History

Not long after releasing VM VirtualBox version 3.2.12, Oracle announced the first beta for VirtualBox version 4.0, which will be a new major release. As of this version VirtualBox will introduce Extension Packs which Oracle and 3rd parties can use to delivers additional functionality to the product. Oracle will release the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack which adds support for USB 2.0, RDP Server and the PXE bootloader with E1000 support.

Also intoduced with version 4.0 is a different licensing mechanism, the H reports . Both the product source code and the binaries will be licensed under GPLv2, The Extension Pack mechanism will be licensed under the VirualBox Personal Use and Evaluation Licence (PUEL), which means that distributors shipping the Open Source Edition of VirtualBox no longer need to build from the sources themselves.

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Now that even 2010 is about to end, VMware is getting ready to disclose more about its strategy for mobile and how exactly it plans to deliver the Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) on customers’ handsets and possibly tablets.

In mid September, virtualization.info reported about the state of the project, originally announced in November 2008: ignited by the acquisition of Trango Virtual Processors, and delayed by at least one year, MVP is still alive albeit VMware has made significant changes to its architecture over time.

Even without a confirmation from competitor Open Kernel Labs, it was pretty obvious that VMware’s only choice to deliver at the moment is through the Android mobile OS. This would imply a direct partnership with Google and/or its ODM partners. 
The confirmation arrives today: VMware and LG Electronics announce a partnership to deliver MVP on Android.

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In September 2008 a new European startup entered the virtualization market: icomasoft.

The company raised some popularity rather quickly thanks to a relatively simple plug-in for VMware vSphere clients that leverages the VMware PowerShell Toolkit:  VI PowerScripter.
The product can be used to automate any kind of task inside a VMware virtual infrastructure, but icomasoft has been smart enough to provide predefined workflows for mass provisioning, resource consumption graphs generation, hosts/VMs configurations export, etc.

Yet, VI PowerScripter shouldn’t be considered the company’s flagship product. It has been just labelled legacy, despite it’s still actively developed to current customers.
icomasoft has more ambitious plans, which start to become evident this week, with the public beta release of opvizor, a performance analysis platform that approaches the troubleshooting from a completely new perspective.

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According to Linux-KVM.com, Red Hat has recently started the development of a GTK client for Linux that leverages the open source SPICE remote desktop protocol.

The project still is in its very early stage, as version 0.2 for 64bit Fedora 14 is the only binary available at the moment.

SPICE too is far away from reaching version 1.0, expected not earlier than in H2 2011.

VMware has released version 1.5 of its vCenter CapacityIQ product. CapacityIQ is a capacity management solution for vSphere and this version is the follow-up of version 1.0.4. which was released in August this year. VMware released the first version of the product in October 2009 as an expansion to the company’s effort in the capacity management market. Before CapacityIQ, VMware first released Capacity Planner, acquired from AOG in 2005, as a hosted service for partners only, and then the Guided Consolidation module for vCenter.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables users to analyze, forecast, and plan the capacity needs of their virtual datacenter environment. With this VMware competes with several of its partners providing the same functionality, like VKernel, which probably started supporting Hyper-V environments for its product for that exact reason.

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Today Juniper Networks enters the virtualization market with the acquisition of Altor Networks for $95M, one of the most interesting startup working on virtual data center security.

Altor’s flagship product, Virtual Firewall (VF), which reached version 4.0 in Q3, blends together firewall and intrusion detection system (IDS) technologies. 
The former is a stateful filtering engine developed in house, which features very interesting capabilities like VM-level security policies, integration with VMware VMsafe APIs, dynamically-generated rulebases, and more.
The latter comes from the inclusion of the worldwide popular open source IDS engine Snort and an OEM agreement with SourceFire to resell their commercial attack signatures.

In March the startup closed a new round of funding, equal to $10M, led by DAG, Accel Partners, Foundation Capital and Juniper itself. Overall, Altor raised over $16M.
The $95M are net of Altor shares already owned by Juniper.

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Oracle has released VirtualBox 3.2.12 at the end of last Month. This release is a maintenance released for which the fixes are specified on the VirtualBox Wiki. This version is the follow-up of version 3.2.10 which was released in October this year.

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a hosted desktop virtualization platform and used to be known under the name Sun VirtualBox, and was renamed after Sun was acquired by Oracle in April 2009.

The software can be downloaded from the Oracle website and is available for Windows hosts in both 32 and 64 bit, for OS X hosts running on Intel, for Linux hosts supporting several distributions and Solaris hosts running on both 32 and 64 bit.

HP released a paper titled: A Comprehensive Framework for Securing Virtualized Data Centers. The paper which contains 8 pages addresses the following question: will moving to virtualization make security for the network easier or more difficult to achieve? And HP answers this question by referencing to their TippingPoint Intrusion prevention security solutions.

Tippingpoint comes from 3Com Corporation which HP acquired in November last year for $2.7 Billion, including the brands H3C, 3Com and Tippingpoint.

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Released as a public beta in August, the VMware benchmark framework VMmark 2.0 is finally available.

VMmark 1.0 was focused on measuring the performance of a single virtualization host, but now that the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) has finally released an industry standard tool for this, VMware is moving forward.

VMmark 2.0 focuses on measuring the performance of a whole virtual data center, including complex operations like manual and automated (or DRS-initated) vMotion, Storage vMotion, as well as virtual machines cloning and deployment.

This time each VMmark tile includes:

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Beginning last week of November, VMware started giving away free licenses of Alive VM to customers purchasing vSphere or other products.

Acquired from Integrien this September, Alive analyzes and correlates data across the monitored IT infrastructure in a pretty unique way: for each tracked resource, it can identify the normal behavior of every metric (which implies a dynamic adjustment of thresholds) and then automatically recognize an anomaly. Impressively enough, Alive can handle upwards of 10 million individual metrics every 5 minutes.

The free perpetual license allows to monitor up to 50 virtual machines and includes one year of Basic Support and Subscription (SnS). To have it, customers must purchase products above within March 1st, 2011.

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