virtualization.info Editors

Just before the Christmas break, Citrix released a minor update for its orchestration framework Workflow Studio.

The new version 2.0.1. doesn’t introduce any change in the product but extends the existing activity libraries and delivers a couple of new ones.
Here’s the extended/new libraries about virtualization:

• [NEW] Citrix XenDesktop Activity Library
  • Activities that create, delete, and retrieve desktop definitions and manage desktop groups.
• [EXTENDED] Citrix XenServer Activity Library 
  • Automate the process of taking snapshots, backing up VMs, and backing up VM metadata for site migration and disaster recovery scenarios.
  • Automate the installation and update of tools on guest VMs.
• [EXTENDED] Citrix XenApp Activity Library
  Now includes activities that support automated application streaming packaging and application management.

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Last week Parallels released an update for its desktop virtualization product.

The new build (9308) comes just one month after the official launch of Desktop 5.0. It introduces a number of fixes and a few new capabilities:

• Experimental support for Fedora 12 Xorg 1.7
• Experimental Support for Mandriva 2010
• Support for kernel options with Mac OS X Server guest OSes

Last Friday Microsoft announced the acquisition of Opalis Software, a run-book automation company founded in 1998 in Canada with 70 employees (according to LinkedIn) and over 300 customers (according to Opalis).

Data center orchestration is one of the most important areas where virtualization will expand in the coming years, as soon as customers will realize that their virtual infrastructures are reaching such a scale and complexity to become inefficient.

VMware and Citrix already invested in this area.
VMware acquired the Swiss startup Dunes Technologies in September 2007, and it’s now offering their solution for free, as part of vSphere 4.0 platform, under the name of Orchestrator.
Citrix offers an orchestration framework called Workflow Studio since January 2009.

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Yesterday Veeam released version 4.1 of its disaster recovery solution Backup & Replication.

The major new feature is that the product can now replicate the paid/licensed version of VMware ESXi leveraging the VMware vStorage APIs (so far it could only backup it).
The replication of free version of ESXi is not available, according to what VMware required in June.

Backup & Replication 4.1 also introduces SNMP notifications (reporting the status per-job and per-VM) and a brand new, stand-alone utility, available for Windows and Linux, called Extract that customers can store on tapes with saved data, to accelerate the restore process.

At the last Microsoft PDC conference, the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said that customers will be able to upload their (Hyper-V) virtual machines inside the soon-to-be-launched cloud computing platform Windows Azure.

More clearly, Ozzie said that Microsoft will support the hosting mode offered by Xen-based (like Amazon EC2) and VMware-based cloud architectures, but, besides that, the company didn’t provide any detail about the availability of this IaaS component or the way it works.

The only thing we know for sure is that Microsoft is preparing a toolkit to guide its customers to extend their virtual data center into the Azure cloud.
Now we also know that this toolkit is going to be available in March 2010.

The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) component of Azure will be launched January 1, 2010. Maybe Microsoft plans to announce an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) part too, and that one will arrive in March.

Herco van Brug, Senior Consultant at PQR, last week released an interesting paper about the storage implications in VDI environments.

The 14-pages paper, titled VDI & Storage: Deep Impact, covers an area of virtual desktop infrastructures that is not investigated enough most time:

…when implementing a VDI infrastructure certain points need to be addressed. First of all, the TCO/ROI calculation may not be as rosy as some people suggest. Secondly, the performance impact on applications, specifically multimedia and 3D applications, needs to be investigated. And finally, don’t forget to check licensing aspects, as this can be a very significant factor in VDI infrastructure.
While centralized desktop computing provides important advantages, all resources come together in the data centre. That means that the CPU resources, memory resources, networking and disk resources all need to be facilitated from a single point – the virtual infrastructure.
The advantage of a central infrastructure is that, when sized properly, it is more flexible in terms of resource consumption than decentralized computing. It is also more capable of handling a certain amount of peak loads, as these only occur once in a while on a small number of systems in an average data centre.
But what if the peak loads are sustained and the averages are so high that the cost of facilitating them is disproportionate to that of decentralized computing?
As it turns out, there is a hidden danger to VDI. There’s a killer named “IOPS”…

RSA, the EMC security division acquired in June 2006, just published a recommended reading for any VMware customer interested in VDI: A Guide for Deploying and Administering the RSA Solution for VMware View.

This is a massive 110-pages paper that describes the architecture and step-by-step implementation of a VMware View 4.0 environment secured by RSA products and managed by the EMC Ionix Server Configuration Manager.

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After a couple of months in beta, Citrix releases Essentials 5.5 for Hyper-V just before the holidays.

This version of the management platform for the Microsoft hypervisor includes a new technology called StorageLink Site Recovery.

This feature allows the Hyper-V administrators to control the replication features that their SAN arrays without using multiple consoles. From the Essentials console they can test the recovery process with what-if analysis, and restore the protected VMs in isolated, test networks.

The notable thing is that StorageLink Site Recovery is available for every version of Essentials, including the Express one which is free of charge (but it won’t appear there before Dec. 23).
HP announced its support for this technology a long time ago and now confirms integration with StorageWorks SANs.

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Since the release in May, Cisco updated its virtual switch for VMware virtual infrastructure, the Nexus 1000V, a couple of times.

The second update arrived last week, introducing a number of key features. Most of them are security-oriented and very welcome.

The most prominent anyway is a JAVA-based GUI installer for the Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM).
The GUI allows to perform several actions like create the VMware port groups, VLANs, enable the SSH service, register the Nexus plug-in inside vCenter Server and restart the VSM.
Cisco published  a video to show it in action:

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Today VMware released version 1.2 (build 41671) of its application performance analyzer AppSpeed, announced in January and released for the first time in July.

AppSpeed, acquired from B-Hive in May 2008, is a performance analyzer tool that sniffs the network traffic and learn how the applications inside virtual machines usually perform, so it can help to understand the reason of performance issues.

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