virtualization.info Editors

At the beginning of the week, the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore released a major update for its vReplicator (formerly esxReplicator).

Version 3.0 introduces the following new features:

• Active Block Mapping (ABM) technology
  ABM filters deleted data blocks so that only active blocks are
  scanned and streamed to the target. White space detection eliminates the need to
  compress, stream, and write zero blocks during the replication process.
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology
  CBT tracks the disk block changes made by the source VM. vReplicator 3.0 can take advantage of CBT, once enabled on the source host, to record the blocks that have changed since the last
  replication pass and transfer them to the target host without scanning the VMDK.
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 virtual machines with thin disks
  When replicating a VM containing thin discs from an ESX 4 host to an ESX 4 host,
  vReplicator 3.0 will create a replica VM with thin discs. In addition, when configuring
  jobs for VMs with thin disks, vReplicator will only show targets that support thin disks.
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Storage vMotion
  It ensures that previously scheduled replication jobs continue to run successfully after one or more of the source disks are SVMotioned.
  In addition, the disks on the SVMotion target datastores are replicated instead of the ones originally configured in the replication jobs.

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Leostream is one of the oldest firm in the x86 virtualization market. The startup survived many years without seeking venture capitals, changing its business focus and product line a couple of times, and facing increasing competition from VMware and others in the VDI market where it is positioned today.

In May 2008, Leostream finally accepted financial help, raising $3 million from Meakem Becker.
Last week the same firm fueled Leostream with another $2 million, as confirmed by Xconomy.

The article mentions that Leostream is not yet profitable, and that Meakem Becker hopes tha this additional cash infusion will be enough to cover operational costs until profitability.

The founder and former CEO of PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February 2008), Stephen Pollack, has just joined the Canadian firm VM6 Software as Board Advisor.

Pollack already sits in the Advisory Board of Embotics since November 2008 and Enomaly since December 2008, and recently joined the board of Kaviza too.

Microsoft has finally launched the public beta of its App-V-powered Office 2010 edition called Click-To-Run (CTR).

Microsoft unveiled its plan to virtualize and stream an edition of its productivity suite this summer, but so far Office 2010 CTR was available only as part of a private beta program.

Last week Microsoft released a new Deployment Kit for App-V beta, for those customers that want to stream Office 2010 using their own App-V infrastructure, and now CTR is in public beta:

Thanks to Bink.nu for the news.

At the end of September virtualization.info published an article suggesting that Microsoft would soon extend the capabilities of Azure to become an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, able to compete against Amazon EC2, the Rackspace Cloud and others.

Last week, during the PCD 2009 conference, the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie confirmed it’s the case, mentioning the capability to move a virtual machine in the cloud.

The same day, in an interview to CNET News, Ozzie further acknowledged that Azure will work as PaaS and IaaS cloud:

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At the end of last week CRN published an interesting piece quoting Chris Akerberg, President and COO of Vizioncore.

Akerberg says that VMware may be soon change its per-CPU pricing scheme to adopt something that is more profitable. And that Vizioncore will have to follow the new strategy.

VMware denied the claim and maybe Akerberg is wrong. But it’s worth to remember that Vizioncore is one of the oldest (and once one of the best) partners VMware has.

At the beginning of November virtualization.info covered an old news about the upcoming launch of Office 2010 powered by App-V.

The product, called Office 2010 Click To Run, will be virtualized and streamed to customers’ desktops on demand. Bink.nu just published some screenshots of it:

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During the weekend VMware released the first Update pack for its vSphere platform.

Update 1 (build 208156) is extremely important as it introduces support for the just released View 4.0.
It also introduces support for:

• up to 160 virtual machines per host (only in HA clusters with 8 hosts or less)
• Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (both 32/64bit) as guest OSes (and as platform for the vSphere Client)
• IBM DB2 as backend database for vCenter Server 4.0

The Update 1 also introduces a new Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool, which can be executed on the ESX hosts to find out issues that may prevent the upgrade.

The startup Hyper9 (in a previous life InovaWave) released last week the second version of its flagship product.

The company can’t stop to rename it: from VI Search and Analytics (before launch) to just Hyper9 to Virtualization Optimization Suite (VOS) to, now, Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO).

Along with the name, also the product focus seems to be changing. 
Version 1.0 was launched in March as the definitive on-premises search engine for virtual infrastructures, showing many similarities with the well respected Splunk.
Version 2.0, launched last week, is extending in many areas, from performance tracking to capacity planning to configuration management:

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Can HP just stay and look at Cisco that merges-without-merging with EMC and VMware slipping into the customers data centers that it dominates today? Of course not.

So it buys 3Com. So it starts to push a little more the partnership with Microsoft and the value of Hyper-V on its hardware.

Part of this effort includes the release of a new reference architecture for customers that are interested in installing a Hyper-V virtual infrastructure inside a BladeSystem c7000 and c3000, with ProCurve networking and EVA storage.

To be honest the 23-pages paper seems much more a marketing brochure than a reference architecture.
HP has to do much more than this to compete with comprehensive documentation that VMware/Cisco/EMC are releasing.