virtualization.info Editors

During Citrix Synergy this today, Citrix announced the release of a technical preview for the second version of their client hypervisor XenClient, and also introduced a new type supporting advanced levels of security, isolation and performance with extreme client computing requirements called XenClient XT. Version 2.0 is the follow up of version 1.0 which was released in September last year as part of XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 2.

The Citrix XenClient 2.0 technical preview is available as of today.

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Beginning this month, virtualization.info reported that VKernel released a new diagnostics tool for VMware called CapacityVIEW. Now VKernel has released a new free tool called StorageVIEW. StorageVIEW provides visibility into the storage components of a VMware environment.

It provides the following features:

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Citrix spokesman Bill Burley announced yesterday the release of Citrix Service Provider Automation Pack for XenApp 6, available exclusively for Citrix partners.

This release is the first of the newly formed Cloud App Delivery group at Citrix.

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Citrix has released a technical preview of the upcoming Receiver for Windows 3.0. Receiver is the application which is installed on clients in order to access hosted applications and desktops. The Receiver will replace the Online Plug-in for Windows which is now embedded in Receiver.

New features:

• Internet Explorer 9 support.

• Simplified listing of USB devices in the Desktop Viewer.

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Ringcube has announced the release of version 4.0 of its OS virtualization platform called vDesk, announcing a shift from management of hosted virtualization to providing so called Containers for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments on top of VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop.

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Citrix announced the schedule of a webinar for the phase IV of the Virtual
Reality Check project from Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants) and Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect at PQR).

Scheduled for June 15, 2011 at 1:00 – 2:00 PM EST, the webinar will cover the findings and best practices extracted from an extensive benchmark of Terminal Server and desktop workloads.

Attendance is free of charge, with registration required.

The Virtual Reality Check project was launched in 2009, as a non sponsored effort to compare VDI solutions from different vendors, and produced interesting results so far.

Open source vendor Red Hat announced on May 19th the general availability of the first update of its distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1

This release introduces bugfixes and security updates over RHEL 6, released in November last year, while keeping application compatibility and ISV/IHV certifications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 provides new features, including:

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In April last year, virtualization.info reported that Citrix made a strategic investment in Kaviza, for an undisclosed sum and no details about the terms of the deal. Citrix is now taking this to the next level, because during the annual Citrix Synergy conference, Citrix announced that it has acquired Kaviza known for its connection broker software VDI-in-a-Box.

Kaviza offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers, making it a less complex solution to implement compared to Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View. Customers just have to deploy the Kaviza virtual appliance on their hypervisor of choice and they are ready to go.

Both companies also posted a FAQ for its customers.

Beginning this month, virtualization.info reported that VMware removed the download links to VMware ESX, moving them to another page. With this VMware clearly stated that organizations should move to ESXi, it’s small footprint hypervisor. VMware vSphere 4.1 is the last release to support both het ESX and ESXi hypervisor.

To further support this VMware has released the VMware ESXi 4.1 Operations Guide, the paper which contains 22 pages describes the architecture of VMware ESXi and then explains how various management tasks are performed in it, and the VMware 4.1 ESXi Migration Guide, containing 11 pages providing guidance on how to make the transition to ESXi, along with several recommendations to help ensure a timely and seamless migration. VMware also makes available Migration Checklists and a Host Configuration Worksheet.

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VMware labs has released a technical preview, a so called “fling” of a new tool called InventorySnapshot. Inventory Snapshot alows a user to take a snapshot of a given vCenter inventory configuration, and apply that snapshot to another environment.

The inventory includes the Datacenter folders, datacenters, clusters, resource pools, vApps, hierarchy, roles and permissions, configuration settings, and custom fields. The tool needs Java and PowerCLI in order to work.

Thanks to Eric Sloof for providing the news.