virtualization.info Editors

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.

Xen.org, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) has released version 4.1, this version is the follow-up of version 4.0 which was released in April last year.

Xen is a virtualization engine, used by several Linux distributions, NetBSD and Solaris but also serves as a basis for the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and Xen Hypervisor for Client Devices (XCI) for example, which will probably include a new version of Xen in a future release. Also Citrix XenServer which derives from XCP and Citrix XenClient which derives from XCI use Xen.

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In June last year, virtualization.info covered Dögel IT-Mangement, a company entering the application virtualization market, with a product called Evalaze.

Now Dögel IT-Management has released version 1.0 of its Evalaze application virtualization product.

Evalaze provides a sandbox in the Windows OS providing file system and registry redirection. Applications are captured in snapshots and provided as EXE files which can be executed on clients.

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VKernel has released a new product which will become part of their vOperations Suite (the new name for the VKernel Capacity Management Suite), called Performance Analyzer.

Performance Analyzer monitors, diagnoses, and resolves performance issues in virtual environments, and therefore competes with the AliveVM functionality which VMware released last week when they announced vCenter Operations. Its clear that VKernel is seeing VMware more as a competitor than as a partner, as virtualization.info reported in July last year.

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In April 2009 Microsoft released version 1.0 of its Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) tool. The technology was acquired from Kidaro, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. In April 2010 Service Pack 1 for MED-V 1.0 was released introducing support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

In August last year, virtualization.info reported about the upcoming 2.0 release of MED-V, concluding that the expected features were not very promising compared to the potential of the product since Microsoft offers the solution to maintain legacy applications while updating to new OSes. Now Microsoft has released MED-V 2.0 as part of their Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2011.

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After releasing App-V 4.6 in March last year, Microsoft has now made available Service Pack 1 for App-V 4.6 which is part of the Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2011. Most of the new features are focussed around the sequencer, which is the tool part of App-V to transform traditional applications into virtual ones.

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In October last year, virtualization.info reported about VMware showing off vCenter, View and vCloud Request Manager iPad Clients. Now VMware has released its View client for the iPad, available via Apple iTunes. The client provides the ability to logon to a View desktop using the PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol over the LAN or WAN, for which the ability to access the View infrastructure over the WAN using PCoIP was enhanced in the 4.6 release of VMware View. (see this article from Brian Madden about the negative aspects)

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VMware has announced the release of vCenter Operations which combines the analytics technology from the Alive VM product, the capacity analytics and planning technology from CapacityIQ and the configuration analytics and management technology from Configuration Manager. With this release Vmware is planning to compete with technology from BMC, IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView and Microsoft’s System Center line of products.

CapacityIQ is an evolution from the technique which VMware acquired in 2005 from AOG, Configuration Manager was acquired from VMware’s parent company EMC in March last year and Alive VM comes from Integrien, which VMWare acquired in September last year. In December VMware decided to offer the Alive VM product for free to customers purchasing vSphere or other products.

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VMware announced the acquisition of WaveMaker, one of the most widely used tools for quick web development, with 135.000 downloads a month.

The acquisition fits in VMware’s Platform as a service strategy, building on top of the Spring framework to provide easy-to-use development tools to non- professional or non-coding developers.
With this acquisition, VMware aims to bring many more business users to the Spring based cloud vision, Code2Cloud, while building sinergy with its existing Spring Roo tool.

In August last year, Parallels announced that it hired Birger Steen, the former Microsoft VP of Russia to become President responsible for sales, marketing, product management, and support. Now Parallels announced that Steen has been named Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Parallels replacing founder and former CEO Serguei Beloussov, who will become Chief Architect and Executive Chairman.