History

Pano Logic announced the release of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform Pano System version 3.5, offering support for Microsoft Hyper-V. This release comes after version 3.0 which was released in April this year.

Pano offers a complete remote VDI solution which consists of a software agent which resides in the guest Operating System, a connection broker and a Keyboard/Video/Mouse (KVM) over IP hardware box, called Pano Device. Communication between the Pano Device and the connection broker leverages a bus extension protocol called Pano Direct.

New Features:

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Veeam released Veeam Monitor version 5.0. Veeam Monitor which is part of the Veeam ONE offering released in August covers VMware monitoring and management.
 
Veeam Monitor is a VMware Ready Certified monitoring tool for Vmware environments and is capable of monitoring more than 200 ESX(i) hosts and offers full support for vSphere 4.1. The product offers a comprehensive knowledge base, with more than 125 built-in alerts. Also performance dashboards are offered with drill-down functionality.
 
New features:

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Earlier this week, Citrix announced the new features that will be part of XenDesktop 5.0, the company’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform.

Besides the obvious presence of XenClient 1.0, officially released last month and already included in XenDesktop 4 Feature Pack 2, the most relevant new component of the platform is called Desktop Director, an additional web-based console for operations management.

The tool provides statistics about the deployed applications instances and virtual desktops, the software inventory usage and even basic information about the health of underlying infrastructure.
If an end-user reports a problem, Desktop Director can be used to analyze the desktop environment and recognize if there’s any performance bottleneck or any missing software component (like the Flash plug-in for internet browsers). From the new console, operators can also launch a Remote Assistance session on Windows desktops and directly solve misconfiguration errors.
One of the most useful capabilities anyway, is the one that allows operators to recognize unused virtual desktops and terminate them in different ways (put them in maintenance mode, powering them off, logging-out inactive users, etc.), freeing up resources inside the virtual data center.

Citrix published a video tour of Desktop Director here.

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Last week Red Hat made available the video recordings of the KVM Forum 2010, which took place in August in Boston.

Most videos are available, including the one about Ganeti, the cluster management solution for Xen and KVM that supports live migration, para-virtualized and fully virtualized guest operating systems.

As virtualization.info already highlighted, it’s remarkable that Google is leading the Ganeti project as the company in the past stated that “…it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization” in 2007.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14639529[/vimeo]

AppZero announced that it has hired Bill Cullen as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This news follows the recent addition of Mark Striling and Nigel Stokes as new investors for the company.

Before joining AppZero, Cullen was responsible for the Products and Engineering teams at Sonic Software, which developed SonicESB, an Enterprise Service Bus. Cullen developed SonicMQ, a message broker technology. Before joining Sonic Software Cullen worked for OneWave, Inc, IRI Software, Softbridge Microsystems and Advantage Systems.

VMware has released the VIX Java Toolkit. The toolkit which will be covered under the BSD license allows Java developers to leverage the VMware VIX API for use in their programs. In oder to use the toolkit developers need the JDK version 1.6 and the JNA library.

“…Java developers who are writing code with the vSphere/VI APIs will find this particularly useful as the vSphere API does not currently provide any functionality for interacting with the guest operating system. In addition, this is helpful for software testing as well as systems administration.
Features
• Provides Java wrapper for the VIX API
• Provides VIX objects and utility code to reduce complexities of using the VIX API…”

Thanks to Eric Sloof for providing this news.

Desktone announced that the company has hired David Grant as Vice President of Marketing and James Glover as Vice President of Sales.

Grant comes from IBM, where he was Director of Marketing for the security business unit of IBM Rational, before that he was Vice President, Marketing and Product Management at Watchfire where he started in 2000. Watchfire which was acquired by IBM in 2007.

Glover comes from Momento, where he was Senior Vice President and General Manager for 3 1/2 years. Before that he also worked for Watchfire as Vice President North Americal Sales but apparently he left the company after it was acquired by IBM. He started to work for Watchfire in 1999.

These new hires come close after Desktone replaced it’s CEO Harry Ruda with Peter McKay in August this year.

Last week, virtualization.info reported that Citrix hired Andrew Susa to become the Senior Director for the Asia-Pacific region.

Today we were tipped by a reader that Thomas Huber, who was Director Systems Engineering Eastern EMEA at VMware, is now Director Channel Sales and Development at Citrix.

Huber started to work for VMware in 2005 as Manager Partner Presales Organization Central and Eastern Europe. After that he became Senior Regional Presales Manager Central Eastern Europa, Middle East and Africa. Ending up as Director Systems Engineering Eastern EMEA.

VMware’s vSphere PowerCLI is a set of Windows PowerShell snapins that provide administration and automation for VMware vSphere. The PowerCLI allows you to do most of the things you can do with the vSphere Client. The latest version available is version 4.1. and can be downloaded from the VMware website.

The vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide, which contains 31 pages provides information about using the VMware vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets (pronounced “commandlets”) set that ships with vSphere PowerCLI for managing, monitoring, automating, and handling life‐cycle operations for VMware vSphere components—virtual machines, datacenters, storage, networks, and so on.

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In September this year EMC published an article titled: Deploying Microsoft Windows 7 Virtual Desktops with VMware View – Applied Best Practices.

This paper discusses how Windows7 should be configured for optimal performance in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementation. The paper details how to configure the Windows 7 subsystem to minimize the performance requirements on the shared storage and VMware ESX environment.

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