virtualization.info Editors

Last week IDC published its Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker for Q4 2009, reporting an increase in the amount of servers used for virtualization.

18.2% of all new servers shipped in the last quarter of last year in fact were virtualized, compared to 15.2% in the same period of 2008.
Despite that, the total amount of virtualized servers in 2009 was 5% less than in 2008, with a 14% decline in spending for virtualization hosts.

Virtualization software revenue didn’t go much better:

Worldwide virtualization software revenue for all CPU types declined 10% year over year in 4Q09 to $447 million, thanks primarily to economic pressures and an increasingly competitive marketplace. Virtualization licenses increased 13% year over year and 21% sequentially in the quarter but declined 7% for all of 2009.

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VMware developed a workload simulator to test VDI environments with View and Windows virtual desktops called Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Simulator (RAWC).

The company recently released version 1.1. which introduces Windows 7 workload simulation along with Windows XP, Office 2007, Windows Media Player and other technologies that are common in today’s Windows desktop environments.

Unfortunately the very interesting tool is not available for end-users but just for VMware Partners.

Thanks to Yellow Bricks for the news.

The adoption of cloud computing implies facing and solving a number of remarkable challenges. The security aspect is probably the most discussed ever but another key point that ISVs, cloud providers and customers have to agree on is licensing.

Licensing of guest operating systems and their applications in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms is a critical aspect to consider when evaluating the economics of this technology. And really a few players are actively discussing it.
So it’s with a lot of interest that virtualization.info reports about the activity around Amazon and its Xen-based EC2 IaaS cloud.

Last month Microsoft and Amazon announced a new pilot program that allows their customers to extend their existing Windows Server Enterprise Agreement (EA) licenses, plus Software Assurance (SA), to the instances they have inside EC2.

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Last week Oracle announced the availability of VirtualBox 3.2 beta 1 (build 60785).

The upcoming new version is going to introduce a remarkable number of new features, including:

• Support for memory overcommit (ballooning only, 64bit guest operating systems only)
• Support for CPU hot-plugging (Linux guest OSes and Windows Server 2008 Data Center Edition 64bit) and hot-removing (Linux guest OSes only)
• Support for Large Pages

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After releasing version 2.1 in December 2009, Microsoft is preparing to launch a major new version of its virtual machines patch management tool: Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST).

VMST 3.0, currently in beta, introduces a number of interesting features like:

• Patching of offline virtual machines in a System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) library
• Patching of stopped and saved state virtual machines on a host
• Patching of virtual machine templates
• Support for manual copy of update packages into offline virtual hard disks in a SCVMM library
• Support Hyper-V Live Migration (requires Windows Server 2008 R2 failover clusters)

For most of its back-end server products Microsoft also offers a so called Best Practices Analyzer (BPA): a scan tool that examines the environment and returns the list of configuration mistakes that could be fixed.

There’s one for App-V 4.5, and now there’s one for Hyper-V 2008 R2 too (at least for the version that is included in Windows Server 2008 R2).

The free tool analyzes the configuration of Windows, of Hyper-V (including its virtual networking and virtual storage) and of existing virtual machines:

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At the beginning of March VKernel released an interesting free tool called Capacity View.

The idea is to provide an extremely simple dashboard for Windows that summarizes the virtual infrastructure elements, the resources allocation and the amount of alerts that VMware vCenter is raising at any given moment.

This is not something that VMware administrators can’t have in other ways, but the value is in the way the data is presented, which makes information access faster.

Last week VKernel decided to use the same approach to solve another problem: understanding what’s happening inside the virtual machines.

The free dashboard AppVIEW 1.0 in fact displays information about just five virtual machines, listing the status of applications inside them over a month period:

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As expected, Virtual Bridges recently released version 4.0 of its VDI platform VERDE.

The new product introduces a least a couple of interesting additional capabilities:

• Support for the NoMachine NX remote protocol
• Bi-directional user data synchronization in offline VDI scenarios

On top of that VERDE 4.0 introduces the much expected web management console, while retaining the command line interface that exists since early versions.

VERDE 4.0 is available for on-premises installation or through the RackSpace Cloud, thanks to a recent agreement between the two companies.

At the beginning of April, MokaFive secured its third round of funding, collecting almost $40M in four years.

Just one month after, the company finally releases a new version of its security wrapper for hosted virtualization platforms: Suite 2.8

The MokaFive foundation engine included in Suite, Live PC, leverages a hosted virtualization platform to control and secure a virtual machine.
At the beginning the product used VMware Player. Then MokaFive decided to switch the engine to Parallels Workstation. Then back to VMware Player and VMware Fusion.
Now Suite 2.8 introduces beta support for another virtualization engine: Oracle VirtualBox (not clear what version).

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This week, during the Management Summit (MMS) 2010 conference, Microsoft showed some of the features that customers will see in the next version of System Center product family, due in 2011.

virtualization.info followed the live keynotes (day 1 and day 2) and reported a few notes on Twitter.
One of the most significant things said on stage is that next version of Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will introduce support for the upcoming server-side version of App-V, apparently officially titled Server App-V.
It’s quite safe to assume that Server App-V won’t come out before next year if its management console is due for that timeframe.

Microsoft summarized some of the key information provided during the event on its corporate blog Dynamic Data Center Alliance:

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