History

After releasing a beta beginning this month, Oracle has now announced the general availability of version 4.0 of VirtualBox. Virtualbox is a desktop virtualization solution also known as a type-2 Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). VirtualBox can be installed on top of Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux and it can run Windows, Linux and Solaris as guest.

The product was initially developed by innotek, which was acquired by Sun in February 2008, Sun rebranded the product to Sun VM VirtualBox. In April 2009 Sun on its turn was acquired by Oracle, which rebranded the product to Oracle VM VirtualBox.

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Christopher Young, VMware Vice President and General Manager End User Computing has joined the board of directors of Rapid 7, a company which provides threat management solutions and is the 7th fastest growing security company in the U.S. Rapid 7 along other products provides the open-source based penetration testing framework Metasploit, which it acquired in October 2009.

Young joined VMware in September this year, coming from EMC where he was Senior Vice President of RSA products to lead the newly created End-User Computing business unit. VMware clearly wanted to make a statement, suggesting that security is going to become a key part of its desktop virtualization offering.

The fact that Young now joined the board of directors clearly suggests that the Vulnerability Management and Penetration testing Products of Rapid 7 will be integrated somehow in the VMware offering, either by using the products or by an acquisition of Rapid 7 by VMware in the future.

Just before the end of the year, as promised, Microsoft released the first early beta of Server App-V, one of its most ambitious virtualization platforms.

App-V technology derives from SoftGrid, the application virtualization platform that Microsoft inherited with the acquisition of Softricity in May 2006.
Considered a leading solution before the acquisition, it didn’t become a mainstream platform despite Microsoft resources. This depended on several factors:

• the decision to relegate App-V in the controversial Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), available for Software Assurance (SA) customers;
• the lack of action to support App-V across its product portfolio (Office 2010 is the first major application made available as an App-V package)
• the lack of support from 3rd party ISVs
• the lack of a proper license to allow service providers to stream Windows applications to customers
• the lack of any significant marketing activity to promote App-V
• the lack of any concrete demand from customers

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Since its first official release beginning 2009, the Virtual Session Indexer(VSI) has gained popularity as an independent benchmarking tool. One of the projects using the VSI tool is Project Virtual Reality Check, which entered phase3 last September. Now Login Consultants has made available the Virtual Session Indexer version 3.0. VSI is a benchmarking platform to measure remote desktop performance in a Terminal Server farm or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment.

The tool is developed by Login Consultants and is provided for free as an Express Edition, there is also a Pro edition which is supported by Login Consultants consulting services.

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The open source OS virtualization solution OpenVZ (formerly OpenVirtuozzo), supported by Parallels, is now available in version 3.0.25. This version is an update of version 3.0.24.2. OpenVZ serves as the basis of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers

OpenVZ can be installed on top of Linux distributions as a patch and is a container-based virtualization platform for Linux, meaning that it does virtualization on the OS level. It creates multiple secure isolated containers on a single physical server to ensure that applications do not conflict, one of the biggest advantages of container-based virtualization is that the VM’s running on top of it, do not have to be modified or as it is called "enlightened" in order to run.

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Todd Muirhead, performance staff engineer at VMware posted an article about Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) performance running on VMware vShere 4.1 over on the VMware VROOM! performance blog. Oracle RAC are used to run critical databases with stringent performance requirements.

In order to test the performance, three servers were used, two in a dual boot configuration between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 and and vSphere ESXi 4.1 and one running ESXi only to host the virtual machines when the two other physical servers were booted into RHEL so that the two VMs could preserved. Also the CPU configuration of the physical machines was limited in order to enable a direct performance comparison, because of the eight vCPU limitation of ESXi.

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Rebecca Grider, who works at the performance engineering department at VMware posted an article on the VMware VROOM! Blog about performance scaling of an cluster which is build on entry-level hardware. Using VMmark they determined how a four-host cluster with a modest hardware configuration, the Dell PowerEdge R310 running ESX 4.1. would scale under increasing load.

Since most of the times the workload throughput is limited by disk performance the tests were repeated with two different storage arrays, the EMC CX500 and the EMC CX3-20.

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Version 0.7.1. of SPICE, the open source remote desktop protocol supported by Red Hat is now available. The 0.7.x releases will be a so called development release which will only contain bugfixes and support for Common Access Card (CAC) smartcard and redirection eventually leading to the 0.8.x stable branch. The current stable release is version 0.6.3 which introduced the long awaited copy & paste support.

Changes in this “Brown paper bag” release:

• Update SPICE_SERVER_VERSION
• Include server/tests/test_util.h in the make dist generated tarbals, so that they actually compile

In a reaction to the announcement from Quest to OEM the Liquidware Labs VDI assessment tooling and rebranding it as Quest VDI assessment, Lanamark, a competitor of Liquidware Labs responded to that announcement by stating that Sensitive data will be at risk when the Quest VDI assessment is used.

This statement is based on information provided in the login screen of the Quest VDI assessment, which states:

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Symantec has announced the development of a management plugin for its Backup Exec 2010 products which integrates into VMware vCenter. The plugin is scheduled to be available early next year.

The Backup Exec Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter Server works with the core Backup Exec virtualization features to provide a consolidated protection status view of all virtual machines within the VMware vCenter Server or VMware vSphere Client. 

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