virtualization.info Editors

While waiting to see if Microsoft has any major announcement to make today and/or tomorrow at its Management Summit conference, virtualization.info is able to report about a number of potential features for Azure that the company is evaluating behind the scene.

The first one is a capability for customers to use Azure as a Content Distribution Network (CDN) like Akamai or Amazon S3, and to define specific policies on how to route incoming traffic across multiple instances of an application inside the Azure CDN.

The second one is the capability to provide a set of technologies (like transparent routing across secure channels and network fencing) to bridge on-premises data centers with the Azure facility, creating the same hybrid cloud model that VMware plans to deliver with its upcoming vCloud Service Director (codename project Redwood) and that CloudShare delivers today.

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Yesterday Microsoft announced the release of System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010 and System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010.

The new version of SCE is based on the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 engine, and so it supports physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations, virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migrations of VMware virtual machines, Live Migration, PRO workload optimization technology, and a number of additional things:

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Yesterday Microsoft announced the release of System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010 and System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010.

The new version of SCDPM, in beta since October 2009, introduces the following new capabilities:

• Support for Hyper-V R2 (including the stand-alone version and the one that comes with Windows)

• Support for Live Migration scenarios using cluster-shared volumes (CSV)

• Restore VMs to alternate Hyper-V hosts

• Individual file-item restore from host-based backups, so you can protect the entire virtual machine from the host (no guest agent required), but selectively restore individual files from inside the VHDs

Tomorrow Microsoft will kick off its Management Summit (MMS) 2010 in Las Vegas and while there is no information about the keynotes content, we may have some important announcements related to virtualization and cloud computing.

The conference tagline this year in fact says “Manage the Future – Desktop to Cloud”. More importantly, Microsoft specifically advertised the April 20 and 21 keynotes live streams on its virtualization blog, which is something pretty unusual, with hinted about “demos of new and upcoming products”.

Microsoft is expected to unveil its plans to compete against Amazon with a portion of Azure able to work as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. Or at least this is what the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie suggested five months ago.

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At the beginning of March Microsoft released App-V 4.6 introducing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

At that time the platform version for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) didn’t include support for 64bit guest operating systems, which Microsoft released a the of the last week.

Thanks to Bink.nu for the news.

Three months after the previous release, Quest announces version 7.1 of its VDI connection broker vWorkspaces.

The new build introduces a number of new features including:

• Microsoft RDP acceleration for WAN links (EOP Xtream)
• Support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop (RD) Connection Broker
• Support for Remote Desktop (RD) RemoteApp for Hyper-V and Session Hosts/Terminal Servers
• Support for Hyper-V Differencing Disks through System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
• Support for virtual desktops load balancing across multiple Hyper-V hosts
• Support for Microsoft App-V 4.6

Today CloudShare announces the availability of FastUpload technology as part of their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

FastUpload includes the secure channel to upload virtual machines from a VMware infrastructure and the virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion process needed to use them to the CloudShare online facility is a method to upload VMware virtual machines on the CloudShare facility reducing the transfer time.
It seems to have much in common with what the VMware vCloud Service Director (codename Project Redwood) is expected to deliver but it’s actually extremely different.

CloudShare claims that FastUpload can convert upload entire VMware data centers in just 15 minutes, the press announcement isn’t clear about this point but it’s quite evident that the indicated time doesn’t include the virtual machines uploading process, which depends on multiple factors.  by using a patent-pending approach to reduce the amount of data to transfer. But it’s way more complicated than that.

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Despite a tight business partnership, Teradici continued to operate independently after the September 2008 deal with VMware.
The company even secured a Series C round of funding staking $43.3M.

After a long focus on the software-only implementation of PCoIP for View 4.0, Teradici launches a new product on its own: PCoIP Management Console.

The product is able to perform a number of tasks on PCoIP-powered thin clients, which several vendors OEM from Teradici:

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In December 2009 Red Hat announced the conversion of SPICE, the remote desktop protocol invented by Qumranet, into an open source technology.

It’s too early to understand if the move will facilitate or not the adoption of SPICE against Microsoft RDP (and its upcoming enhancement RemoteFX), Citrix HDX and VMware/Teradici PCoIP.
The first feedback is not exactly positive: the open source version of Red Hat SPICE protocol is unusable says Virtual Bridges.

Meanwhile SPICE has been included in the freedesktop.org project, an organization born exactly ten years ago to “encourage cooperation among open source desktops for the X Window System”.
The mission statement, edited last time three years ago, doesn’t seem to include specific goals around VDI:

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When VMware launched its stellar IPO in August 2007, many suggested that its parent company EMC may sell the virtualization vendor.
But over the years EMC reiterated multiple times that it has no intention to do so and that it would continue to keep around 80% of the ownership.

Quite the opposite, the company is buying back VMware stocks: TheStreet in fact just informed that EMC bought back 160,000 VMW shares, equal to approximately $9.1M.