virtualization.info Editors

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“.

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Teradici, the developer of the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) remote desktop protocol, which is leveraged in software (by VMware view) and provided with Teradici hardware solutions which are OEM’ed by several vendors, announced the compatibility of APEX 2800 server offload card with the latest release of VMware View 5.1, maintaining full compatibility with all current VMware View and VMware vSphere releases.

The Teradici PCoIP server offload card is an hardware add-on available as a standard PCIe expansion card that monitors the graphical demands and dynamically offloads the most active 64 displays on the server.

Catbird, the company providing security and compliance solutions with a focus on the virtualization market, yesterday announced that Catbird vSecurity, its product that proactively secures the virtual network and guest operating systems by analyzing and responding to network events and attack, and enforcing correct VM configuration, now integrates the support for static and dynamically provisioned virtual desktops.

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On May 2 Desktone, Inc., a US company founded in 2006 and based in MA, announced Desktone 5.0 Platform, the new release of its DaaS platform for service providers and telecommunication companies.

Desktone 5.0 Platform can deliver three sperate types of hosted virtual desktop to end users:

Hosted Full-Featured VDI: Delivering end users a full-featured desktop that replicates the exact experience of a physical Windows desktop.

Hosted Shared Leveraging Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH): An ideal option for users such as task workers that don’t require a full-featured desktop.

Hosted Personal Windows Server: A comparable Windows experience at a more affordable price, often utilized by small to mid-sized companies.

providing multi-tenancy and granting the compliance with Microsoft licensing terms.

Release 5.0 includes DaaS Automation Engine, an OEM oriented feature that automate provisioning  and sizing of full tenant environments enabling service providers to offer free “try and buy” deployments.

Another new feature is the multi-data center management capability, that allows dynamic provisioning of hosted desktop, ensuring the shortest path but maintaining centralized administration.

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Today VMware announced the beta release of Project Octopus, its Enterprise cloud file sharing application that appeared in the Apple App Store in the first week of April.

Octopus uses synchronization technology from Zimbra and Mozy in order to enable enterprise data sharing, with centralized policy management for administrators, on- and off-premise and offers clients for iOS, Android, web browsers, etc.

Project Octopus will offer, in the final release, integration with VMware Horizon, VMware View and Project AppBlast.

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Today VMware disclosed the new features of VMware View 5.1, its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure platform. This version is the follow up of version 5 which was released in August 2011.

The most important features can be summarized as follows:

• View Storage Accelerator, already announced for View 5.0 and lifted at the last moment, this feature is borrowed from vSphere’s Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) and basically caches frequently used disk blocks into VDI host’s RAM avoiding frequent reading of the same informations from central storage.
• View Persona Management is now extended to physical machine with the main purpose of VDI migrations or OSes migrations.
• vCenter Operations (vCOPs) Manager for View is a new version, optimized for virtual desktop deployment, that provides end-to-end realtime monitoring of desktop and users. Already announced at VMworld Europe last year now includes a very requested feature: the ability to monitor PCoIP performance. This new release could help companies to use a single management stack for both private clouds/infrastructures and VDI.

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IBM’s big data platform, based on open source project Apache Hadoop, moves towards commercial distributions choosing to support Cloudera, as Oracle did in January for its Big Data Appliance.

The announcement comes with the acquisition of Vivismo, a private held company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that provides a federated discovery and navigation software able to expand big data analysis to traditional legacy applications and their data repositories.

Cloudera is one of the primary and first commercial distributions of Hadoop but there are others available from Hortonworks, MapR, and EMC Greenplum. The fact that Cloudera got the nod from two industry giants is noteworthy given the number of choices out there and may in fact make Cloudera first among equals in the commercial Hadoop field.

Writes Barbara Darrow in her article on Gigaom.

On April 25 Citrix announced its financial results for first quarter of fiscal 2012, ended March 31, 2012.

The company announced $589M in total revenue, with $243M in cash flow, up 53% year-on-year.

Compared to Q1 2011 both new license sales and license updates & maintenance (an unified classification that combines Technical Services and License Updates, previously presented as separated voices) increased 19%.

Professional services grew 33% and online SaaS revenue increased 21%.

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Last week Unidesk has released version 1.6 of its layering solution.

Unidesk solution transparently segments a VDI gold master into multiple, isolated containers that administrators can use to deploy applications, patches, drivers, etc., preserving, for any update, the customizations made by individual users.

The new features introduced in this release:

Integrated Citrix XenDesktop Support

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During Microsoft Management Summit 2012 Veeam announced the Veeam Management Pack (MP) 10-Pack, a free monitoring solution that allows VMware environments monitoring through System Center 2012 Operations Manager console.

For new MP costumers that use System Center 2012 or plan to implement it soon, Veeam offers a free perpetual 10-socket license that comes with a full year of maintenance and support.

This solution meets the growing need for companies to manage heterogeneous virtual data centers using a single console, as Hotlink does with SuperVISOR and vCenter, and suggests that Veeam is ready to bet on the idea that Hyper-V will continue to gain market share in the future.

We also suggest to read this in-depth article by David Marshall.