virtualization.info Editors

After the acquisition of PlateSpin, Novell made several changes inside its subsidiary.
virtualization.info already published some of them, like the migration of the development team in India and the replacement of several members that left after the acquisition.

Novell also split the original PlateSpin PowerConvert in two products: Migrate and Protect.

Migrate gets a new update this week, reaching version 8.1.
The product now supports Windows Server 2008 (it’s not clear if this includes the imminent R2 edition but probably not), Windows Vista and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. But the major new feature of this release is the support Sun Solaris 10.

This support is very specific: the P2V migration can be performed only from a physical Solaris box with SPARC architecture to a Sun Solaris 10 Container (aka Zone).
The other way around is not available at the moment, and it’s not possible to perform a live migration.

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Just a few weeks after the launch of Connection Broker 6.0, Leostream is back with the first minor update.

Connection Broker 6.1 introduces enhancements to its policy management and reporting layers, plus the following new features:

• Web Access to Citrix XenApp
  End-users can launch Citrix XenApp desktops and applications via the Connection Broker web browser.
• Wake-on-LAN for Physical Machines
  Connection Broker can interact with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) power up physical machines through Wake-on-LAN.

Just yesterday virtualization.info reported how Citrix is reorganizing its application virtualization division by appointing a new CTO.

VMware is doing exactly the same: virtualization.info has learned from trusted sources that the company is looking for a new CTO just for the desktop division, to take care of View, ThinApp, the new remote desktop in co-development with Teradici, and probably the client hypervisor as well.
This new CTO won’t replace the well-known Steve Herrod but rather work side by side with him to lead the VDI and application virtualization effort.

By a coincidence, this morning TechCrunch reports that Mark Lucovsky, Director of Engineering at Google, left the search engine to take a job at VMware.

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Just last month virtualization.info highlighted how Microsoft may be working under the radar to to hit VMware where the vendor is betting the most: on the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiative.

Part of this silent effort involves the improvement of the RDP protocol to efficiently handle the heavy multimedia protocols that every VDI client has to render.

Anyway this is just one piece of the VDI story that Microsoft may be shaping.
Another one is the so called client hypervisor, needed to break free the mobile VDI clients from the corporate network dependency. 
On this front Microsoft is deadly silent but it’s evident that the company could push the button at any moment: nobody in the market has the capability to distribute a client hypervisor on million devices like Microsoft.
They could write a dedicated version of Hyper-V and embed it in Windows 7 (or its successor), or just wait for Citrix and Intel to do the dirty work, and then use their upcoming XenClient (which will be free of charge) with an OEM license.

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In the last couple of years virtualization.info reported how the relationship between Microsoft and Citrix is getting tighter and tighter around virtualization, well beyond the historical Terminal Server/Metaframe partnership.

In the name of a planned integration that the two announced two years ago, XenServer uses the Microsoft virtual hard drive format (VHD), the Citrix Essentials management suite controls Hyper-V (and Citrix gives a part of it away for free) and the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will manage XenServer and XenApp.

It’s not finished anyway: yesterday Citrix announced further integration, this time about App-V and XenApp.

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Last week Wyse Technology announced the release of Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA).

This new protocol enhancement, probably a superset of the existing TCX Multimedia technology that VMware is OEM’ing, is promised to accelerate up to 3 times the performance of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp (using the ICA protocol), VMware View and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (both using the RDP protocol) in WAN scenarios with more than 200ms in network latency.

Like the Citrix Branch Repeater and other products in this space, VDA works as a proxy that customers need to install on the branch office.

VDA is embedded in Wyse thin clients that use the ThinOS 6.4 but its works also on regular fat clients like workstation and laptops powered by Windows XP.

Here’s a 2 minutes demo of the technology:

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A couple of weeks ago HP announced its support for the StorageLink technology that Citrix is offering inside the Essentials management suite.

StorageLink allows the XenServer and Hyper-V administrators to manipulate the SAN LUNs directly from inside XenCenter and Hyper-V MMC console.
HP is supporting this technology on its StorageWorks SANs, including EVA, MSA and LeftHand Networks arrays.

With this move HP may be trying to consolidate its position in the SMB market, as the announcement comes just a little before the Citrix one about a free version Essentials for Hyper-V (called Express Edition) that includes the StorageLink layer.

After more than one year VMware finally seems to make some progress on one of the most useful tools in its revamped product portfolio: Lifecycle Manager.

The technology behind this product was acquired in September 2007 from the Swiss startup Dunes Technologies.
The Dunes orchestration framework was used to build a simple yet very useful web portal for self-service virtual machines provisioning.
The framework itself turned into vCenter Orchestrator, bundled as part of vSphere 4.0, while the automation package turned into vCenter Lifecycle Manager. In fact the new 1.1 beta (build 4376) requires an updated version of the former to run properly.
While fairly complex, in theory a customer should be able to develop his own version of Lifecycle Manager just using Orchestrator.

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Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and vCenter AppSpeed 1.0.

AppSpeed 1.0 (build 36919) is powered by the technology that VMware acquired in May 2008 from B-hive.
It is able to discover the elements of the virtual infrastructures (physical hosts, virtual machines, clusters, etc.), the applications running inside them, and even some structures inside the applications (like tables inside a database).
Once tracked the applications, AppSpeed sniffs their traffic to understand their “normal” behavior (like the response time, the performance) and build some baselines.
At this point the product compares the baselines with the actual application performance to recognize potential slows down (or lack of availability) that affect the user experience.

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Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and AppSpeed 1.0.

The need for chargeback capabilities is growing at a fast pace as the virtualization technologies mature and multiple departments of the same organization start to use the same virtual infrastructure with confidence.
This is why startups like VKernel are growing in popularity and seasoned players like Vizioncore start to include the chargeback feature in their performance monitoring products.

With a perfect timing VMware enters the segment and releases this new module for vCenter Server 3.5 and 4.0.

Chargeback 1.0 (build 175384), which comes as a virtual appliance, sports the following capabilities:

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