History

Last week the analysis firm Gartner generated a lot of interest for a couple of comments made about the virtualization industry.
The first one came from Thomas Bittman, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, who said that Microsoft Hyper-V is under-performing compared to his expectations. 
The second one came from Chris Wolf, Vice President of Research, who said that Citrix HDX remote desktop protocol performs better than VMware PCoIP in high-latency (200ms) WAN scenarios.

While Microsoft didn’t reply (not yet at least) to Bittman, VMware has been very quick in addressing Wolf comments. The official reply comes directly from Scott Davis, CTO of the End User Computing business unit (emphasis our):

…VMware View 4.5 with and PCoIP are configured out of the box to provide the richest LAN experience. There are several important parameters that can be adjusted to optimally tune the protocol for WAN conditions and specific usage scenarios. For WAN conditions it can be very helpful to adjust the display frame rate, image quality and min/max bandwidth settings. As an example, the default frame rate with PCoIP is 30. This can be safely cut down to 12 frames per second for WAN usage resulting in less bandwidth consumption and a better experience in many such circumstances…

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Microsoft has made available the Release Candidate of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

Service Pack 1, which is now feature complete will introduce two important new features: Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and the RemoteFX technology for Remote Desktop Services which Microsoft acquired from Calista in January 2008. The final Service Pack is still expected for H1 2011 as reported by virtualization.info in July this year.

The most interesting news here is the support for Dynamic Memory for the Standard and Web editions of Windows Server as reported by Ben Armstrong, Virtualization Program Manager at Microsoft

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HyTrust has announced that it will partner with RSA in order to provide interoperability with the RSA enVision platform.

The HyTrust Appliance provides access control and change management for VMware virtual infrastructures, it does so by sitting between the VMware management interfaces (vCenter Client, ESX SSH and web management interfaces, vCenter and ESX APIs) as a transparent proxy that enforces authentication, authorization and corporate policy. The latest version is HyTrust Appliance 2.0 which was announced in March this year.

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VMware and Symantec jointly released a technical white paper titled: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications with Confidence. The paper which is 10 pages provides an overview of the challenges faced when virtualizing business critical applications and how ApplicationHA, which is a joint solution from VMware and Symantec can help to solve these challenges.

ApplicationHA monitors the health of applications and virtual machines, and is powered by Veritas Cluster Server technology. It can restart both: applications by direct intervention, and VMs by coordinating with vCenter Server. Plus, the product can be fully operated from the vCenter Client and supports VMware HA and DRS.

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Hyper9 has hired Bob Quillin as the new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Greg Barone as Vice President of Worldwide Sales.

Quillin comes from VMware where he was Director Product Marketing vCenter virtualization and cloud management solutions for applications, configuration and compliance for 7 months. Before that he was Senior Director Marketing at EMC for 4 1/2 years for the Ionix virtualization management line. Before that he held several marketing related positions at different companies, like nLayers, Network Physics, Manage.com, Packateer, NetLabs and Standford Telecommunications, where he started his career in 1983.

Barone comes from Reaction Design where he was Director of Sales for North America for 1 year and 5 months. Before that he worked for Fluke Networks for 1 year. He was also Vice President of Sales for 4 years at Cognio, which was acquired by Cisco.

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Yesterday Citrix announced its Q3 2010 earnings, sharing interesting details about the desktop virtualization business unit performance.

In Q3 2010 the company revenue has been $277M, an 11% increase compared to 2009 (5% of that growth comes from license revenue, $60M is the total revenue for XenDesktop).
Despite the growth, Citrix reports a 6% decline, compared to Q2, for license revenue because of the XenDesktop Trade-up promotion ended in Q2. 
An interesting information is that Citrix is on track to cover 15% of its customer base within year end with the Trade-up program, and it’s planning to make it part of the standard XenApp upgrade process in 2011.
Everything beyond the Trade-up program (new customers and licenses) translated into a revenue growth of 17% sequentially and over 200% from 2009.

Citrix scored 85 XenDesktop transactions from more than 1000 seat each, and 13 with over 5000 seats. 
More than 2/3 of them selected the XenDesktop Platinum Edition, the one that is considered enterprise-ready by Gartner.

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Almost one year ago, after a long co-development with the startup Teradici, VMware launched a software-only version of the remote desktop protocol PC over IP (PCoIP). PCoIP support has been introduced in View 4.0, side by side with support for Microsoft RDP, and it’s obviously still present in the new View 4.5.
Since then, customers interested in VDI have wondered if PCoIP is on par or superior to the Citrix High Definition eXperience (HDX) protocol, an extension of the ICA protocol, introduced with XenDesktop 3.0 in February 2009.

While a few benchmarks have been published about the topic, there’s a lack of real-world tests that can answer the simple question: how the experience will be for the average employee?

Chris Wolf, Vice President of Research at Gartner, just provided an answer: the two protocols are on par on LAN, while Citrix HDX performs better over WAN links with more than 200ms latency. 
Wolf tested both XenDesktop 4.0 Service Pack 1 and VMware View 4.5, through a L2TP/IPsec VPN to connect from Europe to his facility in US.

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Now that Veeam Backup & Replicator 5.0 is generally available, its worth to report that NetEx and Veeam have reached a partnership where Veaam will bundle a one-year subscription of the NetEx HyperIP VM Edition software with it’s Backup & Replication for VMware product, Businesswire reports. This offer will be available from July 1, 2010 to July 2011, with a maximum of two virtual appliances per company.

The NetEx HyperIP is WAN optimization software and will be supplied as a virtual appliance which will run inside a VMware VM, it will be limited to 2Mb/s though, while the full version of HyperIP can support up to 800 Mb/s. Combining this solution with the Backup & Replication solution from Veaam gives this product more performance while moving large amounts of data across a WAN.

This is not an OEM agreement, but a bundling offering, therefore customers have to request the HyperIP license key at the NetEx website after purchase

This partnering is quite interesting, because Veeam didn’t announce a partnering with a company like this before. This could potentially mean that Veeam is testing the interest of HyperIP at it’s customers, which if succesfully could end up in Veaam buying NetEx, so it can include its HyperIP product.

VMware has released a Product Interoperability Matrix on its website. The matrix gives an overview of which versions of VMware products are compatible with each other.

The Product Interoperability Matrix allows you to select the VMware product and its version. After that you can select a platform and see if it is compatible with the selected platform. The Interoperability Matrix will show you the supported versions in a table.

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Veaam today announced the release of its disaster recovery solution: Veaam Backup & Replication version 5. This version is the follow up of version 4 which was released in 2009.

This version includes the SureBackup functionality on which virtualization.info reported extensively in March this year.

Released as vPower technology the following new functionalities are provided:

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