virtualization.info Editors

While virtualization professionals are still trying to figure out how the renewed alliance between Microsoft and EMC will work on virtualization, another major event happens: Red Hat joins the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

Pretty much like Cisco (why Cisco is here?), Citrix, Novell, Oracle, Sun, Unisys (why Unisys is here?), Virtual Iron and VMware did in the last few months (the SVVP was launched in June 2008) now also Red Hat had to accept the Microsoft conditions to offer concrete Windows support to its virtualized customers.
As side benefit, the Microsoft customers finally will be able to run Red Hat guest OSes on their Hyper-V hosts.

The agreement implies that:

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For the forth time in few days that benchmarks about Citrix and VMware desktop virtualization (VDI, presentation virtualization and application virtualization) solutions take the central stage.
Is it a sign that somebody is getting nervous?

The first (non-sponsored) analysis came out from two independent enterprise architects, Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp, which evaluated how XenServer, ESX and Hyper-V perform in VDI scenarios.

After an immediate reaction from VMware, a XenDesktop 2.1 Scalability Analysis popped up from Citrix (to be fair this document was released on Jan 12, days before the Spruijt/van de Kamp work, and further updated on Jan 27).

Then an independent performance comparison (committed by VMware) between Microsoft App-V, Symantec/Altiris SVS, VMware ThinApp and Citrix XenApp was released by the Exo Performance Network team.

The last episode of this saga come out last week from the Tolly Group.

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So far Symantec has been almost non-existent in the virtualization market.

The company acquired Altiris in January 2007 and AppStream in April 2008.
In more than two years the application virtualization suite SVS was updated a single time, reaching version 2.1 in June 2007.

In this timeframe not a single word was spent to detail the long-term vision and strategy for the virtualization market, despite the company made additional moves like the acquisition of a VDI connection broker provider called nSuite in August 2008.

Towards the end of last year anyway, some details about a renewed commitment emerged: Symantec renamed Altiris SVS in Workspace Virtualization (SWV), unofficially launching version 6.1 beta program.

Today, finally, we know where all of this will end out.

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After less than seven months since the launch of Backup 2.0, Veeam is ready to fire out a new major release.

Despite the company entered this segment very in late (March 2008) compared to some well-known competitors like Vizioncore, it worked really fast to fill any technology gap and establish itself as a market leader.

To demonstrate it, today Backup 3.0 introduces some remarkable new features (the first three of them are industry first):

• the capability to backup ESX and ESXi (including the free edition) hypervisors without the need of VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)
• the capability to offer file-level restore from Linux/Unix/BSD/Mac OS virtual machines backup images
• the support for Windows Server 2008 Volume Shadow Service
• The capability to backup virtual machine templates

The security vendor Tripwire continues to shift its focus on virtualization.
So far the company extended its support to virtual infrastructures (only VMware ones at the moment), released a free configuration checker for VMware ESX, and hired the popular expert Stephen Beaver as virtualization evangelist.

Today Tripwire moves another step towards VMware and release a second free tool called OpsCheck.

OpsCheck, which supports ESX 3.0/3.5 (including ESXi version), connects to VMware vCenter through a secure channel and verifies if VMotion is properly configured and operational by checking virtual machines device configurations, data stores, and networks.

The product is available as a Java application running on any Windows Server 2003 box with JRE 1.5 or later.

The Canadian startup Lanamark continues to unveil pieces of its hosted capacity planning solution.

After the major upgrade released at the beginning of this month, the company now makes available a new Server Virtualization Design Module.

The module does something truly useful: develops multiple capacity plans, one for each supported virtualization platform (Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Virtual Iron and of course VMware ESX), and compares them side-by-side.

Every analysis takes into account technical (new/redeployed/upgraded servers, storage arrays support, etc.) and business (software license cost, delivered services) constrains.
To do so Lanamark built an online repository (which is constantly updated) featuring TCOs for every component of a virtual infrastructure.

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After more than one year VMware is finally ready to release a stand-alone version of its physical to virtual (P2V) / virtual to virtual (V2V) migration tool that matches the one embedded within VI 3.5.

So far the Standalone version (formerly split in Started Edition and Standalone Enterprise edition) of the product was frozen at version 3.0.3 and it’s unclear why the company took so long to upgrade it.

The new 4.0 version (build 146302) includes:

• Support for Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu Linux distributions as source
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 as source
• Support for Parallels Desktop virtual machines as source
• Incremental hot cloning (Converter now replicates any change happening to the source machine during the P2V migration)
• Power off source machine at the end of the conversion
• Selection of the target virtual disk and virtual volumes configuration
• Configuration of the target virtual machine

This product (now available in a single edition) remains available free of charge. 
VMware published an insightful comparison between this version and the one included with VI 3.5:

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After signing a major OEM agreement with IBM and a promising technology partnership with eG Innovations in October 2008, Leostream is ready to close additional deals.

This time the company allies with BOSaNOVA, a thin client vendor that offers VDI Ready CE.Net, Linux and XPe devices.

At this point the Leostream connection broker has a conspicuous number of partners in the server-based computing industry: Wyse, IGEL Technology, Praim, Astec Technology, Cranberry, Devon IT and even Fujitsu Siemens.

Last week VMware updated its desktop product for Apple Mac OS: Fusion.

The new minor release 2.0.2 (build 147997) introduces the following features:

• Support for Mac OS X 10.5.6 as host OS
• Support for Mac OS X 10.5.6 Server and Ubuntu 8.10 as guest OSes
• Support for Parallels Desktop 4.0 and Parallels Server for Mac 1.0 virtual machines
• Support for DMG CD/DVD images in addition to ISO images

Representing a virtual infrastructure through diagrams can be challenging as the industry didn’t agree yet on a common symbology.
A first attempt to simplify the task came from Scott Herold in December 2004, when he released a nice stencil for Microsoft Visio on his website VMguru.

Four years later the virtualization stencils are back, this time thanks to VMware.

Filling a void that Microsoft wasn’t interested to fill, last week VMware was kind enough to release a massive collection of high quality icons (available in 2D and 3D through a PowerPoint slide deck) that represent pretty much every aspect of a virtual infrastructure, from a single virtual machine to an entire VDI environment:

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