virtualization.info Editors

On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.

This new platform promises to deliver a desktop experience  comparable to a local PC, up to 100 VDI users for each single server equipped with a VGX board.

NVIDIA VGX represents a new era in desktop virtualization. It delivers an experience nearly indistinguishable from a full desktop while substantially lowering the cost of a virtualized PC.

said Jeff Brown, general manager of the Professional Solutions Group at NVIDIA.

This product is intended for those kind of users who work with 3D design softwares and simulation tools and is designed to be integrated into enterprise IT departments providing an integration layer for commercial hypervisors (the news only talks about Citrix XenServer) and a level of manageability that allows to configure the graphics capabilities delivered to individual users in the network, based on their demands.

Read more

Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.

The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review period will run through July 5th.

To download the beta materials on Connect follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219165

To join the beta review program follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=171065

The new features introduced in version 7.0 include Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness assessment, VDI readiness assessment and the ability to plan for virtualization assessment of Linux server.

MAP 7.0 supports SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration planning and, along with Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter, simplifies the migration of VMware virtual machine to Hyper-V.

Read more

On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.

One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long seven-part video series, was the need to increase the automation and integration between VMware’s various products, topic about which Herrod reassured those present confirming VMware’s awareness of the problem.

Of this long speech the statement that has inflamed internet is

VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite is really more of a marketing term. Those of you know our products deeply know that they don’t fit this well together as they need to. Some of them have multiple databases, some don’t look the same, some install differently, and what I can’t stand that is Site Recovery Manager doesn’t currently work with vCloud Director. So, what we are basically able to say is that we created and acquired companies that led to a lot of individual products that don’t work well enough together yet.

as reported by Dave Northey on Microsoft’s TechNet blog.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeaXJ5L2-5Y[/youtube]Re-inserted in the context and completed with the last assertion

Read more

On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment with no storage.

Atlantis claims to lower the cost of virtual desktops below $200 per desktop with its product that performs IO traffic processing and inline duplication of images to run all desktops from local server memory.

Read more

On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.

VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza acquisition in May 2011, already eliminates  much of the traditional VDI infrastructure, including shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers, with a simple deployment of the virtual appliance on the hypervisor of choice.

Project Aruba uses vDisks layering technology, obtained with Ringcube acquisition, to manage end-user applications and preferences allowing Virtual Desktops personalization and flexibility.

Project Aruba provides the following key features:

Read more

On April 26 VMware announced the general availability of VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) 1.1, previously introduced as a part of vCenter Operations Management Suite.

VIN automatically detects, discovers and maps all the applications virtualized on vSphere reporting all the characteristics and dependencies through vSphere Web Client, visual maps and searchable tables.

There is no need to install additional agents because VIN leverages VMware tools.

Read more

On May 3 VMware released a security update, that the company itself define as “accelerated“, with the purpose to patch five “critical” security issues across VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor version 3.5, 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0 and also two of the client products, VMware Workstation and Player.

As reported in the Security Note, this update is connected to the source code leak announced on April 24.

Albeit VMware didn’t release any detail about the leak so far, ThreatPost, run by Kaspersky Lab, indicates “Hardcore Charlie” as the hacker claiming to have stolen 300 Megabytes of VMware source code from the military contractor China National Import & Export Corp (CEIEC).

Despite VMware quotes the event in the note, doesn’t evidence any link between the discovered vulnerabilities and the stolen code, merely suggesting the update as a normal security procedure.

Read more

On May 3 VMware announced it has joined the Facebook Open Compute Project, an initiative launched in 2011, with the objective of increase technology efficiencies and reduce the environmental impact of data centers.

VMware vSphere 5 is now certified to run on open AMD and Intel-based hardware following the project’s specifications enabling Open Compute users to virtualize production workloads and business-critical applications.

VMware is committed to delivering innovative technology that transforms and redefines how businesses function and operate in the cloud era. VMware vSphere® 5 is now certified to run on Open Compute AMD-and Intel-based v2.0 server platforms. With VMware vSphere 5 now expanding to cover a wide range of embedded processors, I/O devices and servers, customers are offered a greater choice in IT solutions.

said Richard A. Brunner, chief platform architect, VMware.

On April 24 VMware published a technical paper titled: The VMware Reference Architecture for Stateless Virtual Desktops on Local Solid-State Storage with VMware View 5 which introduce the use of local solid-state drives (SSDs) within a physical host to offload the majority of desktop virtualization IOPS needed.

The objective of this model is to significantly reduce the hardware infrastructure costs of desktop virtualization environments while providing an highly scalable architecture.

On May 2 Liquidware Lab, the company founded in 2008 by David Bieneman, announced a new product called FlexApp and version 5.0 of its Stratusphere FIT, Stratusphere UX and ProfileUnity which will integrate VMware’s end-user computing (EUC) strategy following the release of VMware View 5.1.

Stratusphere FIT, that rates the physical desktop candidates for VMware View environments, and Stratusphere UX, able to identify poor user experience in an existing VDI environment allowing optimization, both deriving from vmSight acquisition, will be integrated into VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View using a plugin to provide various end-user indicators and an overall “Health Index Score“.

Read more