virtualization.info Editors

In 2006 the ConVirt team started an ambitious project: develop an open source, multi-host management console for Xen.

Initially called XenMan, the tool was then renamed ConVirt and its roadmap was enriched with several highly desirable features that led to the multi-hypervisor management platform that the company offers today.

In January this year Convirture added the support for Microsoft Hyper-V, in addition to existing support for major virtualization platforms like KVM, Xen and VMware.

ConVirt Enterprise also has a Cloud version that adds the support for public cloud platforms like Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus and OpenStack.

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While cloud datacenters like Google and Amazon have been using server attached storage for a while, enterprises are slowly starting to see the advantages of it. Costs, the ability to scale capacity and performance and simplicity of management are just a few of the benefits.

Many Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions have emerged the last three years or so. To name some: VMware Virtual SAN, Nutanix, Maxta MxSP, SimpliVity and Scale Computing.

Sanbolic enters this market now as well with a solution named Scale-Out Platform. It cannot be compared however to the other SDS solutions named at the start of this blog. Those are relative simple: take a bunch of local disks in a server, aggregate those by software running either in the hypervisor kernel or in a virtual machine, distribute the data over mutliple nodes for availability and present volumes.

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Dell has released a paper titled:"Dell Wyse Datacenter for Microsoft VDI and vWorkspace". The paper which contains 104 pages contains a reference architecture for covering the architecture design, configuration and implementation considerations for the key components of the architecture required to deliver virtual desktops via Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 RDS or Dell vWorkspace 8.0 MR1 on Microsoft Hyper-V.

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CloudLinux, the company responsible for developing the CloudLinux OS has released a new product called KernelCare. KernelCare is capable of automatically patching Linux Server security updates without having to reboot the servers. KernelCare loads patches using a module for with no impact on performance since those take only nanoseconds.

KernelCare is available for CentOS 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, CloudLinux OS 6 and OpenVZ (64-bit only). CloudLinux plans to add support for Debian and Ubuntu, as well as CentOS 5, RHEL 5, CloudLinux OS 5 within the next 60 days. In addition, RHEL 7 will be supported once it is out of beta. KernelCare is available via monthly subscription of $3.95 per server.

CloudLinux has its headquarters in Princeton, N.J. and development based in Donetsk Ukraine.

Siris Capital, research & investing information firm, headquartered in New York and founded 2011, announced to have completed the acquisition of Stratus Technologies, the producer of fault tolerant systems famous for its Stratus’ 99.999% uptime.

Siris Capital Group is acquiring Stratus Technologies for approximately $352 million, a transaction that was already announced on March 31, 2014.

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On April 23, Citrix announced its financial results for first quarter of fiscal year 2014, ended March 31, 2014.

Citrix announced a total revenue of $751 million, for an increase of 12% compared to Q1 2013

Net income registered a slight decrease with $56 million compared to $60 million of Q1 2013 while Non-GAAP results raised from $117 million for Q1 2013 to $119 million for Q1 2014.

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On April 22, VMware released the results about its growth for Q1 2014.

VMware, announced a total  revenue growth of $1.36 billion, for an increase of 14 percent compared to Q1 2013.

Operating income for the first quarter was $241 million, an increase of 51% from the first quarter of 2013.

Operating Margin registered an increase of 51%, as reported in the official news.

The non-GAAP Operating Margin registered an increment of 9% from Q1 2013, with an income of $423 million.

Operating cash flows had an increase of 11% from Q1 2013.

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On April 15 Splunk announced the availability of Splunk App for VMware 3.1, the system that is competing with VMware Log Insight solution to provide administrators with a real-time insights of the virtualized environment, analyzing and identifying performance and capacity bottlenecks.

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PQR, a dutch technology company has released a paper titled:"3D Graphics for Virtual Desktops Smackdown". The paper which contains 139 pages is written by virtualization experts, Benny Tritsch, Ruben Spruijt, and Shawn Bass. The paper provides a thorough, independent, and well-researched technical deep dive into strategy, vendors, solutions, features, qualifying questions, and much more about what technologists need to know about 3D Graphics for Virtual Desktops.

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Citrix has released version 5.1 of its client hypervisor XenClient. XenClient consists of two technologies, the XenClient, which is a type-1 client hypervisor running on selected hardware and the XenClient Enterprise Synchronizer, which allows XenClients to download centrally managed virtual desktops and run the locally. Syncrhronzier provides backup and restore, security policies and more. The update contains fixes for both the XenClient Engine and the XenClient Synchronizer.

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