virtualization.info Editors

In January ClearCube started a process to become an agnostic VDI vendor and broaden its business focus beyond the blades manifacturing.
The release of Sentral 5.6 in fact introduced the support of its connection broker for 3rd party hypervisors.

Now the company goes further, announcing the spin-off VDIworks, which will develop and sell the connection broker with the new name of Virtual Desktop Platform.
ClearCube will continue to offer Sentral thanks to an OEM agreement between the two entities.

The ClearCube President, Rick Hoffman, is now the VDIworks President. His place at ClearCube has been replaced by Randy Printz, previously covering the COO role.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Leostream is one of the oldest firm in the virtualization space, along with few others like Vizioncore and PlateSpin.
Used to sell an enterprise management product for virtualization platforms in the early days, the company completely changed direction, dropping its first product and focusing first on P2V migration (with P>V Direct) and then on VDI (with Hosted Desktop Connection Broker).

While others got funded and became acquisition targets (Vizioncore by Quest, PlateSpin by Novell), Leostream is one of the few that never raised major resources over time.

The situation is now changed since Meakem Becker Venture Capital has just invested $3 million in the company, as reported by Private Equity HUB.

Leostream has now much work to do to refresh its image, consolidate its offering and pitch it against the recent horde of VDI vendors.

After InMage, Ericon is the second company announcing its support for the Oracle controverse hypervisor released in November 2007.

So PowerTerm WebConnect becomes the first VDI solution for Oracle VM, filling an empty niche market while the VDI crowd competes around VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and the upcoming Microsoft Hyper-V.

Ericom published a 3 minutes demo of the product here.

The price of this version is unclear: the websites uses the word free instead of free trial everywhere.
Download it here and please report back if there are feature limitations or timebombs.

Update: Ericom contacted virtualization.info and confirmed that PowerTerm WebConnect is 100% free up to 500 concurrent users.
Considering that also Oracle VM comes for free, Ericom has just launched the first free of charge VDI solution on the market.

AMD announced that its facility dedicated to fine tuning, the Operating System Research Center (OSRC), has extended its focus to include Sun OpenSolaris and the xVM products.
This may imply that xVM Server may have a performance advantage when used on AMD processors.

It’s unclear if and how this new effort will impact the upcoming release 1.0 of the new Sun hypervisor, but one thing is for sure: with Intel in strong partnership with VMware, AMD has to find another strong virtualization partner to boost the sales of its finally released quad-core CPU (codename Barcellona). Maybe the chip manifacturer is betting on Sun.

Sun releases today the first version of its desktop virtualization product VirtualBox since the acquisition of innotek.

The new VirtualBox 1.6 introduces:

• full support for Solaris (now including Guest Additions) and Mac OS versions (which means tha Sun is now an official competitor of Parallels and VMware)
• seamless window (what Parallels call Coherence and VMware calls Unity) for Solaris and Linux guest OSes
• support for virtual SATA hard drives (for the first time in a virtualization product)
• PAE memory support for guest OSes
• introduction of a web services API

Download it free of charge here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Just one week after version 67, KVM releases version 68.

The new build introduces support for the upcoming Intel nested pages technology dubbed Extended Page Tables (EPT).
The EPT technology should be available only in 2009/2010 when Intel will introduce a completely new architecture in its upcoming Nehalem CPU.

Despite all virtualization vendors are working to support Intel EPT in their hypervisors, KVM is probably the first platform to offer it today.

Download KVM 68 here.

VMware continues at fast pace the beta program of the recently acquired Thinstall Application Virtualization Suite, now temporarily called Project North Star.

Today the company releases beta 2 (build 3.386) and introduces two new features:

• Application Sync
  This feature enables you to deploy Project North Star (Thinstall) application updates. Application Sync automatically checks for and installs updates to your packaged applications. Updates might include changes such as a new version, service pack updates, or configuration changes in the package.ini file
• Application Link
  This feature connects deployed applications. For example, you can establish a relationship between a deployed instance of Microsoft Office 2003 and a new Microsoft Office plug-in. Application Link enables you to establish a link between applications without having to encapsulate them into the same executable package

Enroll the beta program here.

In July 2007 VMware released its first benchmarking tool, VMmark, trying to fill a void still existing today: a commonly accepted measurement system to evaluate performance of different virtualization platforms on different hardware (the SPEC is still mum about its plans).

Since that time all major OEMs, Dell, HP IBM and Sun, adopted VMmark and published on VMware website the results for their 4/8/16 cores systems.

Now VMware is about to release a minor update which introduces support for 64bit workloads.
Three of the six virtual servers which compose each VMmark tile are now 64bits: the Java server (running SPECjbb 2005), the database server (running MySQL) and the web server (running SPECweb 2005).

The new version has been distributed to the VMware OEM partners and may be soon available to all customers.

Parallels publishes the fourth beta of its upcoming hypervisor dubbed Parallels Server.
The new beta re-introduces support for Mac OS X 10.5 Server as guest OS.

The product is now in beta since almost one year (the company demonstrated the first private beta at Apple WWDC event in June 2007) but Parallels is working on it since much more: in January 2006 SWsoft (the company former name) was talking about a Parallels Server and a Parallels Enterprise Server planned for early 2007.

Hopefully the only product survived from that original plan will be released at the upcoming WWDC, set for this June 9-13.

Enroll for the beta program here.

It seems that the Microsoft relationship with Parallels is becoming multi-dimensional.

A number of former Microsoft employees work for Parallels since the early days when the company was known as SWsoft.
Among them, since this January, there is also Mark Zbikowski, former Microsoft Architect who led the development effort in MS-DOS and Windows NT.

And now the two are linked by a major OEM agreement which brings key Microsoft products (Express Studio, Visual Studio, Office 2007 and Windows XP or Vista) to the Mac OS community through Parallels Desktop.

Microsoft had the opportunity to deliver this package, dubbed Expression Professional Subscription, by itself but preferred to dismiss Virtual PC for Mac OS in August 2006.

The new bundle will be available through Microsoft website starting from June at the price of $999.