virtualization.info Editors

Liquidware Labs has released version 4.8 of their VDI assessment tool Stratusphere. This version is the follow-up of version 4.6 which was released in May last year. Stratusphere is capable of rating physical desktop candidates for VDI environments or identify poor user experience in an existing VDI environment. It supports the VMware and Citrix hypervisors.

This release focuses on a tenfold increase in scalability per database hub, application IOPS reports, and expanded application virtualization reporting.

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VMware has released a new version of the vSphere hardening guide tailored to version 4.1 of vSphere which was released in July last year. The hardening guide which contains 113 pages provides guidance on how to securely deploy VMware vSphere 4.1 in a production environment and focuses on the initial configuration of the virtualization infrastructure layer.

Recommendations are given for Enterprise, DMZ and Specialized Security Limited Functionality (SSLF) environments.

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German consulting firm Mightycare has released yet another tool, called MCS-Thinview. The tool is a VMware ThinApp Explorer for compiled ThinApp Packages, and can help to see problems in ThinApp packages.

The tool enables you to can see inside the ThinApp Package, Register, Unregister, Install or Uninstall ThinApp Packages on your Computer and:

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Citrix has released version 2.3.1. of its physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion tool: XenConvert. XenConvert is capable of converting a physical server or desktop running Windows to a XenServer VM or provisioning services vDisk. It can also convert an offline VM or disk in the VHD, OVF, VMDK and XVA format, to a XenServer VM.

Version 2.3.1. is the follow up of version 2.3 which was released in January this year and resolves an issue in environments where DHCP is unavailable on the management network.

A couple of weeks ago CiRBA released version 6.1 of its capacity planning tool for virtual infrastructures; Data Center Intelligence. This version is the follow-up of version 6.0 which was released in November last year. The tool supports Xen, IBM pSeries and zSeries and Oracle/Sun Zones and LDOMs.

Changes in this release include:

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VMware has updated its virtualization platform Workstation and Player and platform wrapper product ACE to build 385536. Besides fixing security issues and known problems this version adds support for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Ubuntu 10.10 guest and host operating systems.

Some of the issues resolved in this version:

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The open source remote desktop protocol SPICE, supported by Red Hat has reached version 0.8.0. This version is the follow-up of version 0.7.1 which was released in December last year.

Version 0.8.0 contains mostly bugfixes, but also contains two new features:

• Support for different clipboards (selections) to vd_agent copy paste

• Support for using different authentication mechanisms (just SASL for now)

In February virtualization.info reported on the fact that Microsoft announced a new Windows 7 version tailored for VDI access, called Windows Thin PC (WinTPC), becoming available for customers who use Software Assurance. Now Microsoft has anounced a public Community Technology Preview (CTP), which is available on its Connect website.

WinTPC is a smaller foodprint, locked down version of Windows 7, which enables customers to install this windows version on existing PCs repurposing them as thin clients which can be used to access Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments. WinTPC is comparable with Windows XP Fundamentals, which was revealed in 2005.

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Ericom, the company which provides VDI solutions has released a beta of its HTML5 client for VMware View. The HTML5 client will be able to access Vmware View desktops using the Remote Desktop Protocol(RDP) from any HTML5 compatible web browser.

The clients doesn’t require Java, Flash, Silverlight or any other underlying technology, which makes it quite unique. It leverages WebSockets, AJAX, JSON and HTML5 technologies. Unfortunately it doesn’t support the PCoIP protocol yet, but that can change in the near future, since Ericom is planning more future development based on feedback.

During the annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas last week, Microsoft announced the release of Service Pack 1 for System Center Virtual Machine Manager Release 2.

Service Pack 1 mainly adds support for Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX, introduced with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 in Februari this year. It also contains a rollupof all released hotfixes for SCVMM 2008 R2.

With the release of Service Pack 1 Microsoft also updated the Management Pack for SCVMM 2008 R2 used by System Center Operations Manager, so that current memory consumption is used by Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) instead of a static memory value.