virtualization.info Editors

VMTurbo announces the release of a new product, VMTurbo Performance and Efficiency Reporter, which joins VMTurbo Monitoring to build a complete solution for the virtualized data center, focusing on VMware technologies.
Available for free, Performance and Efficiency Reporter enables real time, fine grained analysis of resources consumption both for physical and virtualized hosts.
As the name of the product suggests, the information gained covers two different categories.

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Both PHD Virtual and Quest announced yesterday their results for Q1.
This has been a good quarter for PHD virtual, with bookings growing 55% year on year and 70% of them being from new customers. According to Thomas Charlton, CEO, the growth has been led by their VMware and Citrix products.

While news are good for PHD Virtual, Quest Software stock lost 5% when the company announced it missed the objectives for Q1. It should be noted, however, that these are company wide results, not directly related to the virtualization division, and that the increase in costs is mostly due new acquisitions and new hires.

UPDATE: as a result of the announcement, JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered their price target on shares of Quest Software from $30 to $28 – analysts Stifel Nicolaus also cut their price target from $30 to $27, with a “buy” rating on the stock.

The Register broke the news of a very relevant information leak on one of HP’s VP linkedin profile.
According to The Register and a screenshot it published supposedly from Scott McClellan‘s Linkedin profile, HP is going to launch a number of new, dedicated cloud computing services:

• HP “obect storage”, a storage environment built from scratch designed for scalability and reliability.
• HP “compute”,”network” and “block storage” cloud services.
• The future HP “cloud” website
• Common and shared services for authentication and so on in the cloud

A “person familiar with the matter”, reported The Register, said that HP is going to unveil its plans at the VMware’s VMWorld conference in August.
The linkedin profile has been updated, removing the information leak, and HP declined to comment.

The absence of Azure or the .NET platform is notable, expecially considering HP said it would have had eventually offered both an “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS) cloud and “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS) cloud.

Update: the platform will likely be called Scalene, as reported by the register

VKernel released today CapacityVIEW (download link), a freeware diagnostic tool for VMware.
It is a quick and lean tool, meant as an administrator’s helper for quick diagnostic of issues on a VMware powered infrastructure. It is capable of reporting to the administrator:

• The number of VMs with performance problems
• Diagnostics and alerts for storage and server performance issues
• Available capacity
• The amount of over allocated CPU, memory and storage
• Virtual machine I/O Latency
• The total amount of resources in the environment
• Number of powered on and off VMs

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AppSense announced that Harry Labana (biography will be the new CTO of the application virtualization vendor.
Labana is leaving Citrix, where he was leading the company core desktop virtualizaton initiative as CTO, to start a new adventure from May 9th: he is following David Roussain, VP of Marketing who moved to AppSense last year.

Labana also commented the change on his corporate blog, also mentioning how AppSense is a strongly growing company and how Goldman Sachs recently demonstrated their confidence in it by investing $70M for a minority stake.

“I am very excited to join AppSense at a critical period in its development, as the market opportunity and potential for user virtualization is growing exponentially,” said Labana. “It has been an honor to work with the team at Citrix, and I view my new role at AppSense as an opportunity to further strengthen and extend the partnership between the two companies. Through my work with AppSense, I have developed a deep respect for its mission and people and will continue to work closely with Citrix to transform the desktop and drive innovation. I look forward to being a key participant in helping AppSense take advantage of the bright future that lies ahead.”

Riverbed announced two new press releases[1] – [2] the enhancement of its flagship Steelhead product to include optimization of Citrix XenDesktop virtual desktop solution and for ESX powered clouds.

Steelhead is a WAN acceleration product meant to improve speed and user experience over slow or high-latency links. It promises up to 60% performance gain over the standard ICA protocol used by Citrix, and even 30x performance gain and 98% traffic reduction for the Steelhead Cloud solution. The latter will provide acceleration on the link between Riverbed and cloud providers running VMware such as Terremark and ZettaServe.

Steelhead Cloud already supported Amazon EC2, and is now completing its offering by optimizing some of the most relevant players left in the market.

PacketMotion, a company focusing on User Activity Management and Network Visibility, announced the availability of its VM-to-VM traffic monitoring solution, PacketSentry Virtual Probe.

The lack of visibility on VM-to-VM traffic is a key issue when considering the security of virtual machines: it makes impossible or extremely difficult to actually monitor very relevant network traffic, and to correctly satisfy some requirements for security compliance or internal audit. The “black hole” of VM-to-VM has been pointed out multiple times, and various vendors gave different answers to this issue.

PacketSentry Virtual Probe has been implemented as a guest VM sitting on the virtual network and connected to promiscuos mode ports on the virtual switch. It will then monitor and secure traffic on VMware clusters leveraging the extensive PacketSentry database: such systems should always be managed by the network and security teams rather than the virtualization administrators, ensuring segregation of duties and allowing security management to be executed by the people in charge of it.

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With another move likely to add gasoline on the fire of the recent Provider or Enabler discussion VMware announced the acquisition of SlideRocket, a SaaS-based business presentation provider.

SlideRocket is a tightly focused company, delivering presentation solutions with a modern and cloud-oriented approach, directly aimed at business but with a range of solutions also covering personal or SMB usage.

it is very interesting to note how this last move fits in the global VMware’s strategy and its renewed focus on end users – even more stressed by the fact that CTO Steve Herrod wrote a lenghty piece himself on the “Post PC era”. The terms of the acquisition, however, were not disclosed.

In December last year, Quest released version 7.2 of its VDI connection broker solution vWorkspace adding support for VMware vSphere 4.1 and adding a PowerShell Module and other new features. Now Quest has announced the availability of Maintenance Release 1 for vWorkSpace 7.2 adding support for Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 adding integration and capabilities for RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory.

Maintenance Release 1 adds the following new features:

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Veeam has announced that it is working on a Capacity Planning Report pack for Veeam Reporter and to be included with Veeam ONE with an expected release in May. With this release Veeam is entering the capacity planning market seeking direct competition with vKernel and other vendors in the capacity planning market including VMware’s vCenter Operations.

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