LiquidWare Labs has released version 4.8 of Profile Unity, extending support with enhanced multi-session login capabilities and Office 2010 support. This version is the follow-up of version 4.7 which was released in December last year. ProfileUnity is a profile migration and management tool which works with Windows XP/2000/Vista and Windows 7 profiles. It provides migration of Windows native user data to Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, Windows 7 environments and VMware ThinApp keeping the profiles in the native Windows format.
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Release: Qubes Beta 1.0
With a post on the Invisible Things blog, Joanna Rutkowska announced the availability of the first beta of Qubes, one year after the first announcement.
The XEN based desktop oriented project designed to be extremely secure has finally reached a stable state and a feature freeze: while the Open Source community version will continue adding new experimental functionalities, a commercial version will be produced from this release, focusing on stability and performance. It currently runs a flavour of Fedora Linux: a new beta will probably be available in 2 months.
Release : Icomasoft opvizor 1.0
Icomasoft, a Swiss startup led by Diego Boscardin, announced today the release of opvizor, a software-as-a-service solution designed to identify, diagnose and eliminate performance, security and configuration issues in VMware environments.
virtualization.info covered the first announcement of opvizor last December, inserting the company in our radar with a “Worth Watching” rating which seems to be confirmed today.
At its core, the platform retrieves encrypted versions of logs from the target infrastructure, analyzing and correlating them to identify root causes of misconfigurations and issues while also allowing easy information sharing with consultants and troubleshooters.
Opvizor is available for 1.500 EUR per user per year, but a freeware version – limited to two ESX hosts and a data volume of 1GB per year – is also available for evaluation and small-scale deployments.
Veeam releases CIOs survey report on VMware Management
Veeam has released a survey, fielded by Vanson Bourne, an market research company which surveyed 253 CIOs from organizations across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France that employ more than 1,000 people and use VMware vSphere. The surveys topic is VMware Management with Enterprise Management Systems from the Big 5: Microsoft, HP, IBM, CA and BMC.
According to the survey the predominant management framework used in the enterprise today is Microsoft System Center (55 percent). This is followed IBM Tivoli (20 percent) and HP OpenView (11 percent).
Release: Kaviza VDI-in-a-Box 4.1
Kaviza has released version 4.1 of their connection broker software VDI-in-a-Box. This version is the follow-up of version 4.0 which was released in January this year. Kaviza offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers. Customers just have to deploy the Kaviza virtual appliance on their hypervisor of choice and they are ready to go.
New features include:
Release: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1
In February this year, Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, introducing Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and RemoteFX for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) features. Besides providing Hyper-V as a role in Windows Server Microsoft also provides a free stand-alone version version of its hypervisor, comparable with the VMware ESXi hypervisor and Citrix XenServer in the OEM pre-installation options.
Today Microsoft released a new version of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 containing the same virtualization feature set as the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.
Thanks to Hyper-V.nu for providing the news.
Release: Virsto VDI 1.0
In March last year, virtualization.info reported about Virsto, a company providing virtual storage optimization software for Microsoft Hyper-V called Virsto One. Now Virsto has renamed Virsto One to Virsto VSI and introduces another product Virsto VDI which is targeted for use with Virtual Desktop environments running either Microsoft VDI or Citrix XenDesktop.
Both products share the same Virsto Virtual Storage Engine (VSE), which compromises 90% of the products code. It provides a solution to improve efficiency and performance of Hyper-V virtual machines, by hijacking and optimizing their interaction with the underlying storage. It is a lightweight solution that installs inside the Hyper-V parent partition and places a filter driver between VMs virtual hard drives (VHDs) and physical volumes .
Release: Microsoft RSAT for Windows 7 SP1
In order to remotely manage Hyper-V on Windows 7, you need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT), provided by Microsoft. RSAT enables IT administrator to manage roles and features remotely from a Enterprise, Professional or Ultimate edition Windows 7 or Windows 7 with SP1 workstation.
Now Microsoft has updated the RSAT to support the new features introduced in Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, which was released in February this year.
Ask the vendors: VMware vCenter Operations
With the release of vCenter Operations in February, VMware took its chances in a market and operational segment which, until then, had been filled by its own partners. In the wake of such move, virtualization.info got in touch with some of the most relevant affected vendors to collect their feedback.
We asked the vendors if they planned to integrate with or build on top of vCenter Operations, what their opinion was on VMware’s general strategy toward partners considering this move and how they saw their own value proposition compared to the VMware offering. The result, we think, is quite interesting…
More details about vSphere 5 appear online
In February this year, virtualization.info reported about VMware which exposed some of the upcoming features of vSphere 5 during its Partner Exchange. Last week even more details appeared online, these details leaked on a Turkish Web Forum, but were removed later. The post itself can still be retrieved from Google Cache though.
Besides, Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) for Storage, Host-based replication for Site Recovery Manager, and Network I/O control for Virtual Machines, vSphere 5 will feature: