virtualization.info Editors

Yesterday Citrix announced the forthcoming release of XenDesktop 4.0, which will be available November 16.

The Citrix answer to the upcoming VMware View 4.0 (and its software version of Teradici PCoIP protocol) is more aggressive than ever.

First of all, the XenDesktop 4.0 Enterprise and Platinum editions are going to include a full, unrestricted edition of XenApp.
The new strategy at Citrix, called FlexCast, is to make no distinction between a desktop deployed on a virtual machine (what we call today VDI), one on a bare metal machine, or one served by a terminal services farm.
XenDesktop plus XenApp are going to allow remote access to all these desktops or to some of their applications, along with application and OS streaming where applicable.

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Without any fanfare, at the beginning of September, Parallels released Virtuozzo Containers (formerly Virtuozzo) 4.5.

Version 4, launched in January, unified for the first time the Windows and Linux branches, introducing major new features like virtual SMP masking and support for Microsoft and Red Hat cluster services.

Version 4.5, which is built on this new architecture, brings in a wire range of new capabilities:

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A couple of months after the launch of the private beta, VMware released Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0 earlier this week.

As we already said in our previous coverage, this is not the 4th edition of the product but the 2nd.
VMware launched SRM 1.0 in June 2008, directly jumping to version 4.0 to explicit the support for vSphere 4.0.

Nonetheless the product is making a notable progress, supporting 12 vendors (a list of 11 is here) that offer fibre channel, iSCSI and NFS storage replication solutions, and supporting 3rd party virtual switches like the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

The most relevant new feature anyway is the support for Many-to-One Failover scenarios, where a single recovery site can receive virtual machines coming from multiple production sites.
Hopefully this is just the prelude to the Many-to-Many Failover that many customers are waiting for.

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In February VMware launched an open source version of its View client, released under the LGPL 2.1 version.

virtualization.info already wrote that with this move the company could conquer a large number of thin client providers, which may prefer to adopt and customize View Open Client rather than developing their own connectors.
But it is also possible that VMware may have decided to go open source primarily to accelerate the development of the product and reduce any real or perceived gap with the competition (read Citrix).

In any case, now that View 4.0 is in private beta and finally introduces the much awaited software version of PCoIP, VMware has all the interest to ask the help of the open source community and attract the attention on the new build.

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Last week Citrix announced the public beta of its premium management solution for the Microsoft hypervisor: Essentials for Hyper-V 5.5.

The main new feature of this version is the support for Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 (plus Windows 7, for the OEM’ed VMLogix Lab Manager), but it also introduces the StorageLink Site Recovery technology for Hyper-V.

StorageLink Site Recovery allows the Hyper-V administrators to control the replication features that their SAN arrays offer without using multiple consoles, and allows to test the recovery process by restoring the protected VMs in isolated, test networks.

The technology may become the foundation of a new product able to compete with VMware Site Recovery Manager, and now Citrix is in the position to offer it to its customers and the Microsoft ones.

Usually virtualization.info doesn’t post stories about industry events (except the major ones related to virtualization like the VMware VMworld) and for sure it doesn’t publish stories about the vendors’ presence at a specific trade show (unless it’s our own Virtualization Congress).

In this particular case we’ll make an exception: VMware just informed its partners that it will exhibit at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009.

This is not the first time that VMware shows up at that event, but it certainly is the first time that VMware and Oracle are in harsh, direct competition.

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While finalizing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0 and ACE 2.6, VMware is also working on the next generation of Fusion.

The product is becoming increasingly important for VMware, as Apple continues to attract new potential customers (mainly because of the iPhone) and gains market share.
The more Windows and Linux users consider switching to Mac OS X, the more Fusion (and its competitors) becomes the must-have gateway to the new environment.

The new Fusion 3.0, which will be available October 27, includes some new, welcome features:

• new 64bit engine optimized for Snow Leopard
• support for Windows 7 and its Aero interface
• support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3
• a P2V migration tool called Switching Made Easy that works over Ethernet or wireless

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In June the Russian website OpenNET unveiled the new features introduced in the first beta of VMware Workstation 7.0.

VMware kept the entire beta phase private, but last Friday decided to announce the public availability of the Release Candidate (build 197124) which also includes Player 3.0 and ACE 2.6.

The most remarkable new features of Workstation 7.0 RC are the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) driver that supports Vista and 7 Aero interface, and the support as guest OS for ESX and its VMotion (only on processors that support Intel EM64T with VT-x or on the AMD64 Family 10H and later processors with AMD-V).

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At the end of last week, with a short announcement on the corporate blog, Microsoft announced the RTM of its Windows XP Mode, a pre-configured virtual machine with Windows XP SP3 as guest OS that will run on the Virtual PC version included in Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate or Enterprise.

virtualization.info already covered the last-minute features included in the August release candidate build.

Every Microsoft customer will be able to download the virtual machine for free by October 22, the official launch day for Windows 7.
Everybody but the Sony customers that purchased a VAIO laptop.

Thanks to the absurd strategy that Sony adopted, its customers cannot run Windows XP Mode or any virtual machine, because Windows Virtual PC needs Intel VT, and the Intel VT capability has been intentionally disabled and hidden inside every VAIO BIOS.

Just a couple of days ago virtualization.info published a piece about the Oracle potential in the virtualization space and its current behavior, specifically focusing on the company support to competing virtualization platform like the VMware one.

We questioned the Oracle credibility and Oracle promptly answered.

Adam Hawley, Director of Product Management for Oracle VM, left a comment on our previous article, but because of the importance of the statements that it contains (and because the defense deserves as much exposure as the attack), we republish it here.

We added emphasis to some parts we consider particularly important:

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