virtualization.info Editors

Red Hat announced its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2016.

Total revenue for the second quarter ended Augus 31, 2015 was $504 million, with an increase of 13% from the same quarter last year. Looking at the financial details we can see that total subscription revenue earned for the quarter was $363 million, with an increase of 9% year-over-year. Operating cash flow for second quarter was of $120 million, up 12% year-over-year, total cash and cash equivalents and investment was $2.0 billion after repurchising about $70 million.

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Citrix on its website announced that it started the End-of-Life process of Citrix XenClient Enterprise, the end of life date will be December 12, 2016.

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. Synchronizer provides backup and restore, security policies and more.

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Altaro Software, company specialized in backup for virtualized environments, specifically Microsoft Hyper-V, announced the release of Altaro VM Backup, previously known as Altaro Hyper-V Backup, rebranded to introduce VMware Hypervisors support from within the same application.

Altaro, founded in 2009, produces along with Altaro VM Backup also Oops! Backup and Backup FS, backup solutions for SMBs and home users. Oops! Backup is supposed to behave as as a ‘time machine’ for Windows, allowing users to preview and restore versions of their files from different points in time. Backup FS is a backup solution used by small and medium sized businesses looking to protect their Windows Servers and PCs from data loss.

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VMware today released version 12 of its type-2 client hypervisor products for Microsoft Windows: Workstation Pro and Player and version 8 of its client hypervisor products for Mac OSX: Fusion. All products mainly add support for running Windows 10.

Player (formerly Player Pro) is able to run VM’s only and can be used for personal use in an unlicensed way or licensed when used for business commercial use. Workstation provides the full functionality of the product. (see this page for a comparison between Player en Workstation) . The same goes for Fusion and Fusion pro, where Fusion provides less functionality as Fusion Pro. (see this page for a comparison between Fusion and Fusion pro), both Fusion as Fusion pro have to be licensed though.

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Veeam today released version 8.0 of its Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM or OpsMgr). Using this Management Pack customers running Operations Manager to monitor vSphere and Hyper-V virtualization platforms. Also monitoring for Veeam Backup and Replication is provided. Version 8 is the follow up of version 7 R2 which was released in December last year.

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Oracle has released version 5.0 of its type-2 virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. Starting with a public beta in April this year and some more test builds and a release candidate later the product is now released. Oracle also already released an update (version 5.0.2.) containing some fixes for version 5.0 already.

There are known problems with VirtualBox 5.0.2 on Windows 10 hosts and with Windows 10 guests. Some of the problems are fixed in the most recent test build which can be found here.

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We quoted several times Virtualization Matrix, the website created to compare the capabilities of the various virtualization platforms on the market such VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.

This idea sparked community interest and a new project was spawned: a multi-comparison and interactive evaluation platform named WhatMatrix.

WhatMatrix allows visitors not only to compare features of different products in many technology fields, it also offers the ability to enrich products “scorecards” by adding complimentary products to a “stack”.

This feature is useful to both users, who can look at the products following a gap-analysis logic, and vendors which can show the value of their products.

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Microsoft has released version 4.0. 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.

Many Linux distributions and versions have Linux Integration Services built-in and do not require installation of this separate LIS package from Microsoft. This LIS package is available for a subset of supported distributions in order to provide the best performance and fullest use of Hyper-V features. It can be installed in the listed distribution versions that do not already have LIS built, and can be installed as an upgrade in listed distribution versions that already have LIS built-in.

The Linux Integration Services (LIS) is supported on the following guest operating systems:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5-5.11 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, and 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0-6.7 32-bit and 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0-7.1 64-bit
• CentOS 5.5-5.11 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, and 64-bit
• CentOS 6.0-6.7 32-bit and 64-bit
• CentOS 7.0-7.1 64-bit
• Oracle Linux 6.4-6.7 with Red Hat Compatible Kernel 32-bit and 64-bit
• Oracle Linux 7.0-7.1 with Red Hat Compatible Kernel 64-bit

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Microsoft has released version 2015 of its Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), which is available as a paid add-on for Microsoft Customers with Software Assurance. In the 2015 release, the products included are updated for Windows 10 among others.

The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack contains the following technologies:

• User Experience Virtualization (UE-V)
• Application Virtualization (App-V)
• Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V)
• Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM)
• Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM)
• Diagnostics and Recovery Toolkit (DaRT)

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Microsoft has released version 2013 Update 1 of its Deployment Toolkit. The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is a toolset for automating desktop and server operating system deployments. MDT 2013 Update 1 supports deployment of the following operating systems: Windows 10 , Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server Tech Preview.

New functionality provided:

• Support for the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) for Windows 10
• Support for deployment and upgrade of Windows 10
• Support for integration with System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager SP1 with the Windows 10 ADK