virtualization.info Editors

Wil van Antwerpen recently collected and published a number of evidences that may prove VMware has no plans to continue the development of VMware Server, once called GSX Server.

One is that the security advice VMSA-2010-0007 includes the following warning:

End of General Support for VMware Server 2.0 is 2011-06-30, users should plan to upgrade to the newest release of either ESXi or VMware Player.

The last version of Server released has been 2.0.2, out more than one year ago, but the 2.0 major update came out in October 2008.

During this time frame, apparently, VMware didn’t fix a number of issues (like VMSA-2009-0016 and VMSA-2010-0005) despite the customers support agreements in place.

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Just a few minutes ago VMware released the information about a new training certification program called VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP).

VCAP is obviously focused on vSphere and other 4.0 products wave, and it’s divided into two sub-certs: Datacenter Administration and Datacenter Design.

Both require that candidates already hold the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) status.
None of them requires attending a mandatory classroom or workshop but VMware suggests specific training paths:

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VMware plans to increase its headcount up to a quarter during this year, according to a quote published by Reuters.

The company has over 7700 employees according to the information provided during the last earnings call.

The US startup Liquidware Labs entered the capacity planning market in October 2009 with the first rebranded version of vmSight, the company/product acquired exactly one year ago. 
That first product was called Stratusphere 4.5 which the company updates today to version 4.6.

Stratusphere 4.6 ships with new features:

• an assessment technique that allows to monitor users by attaching a stealth agent to their Microsoft Active Directory account through Group Policy
• a user experience calibration technique (Stratusphere UX) that measures the performance of their existing workstation and allows IT administrators to define them and good or bad to set a baseline metric. As soon as performance further degrades IT administrators are notified.

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Like Novell, Red Hat too is working on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing management tool.

CIOUpdate in fact reports that the company is developing a commercial implementation of the open source project Deltacloud.

At the moment Deltacloud is not a complete management software that can be compared to products like Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) or Abiquo.
It’s rather an API that can abstract the access to multiple, 3rd parties cloud computing platforms like Amazon EC2, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) or a future on-premises VMware vCloud implementation. What the industry has started to call a meta cloud.

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While PlateSpin executives continue to leave the company, Novell is busy refocusing its go-to-market strategy on cloud computing.

In December 2009 the company announced two upcoming products as part of the PlateSpin portfolio: codename Atlantic and codename Bluestar.
The former has been previewed at the BrainShare EMEA 2010 conference last week.

Officially called Novell Cloud Manager, the self-service provisioning portal for multiple hypervisors, is expected to be released in summer 2010 but Novell already started the Early Adopter program.

Novell published a clip of the conference keynote that includes a live demo of the product.

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Exactly one year ago virtualization.info covered the departure of a notable number of PlateSpin executives from Novell.

There’s no way to know how many members of PlateSpin are still at Novell after the acquisition, but apparently the departures continue:

• Ari Glaizel, co-founder of PlateSpin and main develop of the mighty PowerConvert, has been the Product Manager of PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect for almost two years and a half at Novell.
  He just left to join NexJ Systems as Senior Product Manager.
• Peter Dyer has been Product Manager of PlateSpin Recon for almost one year and a half in Novell. He left in January to join Veeam as Systems Engineer.

One of the original PlateSpin executives still at Novell is John Stetic, currently Director of Product Management at Novell.

Just a couple of weeks ago, PHD Virtual announced its intention to extend its support beyond VMware ESX, embracing Citrix virtualization platforms for the near future. The company even presented a preview of their backup/restore solution for XenServer called Backup for Citrix XenServer at the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco.

And now, just a few days after, the company announces that Citrix is investing in them.
The undisclosed sum is part of new round led by the virtualization vendor and Insight Venture Partner.

Last but not least, the flagship product esXpress is no more. To reflect the new strategy PHD Virtual just renamed it Virtual Backup for VMware ESX.

It’s with a lot of skepticism that today we reports about the Propalms entrance in the VDI space.

The company announced the same identical thing in January 2008.
At that time the pitched product was Virtual Desktop Manager, expected to arrive as a module of the flagship solution called TSE.

Virtual Desktop Manager was indeed included as part of TSE 6.0 beta, bringing in support for Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware ESX, but for some mysterious reason it only supported VMware Server inside TSE 6.0 GA.

With just VMware Server support, Propalms didn’t even bother to promote its connection broker and in fact failed to attract any interest from customers.

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Yesterday Novell announced the Service Pack 1 for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11.

The package seems strictly focused on virtualization, as it includes the new Xen 4.0 and introduces for the first time support for KVM.

More than that, SLES 11 SP1 ships with Linux Integration Services (LIS) for Microsoft Hyper-V, something that no other distribution offers today.
The most wanted version of LIS is the 2.1 which introduces support for 4 vCPUs per virtual machine, and despite it still is in Release Candidate status Novell may be in time to include it as this Service Pack 1 is scheduled for a June 2 release.

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