History

Patrick Rouse, who is Enterprise Solutions Architect at Quest Software published an article on the Quest community site detailing how to use Group Policies to tune Windows 7 for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures.

Patrick took the challenge to roll out Windows 7 on Hyper-V without adding more hardware than the customer was currently using with Windows XP Service Pack 3. In order to do this, instead of "hacking" the system, Patrick decided to user Group Policies (GPO) to tune the Windows 7 OS. He was able to trim 100MB of RAM from his Windows 7 VMs, and reducing the running processes by 6.

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In October this year virtualization.info reported on the expected features for the upcoming Feature Pack 1 for XenServer 5.6, codenamed Cowley. Citrix has now made generally available Feature Pack 1 for Citrix XenServer 5.6. This Feature Pack(FP) adds key functionality such as distributed virtual switching, automated VM protection and recovery and a web management console for delegated administration

Feature Pack 1 adds the following new functionality and improvements:

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Quest has signed a silent OEM agreement with Liquidware Labs, under that agreements Quest now provides the Liquidware Labs Stratusphere tool rebranded as Quest VDI assessment, for free to everyone to use for up to 45 days on a unlimited number of desktops, Brian Madden reports. If users want to continue to use the product afterwards Quest should be contacted, it’s not clear if Quest is charging users for that though. Its interesting to note that the founder of Liquidware Labs, David Bieneman also is the founder of VizionCore, which was acquired by Quest in January 2008.

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VKernel has released a study on virtual infrastructure management, titled: Virtualization Management Index. The report which contains 6 pages is written by Bryan Semple, who is Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel.

The study uses data drawn from over 2,500 virtualized environments representing over 550,000 virtual machines, the first Virtualization Management Index (VMI) details a significant resource under-utilization in virtualized environments. If not corrected, this resource underutilization represents a ROI risk factor as companies move to virtualize more mission critical applications.

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Richard Garsthagen, who is an Senior Evangelist at VMware EMEA posted a interesting blogpost on the run-virtual blog detailing some mobile management solutions for managing VMware virtual infrastructures. The applications tested are in the price range from free till $595.

The following applications were tested:

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After releasing beta 2 in October this year, Quest has now made available version 7.2 of its VDI connection broker solution: vWorkspace. This version is the follow-up of version 7.1 which was released in April this year.

Changes in this version:

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Duncan Epping, working as a vCloud Architect at VMware and Frank Denneman who is Consulting Architect at VMware have published a book titled: VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive (Volume 1).

VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive zooms in on two key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a “how to” guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a VMware HA and DRS cluster, but even more important explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA and DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA and DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools and resource allocation settings. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures.

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Unidesk has released version 1.2 of its CachePoint solution. This version is the follow-up of version 1.0 which was released in July this year, which is short after the company entered the VDI market in April this year. CachePoint decouples the operating system from the applications, and the applications from the user data and personalization without introducing an additional abstraction layer and file system/registry redirection like application virtualization solutions do.

CachePoint injects a file system driver inside a VDI gold master image that transparently segments in the Windows C: drive into multiple, isolated containers. Administrators can deploy one or more applications inside each container, and then containers can be assigned to multiple virtual desktops or multiple users.

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After releasing the Release Candidate in November this year, Trilead has now released version 3.0.018 of its VMware VM backup product VM Explorer. This product is the follow up of version 2.0 which was released in March this year. VM Explorer Backups can be stored on ESX, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD based storage platforms or directly to a SAN. VM Explorer is offered in two editions, the free edition, supporting VMware ESX 3.x and higher with a maximum of 5 devices and a pro edition, which additionally supports vCenter 4 and unlimited devices.

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Oracle has released a white paper titled: Accelerating Deployment of Virtualized Infrastructures with the Oracle VM Blade Cluster Reference Configurations. The paper which contains 13 pages provides a reference architecture helping customers reduce the time needed for deployment and testing by providing a complete and fully tested virtualized stack.

The paper contains the following sections:

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