Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
The VMware vCloud Software Development Kit (SDK) for PHP provides programming interfaces to the VMware vCloud Director. You can use the PHP language binding to interact with the VMware vCloud Director.
The current version of VMware vCloud SDK for PHP beta is based on VMware vCloud API version 1.0.
Features:
VMware has released AppSpeed version 1.5. The product was acquired from B-Hive in May 2008, and soon became part of the VMware product suite.
AppSpeed is a performance analyzer tool that sniffs the network traffic and learns how the applications inside virtual machines usually perform, so it can help to understand the reason of performance issues.
eG Innovations released version 1.0 of its eG VDI Monitor. eG VDI Monitor which is part of the eG Enterprise Suite is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) end-to-end service monitoring solution capable of monitoring all involved components in a VDI infrastructure. The product supports the Citrix, LeoStream and VMware View connection brokers. Besides that eG VDI Monitor supports all three major hypervisors and VDI solutions from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, but also mixed configuration environments consisting of products from these vendors.
As mentioned before, the product provides end-to-end monitoring , which means that it tracks performance inside the guest OS giving details about the user activity, at the Virtual Machine (VM) level and outside the VM, which consists of the Virtual Infrastructure, but also components like firewalls, network switches and routers.
Brian Ehlert, who is a Senior Software Test Engineer at Citrix Labs posted a blog article on how to migrate a Citrix XenDesktop environment from VMware to Hyper-V.
This blog article provides a step by step guide on how to migrate from VMware to Hyper-V as the virtualization platform for the XenDesktop VDI Solution.
At the beginning of this week Microsoft announced the public beta program for Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) 2.0.
The technology, acquired from the US startup Kidaro in March 2008 and originally called Workspaces, is what virtualization.info calls a platform wrapper: a remotely managed layer that envelops a virtual machine, defining things like the network access policy, the expiration time, the virtual hard drive encryption, etc.
With MED-V Microsoft has a very limited number of competitors, including VMware, Virtual Computer, RingCube and MokaFive.
The product was rebranded just a couple of months after the acquisition but Microsoft took an entire year to re-release it. MED-V 1.0, released as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) in April 2009, didn’t introduce any new feature compared to the Kidaro original solution and it is safe to say that the product got only a minor .1 update in more than two years.
The lack of active development seen so far raised concerns about the Microsoft commitment on enterprise desktop virtualization.
At the end of September Citrix announced the upcoming availability of XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 (codename Cowley). This is a significant release as it finally includes the Open vSwitch technology and the distributed virtual switching capabilities that come with it, as well as the VMLogix technology acquired in August 2010.
A couple of weeks after the opening of the beta program, a number of key details emerges about the product, including a number of limitations that is worth reporting:
Q: Which edition of XenServer will be required for Distributed Virtual Switching?
A: The Open vSwitch will be included in all editions of XenServer, including Free XenServer. The vSwitch Controller functionality will be a licensed part of a premium XenServer edition.
…
Q: Will the Open vSwitch support Link Aggregation?
A: Not in the first release. We are looking into this kind of functionality for a future release.
Paul Wilson, architect working in the Citrix Worlwide Consulting Solutions team, hosted a webinar “Designing Scalable XenDesktop Farms” on 22 September. This webinar is still available on Citrix TV.
Based on this webinar he created a blog post giving answers to the questions he wasn’t able to answer at that time.
Here is a snippet from that blogpost:
VMTurbo, who entered the virtualization market in April this year announced the availability of VMTurbo Planner and VMTurbo Watchdog, both offered in the same Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) based virtual appliance, which already contains VMTurbo Monitor and Host Reporter.
VMTurbo Planner is the key piece of the suite, it can use the statistics which are collected and information about under and over-utilization from to offer Capacity Management recommendations.
VMTurbo Planner is capable of:
Oracle has released VM VirtualBox version 3.2.10. This version which is a maintenance release, is the follow up of version 3.2.8. which was released in August 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.
Features:
• Bugfixes
• Support for Ubuntu 10.10
• Support for Fedora 14
virtualization.info is here in Copenhagen to follow the european edition of the VMware VMworld conference.
The US event has been a great success (read virtualization.info live coverage), with over 17,000 attendees. We’ll see if VMware will be able to impress the european audience as much as it did with the US one.
Maurizio Carli, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EMEA region, is on stage. He reports that there are over 6,000 attendees, 1,000 more than VMware’s target.
After a short introduction, Carli leaves the stage to Rick Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer.
He suggests that the companies’ journey in virtualization is made of three stages: the IT Production, focused on cost efficiency (where virtualization is used for server consolidation), the Business Production, focused on quality of service (where virtualization is used to achieve unprecedented reliability for mission critical applications), and the IT as a Service, focused on business agility (where virtualization is used to deliver a more agile cloud computing architecture).
The first two are for optimizing the production of IT services, but the companies should really look forward the third phase, which is for optimizing the business consumption of IT services.
VMware’s CEO, Paul Maritz, is on stage.
He reports that in 2009 the number of running virtual machines were equal to the number of physical servers. In 2013, IDC predicts that VMs will be more than 15M, almost doubling the number of physical servers deployed worldwide