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virtualization.info Editors 
As mentioned in our coverage of the vSphere 4.0 release, the only product of the VMware portfolio that currently supports the new platform is Converter.
VMware upgraded it to version 4.0.1 (build 161434) last month exactly for this purpose.
In details the new product provides support for:
The long awaited new virtualization platform that Symantec is developing since over one year, Endpoint Virtualization Suite (EVS), is still in Release Candidate phase, but its general availability may be imminent.
The company has in fact released the SDK for one of the suite components: Workspace Streaming, the application streaming technology that Symantec acquired from AppStream in April 2008.
Jacob Hammons, a Technical Writer at Symantec, clarifies some details about the SDK:
VMware has recently released a new minor version of its free (if you are a VMware partner) capacity planning tool simply called Capacity Planner.
The new 2.7 version (build 32117) includes a long list of new features:
Today the hardware virtualization subsidiary of Quest, Vizioncore, updates two products of its growing portfolio: vOptimizer Pro and vFoglight.
The first one, a technology that Quest acquired from Invirtus in July 2007, now reaches version 2.2 and introduces:
After almost three years PHD Virtual Technologies (formerly PHD Technologies) has finally released a solid update for its flagship backup solution: esXpress 3.5.
This new version, released at the beginning of May, includes the following features:
On the Windows Server Division blog, Ward Ralston, Group Product Manager of Windows Server Marketing, announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 will reach the RTM milestone the same time of Windows 7.
Both will be generally available on October 22, 2009.
The big question is when Hyper-V 2.0 will be available then.
At the time of Hyper-V 1.0 Microsoft decided to include just a beta version of the hypervisor inside the Windows Server 2008 final code, and to subsequently update it to RTM using the Windows Update services.
The official explanation for this was that the virtualization team could fine-tune the hypervisor only after the operating system was finalized, as the former is embedded into the latter.
At the end of April virtualization.info broke the news about the HP plan to stop the development of its high-performance remote desktop protocol, RGS, and its connection broker, SAM, to leave the VDI market as a software player.
The information we published is based on an internal, official and very updated HP presentation that we received from trusted sources.
Despite that, both HP and several anonymous claimed our article as false and misleading.
Because we don’t want to damage our sources, we didn’t (and will not in the future) publish that presentation. We believe that the credibility we built over the years will be enough for most of our readers.
Nonetheless, because we have no interest in discredit HP, we were happy to reach the company by phone yesterday to understand their official version of the story.
Right now Novell has a lot to clarify to its shareholders about its virtualization strategy: a remarkable number of executives are leaving its subsidiary PlateSpin after the acquisition, Recon (formerly PowerRecon) doesn’t get a significant upgrade since over one year and its development unit is being moved to India, the announced stand-alone virtualization platform based on Xen is not here yet, Oracle is probably building a powerful hypervisor to compete against Novell by merging its product and the Sun and the Virtual Iron ones.
Despite all of that Novell didn’t touch any of these topics at all during its Q2 earnings call, which took place on May 28, three days after virtualization.info broke the news about them.
The only thing that Novell had to say about PlateSpin was:
StartWind software is famous company in the world of storage because of their free iSCSI target for Windows systems (which is supported inside VMware, Microsoft and Citrix virtual machines).
The company has recently increased its activity in the virtualization space and released yesterday a free Virtual to Virtual (V2V) migration tool dubbed V2V Converter.
The tool is able to turn a VMware VMDK virtual hard drive into a Microsoft Hyper-V VHD one and vice versa.
If customers want the tool can even convert the vHD in the IMG format that StarWinds uses for its iSCSI Target.
V2V Converter, which performs a sector by sector copy on the selected target, is available without limitation here.
The Canadian startup Lanamark continues to release new modules for its hosted capacity planning suite.
After the recent Desktop Analysis Pack, now the company launches a Storage Design Module.
The module assesses physical disks usage and I/O requirement, helping to properly size the SAN to host a virtual infrastructure for server consolidation or VDI scenarios.
This new component is also able to evaluate what-if scenarios taking care of technical constrains that may depend on the HBAs, FC switches and storage arrays that the customer wants to use. 