-V 2.0 and it’s not very promising.

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Yesterday Vizioncore announced the upcoming availability of a new feature for its disaster recovery solution vRanger Pro: FlashRestore.

The technology will allow administrators to boot a virtual machine from its backup image without the need to transfer it back from the backup repository to the production hypervisor.
What actually happens behind the scenes is that vRanger Pro leverages the VMware Storage vMotion technology to relocate the virtual hard drives (VMDK) without downtime.

FlashRestore sounds pretty interesting but there’s a potential problem: the approach may be already patent protected.
In March in fact Veeam announced something that sounds pretty similar as part of their SureBackup strategy: to perform its new Recovery Verification, Backup & Replication 5.0 powers the VMs on directly from their backup archives and puts them into isolated virtual networks where the guest OS and its applications are safely executed.

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In June Oracle released version 3.1.1 of the VDI solution inherited from Sun along with several other virtualization products.
At that time the company introduced support for Microsoft Hyper-V as back-end hypervisor but not yet support for its own hypervisor: Oracle VM.

Version 3.2, released yesterday, doesn’t change things: Oracle VM remains unsupported and the company continues to recommend its other virtualization platform, VirtualBox, as replacement.
Oracle believes so much that its type-2 (aka hosted) virtual machine monitor (VMM) can work for virtual desktop infrastructures that it’s bundling it with Oracle VDI.
Interestingly, the only version bundled is the 32bit one for Solaris 10.

It’s striking that, after more than one year since day Oracle moved to acquire Sun, and the release of Sun xVM VDI 3.0, there’s still no support for Oracle VM.

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In January 2008 the hardware vendor ClearCube decided to spin off its software division and started offering a VDI solution that could work with 3rd party hypervisors and physical servers.

Called VDIworks, the startup largely remained under the radar, while trying to differentiate itself with a proprietary remote desktop protocol called VideoOverIP (VOIP) that launched in June 2009.

It’s unclear how much VDI market share the company gained in a world ruled by Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and Quest, but at least VDIworks is trying to win some niches.
It just released in fact a VDI client for the Apple iPad that supports its VOIP protocol: Fast Remote Desktop.

VDIworks released a video of the app:

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Hyper9, which recently lost his founder and CTO, just announced a new add-on for its management product Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO) 2.5

The product continues to evolve: it started as a search engine for virtual infrastructure and then morphed into what seems an articulated management framework with a pluggable architecture.
According to the public documentation, Hyper9 has the ambitious project to release a plug-in for pretty much every need a virtualization administrator may have: from capacity planning to change management, from performance monitoring to chargeback.

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In the new vSphere 4.1 VMware introduced several enhancements to its Host Profile feature, like the capability to roll out administrator password changes.

For the occasion, yesterday VMware published a new 29-pages paper about it: Host Profiles: Technical Overview. 
The document covers several use cases, including the ones that involve advanced profile editing and customization, like when an administrator needs exceptions in host configuration variability.

Interestingly, the paper introduces the new marketing pitch for vSphere (emphasis added):

VMware vSphere 4.1 (“vSphere”) is the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming datacenters into dramatically simplified environments to enable the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services…

In 2008 the company used to refer to vSphere as a Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS). The company still thinks in this way. What slightly changed is the definition: from VDC-OS to C-OS.

While VMware has planned to drop the guest operating systems patching capability from Update Manager (VUM), it seems to continue investing in the product. 
The company just released a very handy tool for VUM capacity planning called Sizing Estimator.

Sizing Estimator can forecast VUM 4.1 database size, patch store disk space, and temporary disk space by checking a number of parameters.
Its output includes:

• VUM database and server deployment model recommendations
• Initial disk space utilization in MB for database, patch store, and temporary space
• Monthly disk space utilization growth in MB for database and patch store
• The upper and lower bounds on the estimation, assuming a 20% variance

Definitively recommended.

The VMware’s annual conference, the VMworld, will take place at the end of August in San Francisco and while its agenda includes many interesting sessions for many different kind of virtualization professionals, in July virtualization.info published a short list of sessions recommended for everybody.

It turns out that VMware recorded a video teaser for some of them, and one includes a hint about a major networking feature that the company may announce during the show keynotes.

The session is TA8361 – Future Direction of Networking Virtualization, performed by Howie Xu, Director of R&D at VMware.
Xu is at the company since June 2002 and has been in charge of the Distribute Virtual Network (vDS) component of vSphere architecture, of the integration with the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch, and of the Network I/O Control feature introduced in vSphere 4.1. 
He’s also one of the people behind several VMware’s acquisitions, including the B-hive one (May 2008) and the Blue Lane Technologies one (October 2008).

Xu is directly responsible for the VMware’s vision and company-wide strategy about networking and I/O virtualization, so what he says in his video is definitively reliable.

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The analysis firm Forrester just released a cost analysis of XenDesktop 4.0 used for VDI, commissioned by Citrix in March.

For the analysis Forrester used the San Jose Campbell Union High School District case study, which had 2,500 physical desktops and 500 laptops.
The school replaced this environment with only 500 virtual desktops and 200 virtualized applications, accessed by 2,500 students and hosted on 40 physical server along with another 100 virtual servers for the back-end.

Interestingly, the virtual desktops boot up and down every 90 minutes, according to the classes schedule. This makes the case study slightly different than the average corporate environment where the workforce mostly uses its virtual machines non-stop.

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After the benchmark about Office SharePoint Server 2007 (171,000 concurrent users on a single server), VMware published a new performance report related to its new vSphere 4.1 virtual infrastructure. This time it’s about SAP.

Once again the company measured the performance of the system using a single physical host: a Dell PowerEdge R905 4U rackmount server with 4 AMD Quad-Core Opteron 8384 CPUs and 128GB RAM.

vSphere 4.1 started serving a single virtual machine with 2 vCPUs and 16GB vRAM, loaded with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2, SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 4 and IBM DB2 9.7.
The test was repeated with multiple VMs, with 2 and 4 vCPUs each.

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