virtualization.info Editors

This new year started with various directive staff movements, people come and go. Yesterday January 6, Citrix announced to have a new Group VP & GM, Desktop & Apps: Rakesh Narasimhan.

While in last year we noticed a sort of exodus from VMware to other companies, such as Jerry Chen and Bogomil Balkansky, who are respectively Jerry working in Greylock and Bogomil working as a startupper.  Now, as expected, we are observing a flow of people filling positions in VMware such as former Citrix Group VP & GM, Desktop & App Bob Schultz now appointed Chief Strategy Lead & VP, End User Computing.

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Cisco has published a paper titled: "Reference Architecture for 500-Seat and 1000-Seat Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Citrix XenDesktop 7 built on Cisco UCS B200-M3 Blade Servers with EMC VNXe and Microsoft Hyper-V 2012". The paper which contains 418 pages contains a reference architecture for building a VDI infrastructure which is validated by Cisco, Citrix, EMC and Microsoft.

The paper describes provides the architecture and design of a virtual desktop infrastructure that can grow from 500 users to 1000 users. The infrastructure is 100% virtualized on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 with third- generation Cisco UCS B-Series B200 M3 Blade Servers iSCSI booting from an EMC VNXe3300 storage array. The virtual desktops are powered using Citrix Provisioning Server 7 and Citrix XenDesktop 7, with a mix of hosted shared desktops (70%) and pooled desktops (30%) to support the user population. Where applicable, the document provides best practice recommendations and sizing guidelines for customer deployments of XenDesktop 7 on the Cisco Unified Computing System.

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Two industry veterans on End User Computing leave Citrix and join VMware.

Bob Schultz joins VMware as Chief Strategy Lead & VP, End User Computing.  He is an experienced senior executive who previously worked for Citrix as Group Vice President  and General manager desktops and applications. In that role he was responsible for stategy of Citrix  market-leading desktop and application virtualization business with responsibility for a broad portfolio of products including Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp. Rakesh Narasimhan replaced Schultz at Citrix.

Sumit Dhawan has been appointed head of the desktop business. He is a senior business leader with 18 years of experience and a proven track record of establishing market leadership for enterprise products. He held various leadership positions at Citrix for nearly 16 years and most recently served as group vice president and general manager for the Enterprise Mobility Group at Citrix, where he was in charge of strategic product positioning, technology integration and go-to-market strategies.

Longtime VMware veteran Kit Colbert has been appointed chief technology officer (CTO) of End-User Computing, and will help drive product and technology strategy for its product portfolio.

This shows that VMware is very serious about End User Computing. In 2013 another senior executive joined VMware in the EUC division. Sanjay Poonen is General Manager of End-User Computing Business.

The VMware press release on todays news can be read here.

VMware is announcing the End of Availability of all VMware Virsto versions, effective January 1, 2014. After this date, you will no longer be able to purchase these products.

Virsto is a software defined storage solution which accelerates storage by intercepting all of the randomized I/O at the  hypervizor level and writing them to dedicated write logs in a serialized format and later de-staged onto virtual disks on storage area networks (SAN). Virsto also optimizes capacity by provisioning each virtual disk as a thin disk.

Virsto also supports Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.

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Over the past two years the virtualization market has faced many challenges and significant changes, virtualization.info has tried to reflect this evolution tracking all the news in a complete and impartial way as it has done since 2003.

Today we would like to thank all our readers that allowed us to be confirmed, also for this year, as one of the leading websites in the industry.

But what are the articles that contributed to achieve this great result? Here the top 10 for 2013:

1. VMware announces vSphere 5.5
2. Gartner releases its 2013 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure
3. Citrix releases XenDesktop 7 and XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack 2
4. Comparison: VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Red Hat Virtualization Matrix
5. Release: Citrix XenServer 6.2

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At December 22 VMware released vCenter Server 5.5.0.b as well as vCenter Server Appliance 5.5.0.b.

This release (version b) does not contain new features or enhancements but contains resolved issues only.

The release notes are here.

Download here

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HP has released a paper titled:"HP Hardware Accelerated Graphics for Desktop Virtualization" The paper which contains 32 pages provides an overview of the concepts and implementation of hardware accelerated VDI environments by HP and its virtualization partners.

The paper explains the differences between the following Hardware accelerated graphic solutions:

• Bare Metal OS
• Pass-through GPU
• Software Virtualized GPU
• Graphic accelerated desktop sessions and application virtualization
• Hardware Virtualized GPU – True virtual GPU

Depending on the scenario in which GPU acceleration is used, either pass-through, software virtualized or hardware virtualized GPU can be used.

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In June 2008 Microsoft launched their Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). The SVVP allows any vendor which offers hosted or bare-metal virtualization platforms to certify their platform for use with Microsoft Windows and allowing their platform to be supported by Microsoft . Since then most major virtualization platform vendors decided to have their solutions certified within the SVVP program.

Last week, Parallels announced that it will have its type-2 Parallels Hypervisor certified under the SVVP program. Once certified the Parallels Hypervisor will be supported by Microsoft.

Dell has released a paper titled: "Desktop Virtualization with VMware Horizon View 5.2 on Dell EqualLogic PS6210XS Hybrid Storage Array". The paper which contains 44 pages details information in order to understand how to design, properly size, and deploy VMware Horizon View based desktop virtualization solutions using Dell EqualLogic storage.

The paper demonstrates how 2,000 standard user virtual desktops can be deployed in a VMware Horizon View 5.2 (Horizon View) VDI environment leveraging a single EqualLogic PS6210XS hybrid array. The test infrastructure included VMware Horizon View 5.2, VMware vSphere 5.1 hypervisor, Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell Force10 and PowerConnect switches, and Dell EqualLogic storage arrays. Details are provided for the storage I/O characteristics under various VDI workload scenarios like boot and login storms along with performance characteristics throughout the VDI stack. Login VSI was used to generate the test results.

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Microsoft has released version 3.5. of its Integration Services for Linux. Hyper-V supports both emulated (“legacy”) and Hyper-V-specific (“synthetic”) devices for Linux virtual machines. When a Linux virtual machine is running with emulated devices, no additional software is required to be installed. However, emulated devices do not provide high performance and cannot leverage the rich virtual machine management infrastructure that the Hyper-V technology offers.

The Linux Integration Services enable synthetic driver support for Virtual Machines running one of the supported Linux Distributions, currently the 32 and 64 bit versions of:

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