virtualization.info Editors

Sven Huisman, technical consultant at PQR, Jeroen van de Kamp, Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants and Ruben Spruijt, Technology Officer at PQR just announced a new paper titled: Project VRC: Phase IV. The paper which contains 38 pages gives some valuable insight on the impact of using Application Virtualization in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment.

The three biggest and most commonly used application virtualization solutions in the VDI market space are investigated: Citrix Application Streaming, Microsoft App-V and VMware ThinApp. To measure the performance impact of these solutions on VDI, Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) was used.

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Quantum, a company which provides backup, recovery and archive software has acquired Pancetera, the company which provides management and optimization for virtual storage in VMware for an ammound of $12 million.

Pancetera entered the virtualization market in January 2010, and was founded in 2009 by Henrik Rosendahl, former CEO of Thinstall before it was acquired by VMware and a couple of people from Data Domain which was acquired by EMC. In July 2010 the company launched its solution called Unite. In November last year, Pancetera released version 2.0 of Unite, introducing support for change block tracking for vSphere.

In January this year Solarwinds acquired the IT Management software company Hyper9, making its move into the virtualization market. Hyper9’s product called Virtual Environment Optimization is now rebranded to Solarwinds Virtual Environment Optimization Virtualization Manager and has reached version 4.0 and is a follow-up of version 3.0 which was released by Hyper9 in November last year.

Some of the new features include:

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Oracle announced last week an update for its VM Server for SPARC, reaching version 2.1. This product, formerly known as Sun Logical Domains, represents the Oracle offer for the Oracle Solaris operating system, running on SPARC processors based servers. Oracle offer includes a x86 solution named Oracle VM Server for x86 (which is now at version 2.2).

This release brings live migration capabilities to the SPARC T-series server family, including SPARC T3, UltraSPARC T2 Plus and UltraSPARC T2 based servers.

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Virsto Software, founded in 2007 by a group of virtualization storage experts, has raised 12$M in a funding round led by InterWest Partners which also involved previous investors such as August Capital and Canaan Partners.

The company also announced the acquisition of EvoStor, a company specialized in the VMware storage market.

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VKernel has released version 3.5 of its vOperations Suite. vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and Chargeback functionality for VMware environments. VKernel used to market the products in the suite separately, but decided to combine them recently. In the future, Vkernel is planning on expanding the suite to support Microsoft Hyper-V in the future, its currently already releasing products tailored for Hyper-V like Vkernel Chargeback with Hyper-V 2.6 which was released in March this year.

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Microsoft has released Windows Thin PC (WinTPC), a new Windows 7 version tailored for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) access, making it Generally Available (GA) at July 1st this year for customers who use Microsoft Software Assurance (SA).

Windows Thin PC, which was announced in January this year is a smaller foodprint, locked down version of Windows 7, which enables customers to install this windows version on existing PCs repurposing them as thin clients which can be used to access Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments. PCs with WinTPC installed do not require a Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license, in contradiction to regular clients who want to access a VDI environment. WinTPC is comparable with Windows XP Fundamentals, which was revealed in 2005.

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Ericom, the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) provider has launched a beta version of a HTML 5 Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Client. The client works with HTML 5 natively and doesn’t require any add-in like Java, Flash, Silverlight ActiveX. The client is called AccessNow and runs on Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer (with the Chrome Frame plug-in), Firefox and other browsers with HTML 5 and WebSockets support.

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VMware announced last week the beta phase for its virtual machine conversion tool VMware vCenter Converter Standalone. The previous stable version of vCenter Converter was released in 2009.

This tool provides a scalable solution to convert virtual (V2V) and physical (P2V) machines to VMware virtual machines. It is also possible to share virtual machines between products such as VMware Server, Player, Fusion and Workstation, in addition to virtual machines running on ESXi instances ( both managed and non managed by vCenter Server).

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VMware announced the availability of a maintenance release for its Mac desktop virtualization solution VMware Fusion, reaching version 3.1.3.

This minor release adds support for Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 (both 32 and 64bit) and Ubuntu Linux 10.10 and 11.04 (both 32 and 64bit).

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