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virtualization.info Editors Yesterday VMware CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Steve Harrod presented a major update in VMware software stack, speaking at the online event “Raising the Bar, Part V”.
The new version of vSphere aims to be the foundation of a complete suite for virtualization and virtualization management, providing a flexible solution for all of the use cases, delivering what VMware calls “IT As A Service” (ITaaS). Read further for an overview of the new capabilities and the new licensing model.
On July 5th Citrix announced the availability of XenServer 6.0 beta (formerly “Project Boston“), based on the Xen 4.1 Hypervisor.
This beta is public and available for download here (a mycitrix.com account is required). A webinar, covering all of the new features of XenServer 6.0, is scheduled for today at 5:00 – 6:30 PM CEST. Registration here.
Now that the news is out that Citrix’s CTO Simon Crosby, and Vice President Ian Pratt are leaving Citrix, to start their own company called Bromium, its clear that this is a great loss to Citrix, especially Crosby served as a public-facing executive, representing Citrix on many occasions. In the meantime the Citrix CTO office, chaired by Martin Duursma responded on the news in a blog post titled: "Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt Announce the Founding of Bromium"
Before joining Citrix, both Crosby and Pratt worked for XenSource, the company which was acquired by Citrix in August 2008, XenSource was founded by Pratt, and supported the development of the Open Source project Xen, the Hypervisor now used by Citrix, and still offered as Open Source through the Xen.org community.
Citrix’s CTO for the Data Center and Cloud Division, Simon Crosby just announced that he is leaving Citrix together with Ian Pratt, Chairman of Xen.org and VP of Advanced Virtualization products, to start a new Company called Bromium Inc, together with Guarav Banga, the creator of Phoenix Hyperspace. Crosby and Pratt joined Citrix after Citrix acquired XenSource Inc in August 2008.
While Crosby did not enclose the technology or products that Bromium is going to deliver, he did say that Bromium isn’t planning to compete with any excisting virtual infrastructure or security vendor. Crosby says: "We are fusing deep virtualization and security systems DNA to build a powerful set of tools that can offer continuous endpoint protection".
In July last year, virtualization.info reported about the first details for the upcoming succesor of Hyper-V called Hyper-V 3.0, at that time there were signals that the Hypervisor would be integrated in Windows 8 as well. In February this year, virtualization.info reported on the fact that more details about Microsofts upcoming client Hypervisor appeared online, pointing to patents which Microsoft claimed hinting at an upcoming client hypervisor.
Now Robert McLaws, who runs the Windows Now blog, has got his hands on a leaked Windows 8 build (7989) which apparently provides the option to install Hyper-V as a feature on the upcoming OS on 64-bit versions of the Operating System.
Microsoft today released the first beta of the successor of System Center Opalis, now called System Center Orchestrator 2012. Opalis Software was acquired by Microsoft in December 2009, and Microsoft decided to integrate the solutions into its System Center portfolio.
System Center Orchestrator (SCO) is Run Book Automation (RBA) software, which can be used to define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows. The workflows are defined in the SCO workflow designer, and so called Integration Packs are provided to interact with Microsoft and non-Microsoft products, which run on so called Action Servers.
Aidan Finn, a Microsoft MVP with he Virtual Machine expertise has released a whitepaper titled: A Guide to Hyper-V Dynamic Memory, Understanding, enabling, and configuring Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Dynamic Memory for virtualised workloads. The paper which contains 40 pages covers Dynamic Memory, a new feature for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, introduced with the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 in February this year. It provides the ability to pool available memory on a physical host and dynamically make that memory available to virtual machines running on the host, based on current workload needs in the virtual machines.
VMware has released 3 new Plug-ins for its orchestration tool, vCenter Orchestrator. The plugins are for HTTP-REST, SOAP and vCenter Update Manager (VUM).
The HTTP-REST and SOAP Plug-ins plug-ins allow for integration with cloud provisioning and operations use cases with systems that offer RESTful or traditional SOAP web services.