History

Intel’s recent acquisitions of Neocleus and McAfee generated a lot of questions around the new go-to-market strategy that the chipmaker is developing.
Among the others, one was specially importan from a virtualization perspective: is Intel moving to develop its own secure client hypervisor and cancel the partnership with Citrix on XenClient?

Before being acquired, in fact, McAfee started a two-phases plan to release VDI-friendly security solutions first (accomplished) and an out-of-band security solution for XenClient (still in development). At the same time, Neocleus was trying to sell a Xen-based client hypervisor with strong focus on security.

The idea of Intel becoming a virtualization platform vendor may sound odd, but it’s worth to remind that the company recently announced a virtual infrastructure for SMBs called Hybrid Cloud. That solution, originally planned to leverage Microsoft Hyper-V, is now shipping with Citrix XenServer.

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Egenera, the company which provides cloud-computing-in-a-box software called PAN Manager has released two whitepapers detailing a reference architecture for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) running on top of Dell or Fujitsu hardware.

PAN Manager is software which pools server, network, and storage resources providing management capabilities by virtualizing I/O and networking and providing simplified server re-configuration, availability and disaster recovery services. The solution provides what Egenera calls a Processing Area Network (PAN). PAN Manager is Citrix Ready validated and is offered on three platforms: Dell blade servers, Fujitsu Primergy servers and Egeneras own BladeFrame systems.

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Veeam has made available a Release Candidate of version 5.6. of its nworks Smart Plug-In (SPI) for VMware. The nworks SPI for VMware is part of the Veeam ONE solution for VMware management and provides distributed monitoring and management of VMware infrastructures which integrates into HP Operations Manager. General availability is expected within 60 days.

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Microsoft has released a paper titled: VDI TCO Analysis for Office Worker Environments. The paper which is 36 pages contains the outcome of a research on the costs of using VDI, resulting in a conclusion that overall VDI is 11% more expensive per user than well-managed PC environments for office workers. Although hardware and service desk costs are reduced, new software and engineering costs are causing the overall costs to increase.

Office workers provide key support functions for organizations, are moderately paid, and have a high turnover cost. Examples include employees that work in accounting, procurement, marketing, and could include specialists like financial traders and software developers.

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Systar, a company founded in 1984 and which provides performance and capacity management software for virtual infrastructures flew under the virtualization.info radar until now. Now that company is announcIng that it extended support for its OmniVision product to Microsoft Hyper-V and HP Integrity besides the already existing support for SUN/Solaris Logical Domain Servers and IBM Power 7 its clear that the company wants to become a serious player in the virtualization market.

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Paul Wilson posted on the Citrix blog an lengthy article sharing his insight in how to better estimate IOPS for VDI solutions. He states though that the only way to prevent under-sizing in the storage tier is by running a pilot and analyzing its results.

For estimation you would normally take the average IOPS of all users, which you multiply by the number of users in order to determine the storage requirements, but that is not sufficient Wilson states.

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As Brian Madden correctly noted, Parallels has recently updated its OS virtualization platform, Virtuozzo Containers (PVC), to version 4.6 in September 2010.

The company didn’t announce the release, not even with a single press announcement, despite Containers remains the only OS virtualization platform for server consolidation on Windows environments on the market.
This is the reason why, most publications, including virtualization.info, didn’t report the news.

Virtuozzo Containers has been updated to version 4.5 more than one year ago, introducing significant new features like resource pooling, containers cloning and startup priority.
Version 4.6 is a mix bag: the Windows version doesn’t introduce any major new feature except the support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, support for Parallels Virtual Automation (PVA) 4.6.1, and support for a number of 3rd anti-virus and backup solutions:

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Bryan Semple, who is Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel wrote a paper titled: 3 Ways Storage & Server Admins Unite to Enhance VMware Performance (Or – how to keep the peace between teams)

The paper which contains 4 pages and explores three steps to unify storage and virtualization teams within organizations, based on experiences which VKernel acquired from the field. He states that the friction is caused by the fact that storage administrators are no longer involved in understanding specific application loads.

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VMware has released a paper titled: Performance of Virtualizaed SQL Server-Based VMware vCenter Database. The paper which contains 17 pages contains a performance study on the impact of a virtualized SQL Server-based vCenter database which is virtualized on vSphere 4.1.

In order to test the performance both a physical and a virtual installation of Windows was used but running SQL Server 2008 R2. Using a script the database was populated with data equally to a full year of inventory, alarms events and tasks and performance statistics, representing a large vCenter implementation.

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In October, VMware updated its virtualization platform Workstation and Player and its platform wrapper ACE to build 301548. Now VMware has updated the products to build 324285 which is a maintenance release for the three products.

Workstation version 7.1.3 is a so called maintenance which only contains bug fixing, detailed in the release notes.

VMware player version 3.1.2 also contains bug fixes as detailed in the release notes and VMware ACE 2.7.2 only contains bug fixes as detailed in the release notes as well.