Gartner has released its annual Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, positioning VMware and Microsoft in the leaders Quadrant. Leaders in this market have a clear strategy and road map for their offerings, understand virtualization’s role in infrastructure and operations transformation, and have a clear vision with respect to cloud computing.
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Paper: HP BladeSystem for Client Virtualization
HP has released a paper titled: "HP BladeSystem for Client Virtualization". The paper which contains 25 pages provides best practices for a client virtualization converged infrastructure. It hightlights five common deployment examples, coverign common storage and networking configurations in the context of stateless and stateful client virtualization implementations.
The paper covers the following configuration examples:
Release: Citrix VDI-in-a-Box 5.3
At the beginning of June, Citrix announced version 5.3 of all-in-one Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution VDI-in-a-Box. Now Citrix has released version 5.3.
Version 5.3 will share technologies with XenDesktop 7, which was also released recently. Version 5.3 will provide full Windows 8 support with HDX connections, personal desktops (PVD) on Windows 8, Single Sign-On for remote users through Citrix NetScaler/Access Gateway, and a new wizard-based SSL certificate installation and management.
Citrix releases XenDesktop 7 and XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack 2
Beginning this month, during its annual Synergy event, Citrix announced version 7 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product XenDesktop. This week Citrix announced the release of XenDesktop 7 and the release of Feature Pack 2 for its desktop and application virtualization product XenApp 6.5.
XenDesktop provides the following new functionality (among others), detailed here:
Microsoft releases betas of App-V 5.0 SP2 and UE-V 2.0
Microsoft today announced the release of a beta for its Application Virtualization product App-V version 5.0 service pack 2 and the beta of version 2.0 of its User Environment Management solution UE-V. Once released, both products will be included in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), which is available for Microsoft Software Assurance users.
Both version will support the Windows 8.1 client Operating System for which Microsoft announced a Tech Preview during its annual Build Conference.
Paper: Project VRC: Phase VI – Best practices and impact of Microsoft Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 in VDI
Project Virtual Reality Check has released a new paper titled: "Phase VI – Best practices and impact of Microsoft Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 in VDI". The paper which can be downloaded after registration on the Project VRC website contains 56 pages and covers the impact of deploying and using Microsoft Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Environments. This paper is the follow up of the paper: Project Virtual Reality Check phase V, which covered the impact of Anti Virus solutions on VDI environments.
For testing the Login Virtual Session Indexer benchmarking tool was used.
Release: Citrix XenServer 6.2
In April this year, Citrix announced that it would transfer the development of the Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation. It acquired the development of the Xen hypervisor when Citrix acquired XenSource in 2007. Today Citrix annouced version 6.2 of XenServer which from now on is fully open source, Citrix still provides a paid version of XenServer though, which includes support and maintenance. This version is the follow up of version 6.1 which was released in October last year.
Version 6.2 changes the licensing model from per-server to per-socket licensing, there will only be one package which will be fully featured and includes functionality which used to be found in the premium editions of XenServer. For existing users individual server licenses will be converted to two socket licenses.
Paper: Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide
Microsoft has released a paper titled:"Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide". The paper which contains 19 pages defines a set of architectural blocks for creating a multitenant, hosted Windows desktop and application service. The primary goal is to enable hosting providers to create secure, scalable, and reliable desktop hosting solution offers for small- and medium-sized organizations with up to 1500 users.
Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions for System Center 2012 Operations Manager
Cristian Edwards and Diego Martinez Rellan both, Premier Fiel Engineers working for Microsoft have released the Hyper-V 2012 Management Pack Extension. The goal of the Management Pack Extensions is to add performance monitoring to the already existing Hyper-V Management Pack provided by Microsoft. The MP has monitors, rules and views. To avoid huge database consumption all rules are disabled by default. You can use these rules for creating your environment baselines.
Release: Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2.14
Oracle has released a maintenance release, version 4.2.14 for its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. The release can be installed on top of VM VirtualBox 4.2 which was released in September last year. The update can be downloaded from the VirtualBox binaries page.
Some of the fixes in this version (from the changelog):