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virtualization.info Editors VMware has released a technical preview of PXE manager for vCenter, which is available from the flings section from the VMware Labs website . PXE Manager is a management tool, supporting automatic PXE boot and customization of large numbers of ESXi systems. It also provides ESXi state mangement and patch management.
PXE Manager for vCenter provides the following functionalities:
NetApp has released a whitepaper titled: Deployment Guide for Citrix XenDesktop 5 on VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer on NetApp Storage. The paper which contains 62 pages, provides guidance on how to install Citrix’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution XenDesktop 5 on top of either the VMware vSphere 4.1.0 or Citrix XenServer 5.6.0. virtualization solutions using NetApp Storage.
The document focuses on hosted VDI desktops providing a step-by-step guide and best practices for leveraging Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) and the NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) 2.0.1P1. Focus is at achieving multiple levels of storage effiency and performance acceleration and not on maximizing the number of virtual desktops that can be placed on a storage controller.
In July 2009, Harry Labana joined Citrix as the new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Desktop and Application Virtualization division. Now Atlantis Computing, a company which provides Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions has announced that Labana will join the companies advisory board. It’s obvious that with this position, Citrix is showing interest in the products of Atlantis Computing which could possibly lead to an acquisition in the near future.
Oracle has released an update for its destkop virtualization solution VM VirtualBox. The release, which is considered a maintence release can be installed on top of version 4.0 of VirtualBox.
While some bugs are fixed, Oracle reports that there is still a bug with running VirtualBox on top of Mac OS X containing new i7 CPU’s leading to very slow and host OS Freezes, Oracle is still fixing this issue and once fixed will release a new version.
Last year April, virtualization.info started following a new startup called VMTurbo, which entered the capacity management solutions market. A few months later, the company launched its first product called the VMTurbo platform. Later that year, the company released as several other products to complement its offering, all becoming available within the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) based virtual appliance it offers to host its products.
Pano Logic has announced the release of version 4.5 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform Pano System. This version is the follow-up of version 4 which was released in January this year, extending support to Citrix XenDesktop 5 which was released in December last year and providing support for Windows 7 64 bit.
Virtual Computer has released service pack 1 for its client hypervisor NxTop version 3.0 which was released in September last year. NxTop consists of two tiers, NxTop Client which is a Xen-based client hypervisor and NxTop Center, its centralized management component. Even though Citrix made a marketing investment in Virtual Computer in order to promote its XenClient NxTop still uses its own Xen-based client hypervisor and didn’t adopt the Citrix XenClient hypervisor, because NxTop considers its own hypervisor more robust and mature at this point.
NxTop hypervisor is also available in a Workstation edition, which is a scaled down free version of the platform, including a centralized management solution, capped to a maximum of five managed computers.
Last week, Microsoft announced the release of the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target for free allowing a Windows Server to host an "cheap" iSCSI SAN, for use with failover clustering for example. Before that, the iSCSI Software Target was available with Windows Storage Server.
Aidan Finn, a Microsoft MVP for Hyper-V has published a step-by-step guide on how to build a Hyper-V Cluster using this iSCSI Software Target.
The paper covers the following topics:
Last week InfoWorld published the results from a test comparing the solutions from Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware held at the Advanced Network Computing Lab at the University of Hawaii. Each solution was tested on the same hardware and network topology. Real-world and synthetic Linux and Windows performance benchmarks were run, and subjective management and administration tests were performed.
The following products were compared:
Quest and MokaFive have announced a partnership in which Quest will bundle the MokaFive client virtualization solution with its own VDI connection broker software, calling it the vWorkspace MokaFive Suite. The solution will be able to provide a local Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution, which will be able to manage, secure and deliver virtual desktops to Windows and Mac. With this combined solution Quest now has the opportunity to support client based VMs running on top of VMware Player or Fusion, Virtual Box or Parallels Workstation, or even the MokaFive BareMetal hypervisor which MokaFive is developing when it will be released.