virtualization.info Editors

In these days Microsoft published an overview on Windows 2012’s Editions and Licensing.

From an editions perspective we find two “main” editions, Standard and Datacenter, differentiated only by virtualization rights: two virtual instances for Standard and unlimited for Datacenter.

The VMs are entitled to run on up to two processors for both editions.

All the features available in the Datacenter edition are also available in the Standard edition, including high availability features like failover clustering, that make the choice between Windows Server 2012′ editions based only on companies’ virtualization strategy.

Windows 2012 Essential and Foundation don’t have any virtualization right.

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Last week VMware announced that it has been positioned at the top of Leaders Quadrant of 2012 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure.

Nothing surprising, unlike the fact that Citrix is still mentioned in the leader board with a product, like XenServer, that apparently is just used as a backend for VDI.

Oracle’s placement, with its Oracle VM, was covered in a previous post.

On 1st of July Raspberry Pi Thin Client project, published a video showing VMWare View Client 5.0 working on their 35$, credit card-sized, thin client.

PCoIP protocol seem not working at the moment but RDP, SSL security and RSA auth are functioning.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnu1I4RR74w[/youtube]

On 1st of July VMware Labs released Guest Reclaim a tool intended for virtualized guests with NTFS filesystems (supported OSes are XP onwards up to Windows 7 for clients and servers until Windows 2008).

Basically Guest Reclaim reclaims dead space from volumes hosted on a thin provisioned SCSI disk.

Features

• Reclaim space from Simple FAT/NTFS volumes
• Works on WindowsXP to Windows7
• Can reclaim space from flat partitions and flat disks
• Can work in virtual as well as physical machines

Today Dell and Quest announced the achievement of a definitive agreement for Dell to acquire Quest after several months of “bidding war“, according to Bloomberg.

Under the terms of the agreement, Dell will pay $28.00 per share against the bid of $25.75 made from Insight Venture Partners, that raises Dell’s total offering at $2.4 billion.

In Dell’s new vision Quest’s assets, like its access management software, performance monitoring solutions, Windows Server and database management solutions became important elements.

Dell recently announced the formation of its Software Group to build upon its existing software expertise. The Dell Software Group will add to Dell’s enterprise solutions capability, accelerate strategic growth and further differentiate the company from competitors by increasing its solutions portfolio with Dell-owned intellectual property.

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On June 29 Citrix announced, through its official blog, the general availability of Citrix’s Hosted Server VDI technology.

This solution, intended for Service Providers, allows to deliver dedicated Cloud VDI desktops using shared hardware/storage and leveraging Microsoft SPLA licenses.

The solution is based on Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Desktop Experience Pack (instead of Windows 7) and XenDesktop FMA with an appropriate new Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA).

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Yesterday Thincomputing.net published an article that highlights the limits that vCenter imposes on VDI deployments.

The article tries to answer the VMware View Administrators’ question about the scalability differences between desktop and server workload.

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Yesterday, Citrix’s official blog published a comparative study between XenDesktp 5.5 and VMware View 5 commissioned to Principled Technology, in order to answer to an identical study, from the same testing facility, previously published from VMware.

According to Citrix’s blog that set of tests evaluated a single user using single virtual desktop on a “quiet” LAN, so they must be repeated on a realistic corporate environment in order to let HDX definitively crush PCOIP.

Unsurprisingly the results support Citrix’s claims also if the poster must admit that VMware View 5.1 wasn’t available when the tests were conducted.

Two days ago VMware published a technical paper containing a comparative performance study of a large Oracle RAC instance installed on vSphere 5 and on a similar physical environment.

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Today Microsoft, through its Windows for your Business Blog, announced the availability of the second beta of User Experience Virtualization (UE-V).

This release includes new functionality like roaming system settings between Windows 7 and Windows 8, support for additional operating system settings, group policy support and sync of Internet Explorer’s settings between version 8, 9 and 10.

The scenarios presented include the following:

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