History

Tim Magnan has released a free monitoring tool for Hyper-V environments called HyperV_Mon, currently in version 1.8. HyperV_Mon is a Gui tool for viewing CPU performance of a system running Microsoft Hyper-V. The tool can be downloaded from the Tmurgent Technologies website.

Although the tool isn’t intended as a regular monitoring tool, it can quickly help to understand what is going on at a Hyper-V host. The tool requires the .NET framework version 3.5 to be installed on the machine where you wish to start the GUI, and it leverages the Root Partition WMI provider of the server running Hyper-V. Further information about how to configure and use the tool is provided in the HyperV_Mon whitepaper.

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Beginning December last year, VMware released version 2.0 of its benchmark framework VMmark 2.0. Where version 1.0 of the VMmark tool was focusing on the performance of a single virtualization host, the 2.0 version is focusing on measuring the performance of a whole virtual data center.

Cisco is the first OEM which published its scores online on the website of VMware, with a score of 6.51 at 6 tiles, using the Cisco UCS B200 M2 hardware platform running on top of VMware ESX 4.1.0 build 260247. Since Cisco is the first to publish their scores, we cannot compare the results yet. Probably other OEMs will follow shortly making it possible to compare the results.

Citrix has released Service Pack 1 for its client hypervisor: XenClient. Service Pack 1 is the first update to version 1.0 which was released in September last year as part of XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 2, and contains hundreds of updates to both the XenClient and the Synchronizer for XenClient.

Service Pack 1 includes support for the FlexCast technology which was introduced with the release of Citrix XenDesktop 5 released in September last year. The update can be downloaded from the Citrix website.

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EMC has released a white paper titled: Microsoft Hyper-V scalability with EMC Symmetrix VMAX, the paper which contains 17 pages highlights a Hyper-V scalability test performed by EMC during the creation of one of the largest Hyper-V environments in the world.

The environment consists of a 16-node Hyper-V cluster, using the Symmetrix VMAX storage arrays capable of scaling to 64 virtual machines per cluster node for a total of 1024 virtual machines, the goal was to see how well the Symmetrix VMAX storage array performs and how performance can be optimized.

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LucidLogix Technologies (Lucid) is a technology company from Israel providing solutions which provides an unique approach when it comes to using Multiple Graphical Processor Unites (GPUs), a technique expected to become more popular now that VDI vendors are announcing support for it, like Microsoft with its upcoming RemoteFX technology, a remote desktop protocol accelerator, which Microsoft acquired when they acquired Calista in January 2008.

Remote FX is currently in Release Candidate status and to be released with Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 which is still expected for H1 2011. These technologies require identical GPUs in the host though, as outlined in the Deploying Microsoft RemoteFX on a Single Remote Desktop Virtualization Host Server Step-by-Step Guide for example.

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Kerry McGowne, who was Vice President of Corporate Marketing has left Parallels in December last year. McGowne who started at Parallels in September 2009 was the follow-up of Kurt Daniel, who left Parallels in January 2009 to become COO for a Web 2.0 startup called WorkLight, as reported by virtualization.info beginning last year. McGowne worked for Parallels for 1 year and 3 months.

McGowne is now a Self-Employed consultant as his linkedin profile states. Before working at Parallels. McGowne was the VP of Corporate Marketing at ServiceSource before joining Parallels in September 2009, and before that he was the Director of Executive Communications and Director of Platform Strategy and Marketing at Microsoft.

After running virtualization.info for seven years, I will be starting a new job next year as Research Director for Gartner, where I will be covering cloud computing, virtualization and datacenter technologies in the IT Professionals research team.

I am extremely excited about this new role, as it presents the opportunity to work closely with and learn from truly brilliant minds, including well-known industry analysts like Chris Wolf, Drue Reeves and Richard Jones. Also, joining a top firm like Gartner will allow me to focus 100 percent on the newest, most innovative technologies that the market will offer.

While this is a thrilling step forward in my career, this announcement is bittersweet because it means I will be stepping down from my role with virtualization.info, as I will no longer be able to contribute directly or indirectly to the site due to a conflict of interest.

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eWeek Magazine published an article about how VMware plans to deploy security inside the Hypervisor in 2011. Allwyn Sequeira, who is Chief Technical Officer for VMware ‘s Security and Network Solutions divisions told a group of technical writers and analysts that security for applications deployed in cloud systems needs to be built into the hypervisor itself and not reside independently in the stack.

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VMware has released a paper titled: Configuration Examples and Troubleshooting for VMDirectPath. The paper which contains 5 pages details some configuration examples on how to configure direct access to an I/O device within ESX using VMDirectPath. VMDirectPath allows you to connect up to two passthrough devices to a virtual machine improving performance for ESX systems that utilize high-speed I/O devices.

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Beginning this month, virtualization.info reported that Red Hat started developing a GIMP Toolkit (GTK) client for Linux leveraging the open source SPICE remote desktop protocol, beginning this month version 2.0 was released providing support for the 64 bit version of Fedora 14 and now version 0.3 is available which now includes RPMs for use with Fedora 14 64 bit.

This release fixes known rendering crashes triggered with the Windows QXL driver. It is also fully asynchronous using co-routines, and the API is fully documented. It supports 16-bit color, as well as display scaling.