virtualization.info Editors

Microsoft just published a series of four technical documents called Deploying Personal Virtual Desktops, which provides step-by-step guidance to install and configure a VDI environment based on Hyper-V, the Remote Desktop (RD) Connection Broker, the Session Host server the Web Access server, and Windows 7 virtual machines:

• Deploying Virtual Desktop Pools by Using Remote Desktop Web Access Step-by-Step Guide
• Deploying Personal Virtual Desktops by Using RemoteApp and Desktop Connection Step-by-Step Guide
• Deploying Virtual Desktop Pools by Using RemoteApp and Desktop Connection Step-by-Step Guide

Thanks to Bink.nu for the news.

Yesterday Vizioncore announced that Evelyne Bourderioux joined the company as new Sales Director for Southern Europe.

Bourderioux comes from NEC Computers where she was the EMEA Sales Director, and from VMware, where she has been in charge of France Strategic and Named Accounts for over four years.

The US startup Kaviza announced yesterday a “strategic investment” by Citrix. The two companies didn’t disclose the sum or the terms of the deal (round of funding, technology partnership, etc.).

Kaviza offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require a shared storage and dedicated, load balanced connection brokers.
The customer just has to deploy the vendor’s virtual appliance on its hypervisor of choice and he’s ready to go.

This VDI-in-a-box appliance uses the virtualization host local storage (and any other DAS device attached) to store the virtual desktop golden images and their linked clones. 
When deployed in multiple instances, it works as a cluster, replicating/synchronizing its configuration, distributing the virtual desktops across all the available virtualization hosts, and brokering the incoming connections thanks to a patent pending grid architecture. 
Last but not least, it includes a management console for virtual desktop administration: kMGR.

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This week Microsoft finally released Service Pack 1 for its Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V, formerly Kidaro Workspaces) platform, introducing support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

This Service Pack comes exactly one year after the release of MED-V 1.0 and unbelievably, the product is still featuring the ancient Virtual PC 2007 SP1. 
Virtual PC 2007 was released in February 2007, and its only service pack was out in May 2008.
Considering the amount of time needed to release MED-V 1.0 since the Kidaro acquisition (13 months), and the time needed to release this first service pack (additional 12 months), Microsoft could at least replace the virtualization platform with the “new” Windows Virtual PC which is included in Windows 7.

The effort that Microsoft has put in this product still seems less than acceptable and six months ago there already were enough elements to wonder if the company is really committed to enterprise desktop virtualization.

MED-V 1.0 SP1 is now available as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2010 refresh.

This Monday Leostream released version 6.4 of its VDI connection broker.

The new build introduces a number of interesting features:

• a new skinnable web interface (for both the client and the administration consoles)
• resource assignment by policies and authentication
• threshold metrics tracking by SNMP
• support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Previous version of the Connection Broker was released in early February. It seems that Leostream is back with a rapid development lifecycle like in summer 2009.

A few virtualization.info readers may remember that Parallels (formerly SWsoft) has its roots in open source.
Its OS virtualization platform Containers (formerly Virtuozzo) in fact has an open source counterpart called OpenVZ (formerly Open Virtuozzo), which is continuously developed since 2005 thanks to the Parallels sponsorship and support.

OpenVZ requires a tight integration with the Linux to work, so Parallels happens to be one of the top 10 kernel contributor in the world (#9 actually, just behind well-know leaders like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, Intel and Oracle).
Yesterday the company further increased its involvement with the open source community by joining The Linux Foundation.

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MokaFive (formerly moka5) is a US startup that launched in May 2006, targeting the consumer market with a wrapper for hosted virtualization platforms (VMware Player first, Parallels Workstation then) called LivePC.

The idea was to leverage hardware virtualization for mobile productivity by adding interesting features like virtual machines streaming, live updating and sharing through a content catalog.
The consumer market didn’t really embraced the concept and after two years the company decided to shift its focus to the corporate market with additional features around networking and security, like the ones that VMware ACE, Kidaro Workspaces and Sentillion vThere (both acquired by Microsoft) were offering since a while.

In the middle of this transformation the company lost two brand names (SkyBlue Technologies first, moka5 then), two CEOs (including the founder Monica Lam), one Vice President of Marketing, and one Vice President of Engineering.

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At the beginning of March, Citrix and Novell started a new partnership on virtualization.
Both offer commercial grade hypervisors based on Xen, but Novell is extending its interest to KVM, following the rival Red Hat.

Despite the evident competition to win Linux shops, Novell agreed to provide joint technical support for customers running SLES on XenServer, and Citrix agreed to use PlateSpin Recon internally and across its Solutions Advisors partner network.

The deal works quite for Citrix which lacks capacity planning tools as part of its virtual infrastructure and may be not ready to acquire a startup in this space.
It works less well for Novell, which is certainly interested in pushing the PlateSpin business, but continues to give confusing messages about its hypervisor strategy.

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The interest around the new Apple iPad is over the top and, while US customers (rest of the world will have to wait another month) are enjoying over 1,000 applications already, most IT vendors are still evaluating if and how to deliver their solutions on the new gadget.

The screen real estate (9.7”) in fact makes the iPad more usable than the iPhone for a number of tasks, which may lead to a more concrete adoption beyond the consumer market.
One of these tasks for sure is server-based/thin computing, so it’s not a big surprise to see that both Citrix and Wyse literally rushed to deliver their Receiver and PocketCloud apps on iPad since day one.

An alternative approach to remote desktop to bring existing applications on the iPad of course would be hardware virtualization.

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A few weeks ago VMware acknowledged a bug in ESX that translates into poor performance when it runs Microsoft Terminal Services workload on Intel 5500 (codename Nehalem) CPUs with Hyper-Threading (HT) enabled.

The issue emerged in independent benchmarks published with the Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) framework and Citrix has been quick in suggesting that this demonstrates the flaws of the VMware EULA.

The founders of Project VRC rerun the benchmark with the patch and the results are considerably better.