virtualization.info Editors

Back in February, Microsoft announced a new version of Windows 7 tailored for VDI access, named Windows Thin PC. A preview is available since March, as reported by virtualization.info.

Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Director of Product Management for Microsoft Desktop Virtualization, announced on the Windows for your Business Blog that Microsoft plans to release Windows Thin PC in June.

Windows Thin PC (WinTPC) aims to help small organizations benefit of virtualization, offering a solution which should be light on memory, disk and networking resources. At the time of writing, 12.000 customers and channel partners have signed up for a preview through the WinTPC Technology Preview programme.

WinTPC offers customers who use Software Assurance the opportunity to repurpose existing PCs as thin clients by providing a locked down version of Windows 7, and is supposed to include a system for securing devices by preventing users from saving data or installing application locally.

We got notice that the direct ESX download links were removed from the download page of vSphere: a strong signal from VMware for all those organizations still using the once-flagship hypervisor.
VMware stated multiple times that the future lies in ESXi (or Hypervisor, as it is now named) and tiny hypervisors with very small footprint: ESX will be shifted for ESXi-Hypervisor from the next version of vSphere.

The ESX download page is still reachable from an indirect link in the page, but this is indeed a very strong signal that everyone should start planning for its demise.

VMware is focusing more and more on the high-level centralized management offered by vCenter and the ecosystem, up to vCloud Director: the old-style ESX with its command line switches and fine grained host configuration simply doesn’t fit the new strategy.

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One of the most active companies in the Hyper-V ecosystem, 5nine (link to the radar) announced the release of a local management tool for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V Manager, also available in a free version.

While the Microsoft virtualization solution provides a command line tool (SCONFIG) for the basic configuration tasks, it provides no local GUI for its management: this is a space well suited for third party solution providers.
Built by leveraging the public Hyper-V WMI APIs, 5Nine Hyper-V Manager provides yet another way of managing your Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. It supports even the latest features of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1, Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX, missing little of the full fledged command line tool.

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The VMware Compliance Checker for vSphere is a free, simple and straightforward tool meant to verify the security of a vSphere environment. It has been developed to compare the detected configuration with the guidelines provided in the VMware vSphere Hardening Guide, and will provide detailed reports representing actionable items and non compliance issues.

Each issue is clearly labeled and a direct reference is provided to fixing instructions and further details, an approach which has proven to be worth the additional work in similar products (the Best Practice Analyzers from Microsoft being a famous example).

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It has been a record first quarter for the Austin-based software provider SolarWinds, reaching $43 million revenue with a $11.7 million.
The quarter included revenue from the recent acquisition of the virtualization management software developer Hyper9. CFO Mike Berry says:

“We generated higher than expected margins and cash flow and even grew our cash balance despite the acquisition of Hyper9”.

SolarWinds growth is supposed to continue. In Q2, the company expects revenue between $43.2 million and $44.7 million. Last month, a spokesman said they are hiring between 20 and 25 people per month, stressing the high growth rate of the company.

Quest Software announced its acquisition of the assets of RemoteScan, a company in the Virtualization Desktop business. RemoteScan focuses on scanning and imaging device connectivity in Windows Terminal, Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp and Quest vWorkspace. The company is based in Missoula, Montana, and until now it has had its main focus on the document management and healthcare markets.

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ActiveState, a company focusing on dynamic languages well known to developers for its Windows Perl and Python tools, announced Stackato, a Cloud Foundry enterprise cloud platform engineered for dynamic languages.
Currently supported development languages are Python and Perl, and the platform has been designed with developers in mind, enabling an in-depth management of applications written in said languages both in private and public cloud scenarios.

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Brian Gammage, VP and Fellow at Gartner, will leave his current company to join VMware: it’s still unclear what his role will be, but he is likely to keep his focus on dekstop and end-user computing.
While Gammage natural place might be helping shape VMware cloud offering for a broad audience, he might also be involved in VMware large desktop virtualization initiative.

Update: VMware has now announced that Gammage has been hired with the newly created role of Chief Market Technologist for the VMware End User Computing team.

It was in the air: with more and more movements in the cloud computing space it was only a matter of time before Red Hat released its own solution.
The (self appointed) World’s Open Source Leader released OpenShift, a Platform as a Service cloud meant for developers of a number of languages, including PHP, Java, Ruby and Python.

OpenShift supports both a light model (Express) and an enterprise grade model (Flex), both currently in beta and scheduled for final launch soon: in the meantime they are both free, their final prices undisclosed.
Red Hat decided to leverage Amazon AWS service as its hosting platform instead of managing its own hardware, but the level of interaction with the actual virtual servers depends on the platform model: Flex will actually run inside the user’s Amazon system, while Express will leverage Red Hat’ shared systems.

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eG Innovations is a performance monitoring and triage solutions provider. Today, eg Innovations announced the release of eG Enterprise-on-Tap, a SaaS performance monitoring solution for applications and business services. eG Enterprise-on-Tap supports physical, virtual and cloud based infrastrucures, covering 10 different operating system versions and more than 120 applications.

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