History

In May this year EMC published an article titled: EMC Performance Optimization for Microsoft Windows XP for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure – Applied Best Practices.

The 32 pages document, which is aligned with VMware documents covering these topics as well discusses how Windows XP should be configured for optimal performance in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementation.
The paper details how to configure the Windows XP subsystem to minimize the performance requirements on the shared storage and VMware ESX environment.

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Following the release of SPICE 0.60, KVM – The Linux Kernel-Based Virtual Machine blog reports that Red Hat has released SPICE version 0.6.1. which contains some bug fixing. Red Hat already announced earlier this week that SPICE is included in Fedora 14 beta 1 distribution.

The awaited cut and paste support is scheduled for release in version 0.6.2.

VMware has hired John Donovan, to become the new Director for Partner Organizations across the Australian/New Zealand region starting the 1st of November, ARNnet reports . He will replace Fred King, who left in June this year.

At this moment Donovan is still Vice President of Alliance and Channel sales at Novell in the Asia-Pacific region. Before joining Novell in 1995, he worked more than 12 years for Symantec, his latest function there was Vice President Channels.

After AppZero lost much of its entire executive team in this year, the company announced earlier this month that Nigel Stokes, former CEO and chairman of DataMirror would become a controlling and majority investor for the company.

Appzero company now announced that Mark Stirling, Vice President, Investments at GrowthWorks Capital will join the AppZero’s Board of Directors, PRWeb reports.

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Earlier today Citrix announced the first public beta of a 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.

The early bits of Open vSwitch appeared online in August 2009, along with a technology roadmap that clears the intention to compete against the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch architecture and the Cisco Nexus 1000V software switch. It took almost an entire year to reach version 1.0. Meanwhile Open vSwitch became a key component of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) networking infrastructure, another project supported by Citrix.

In the last few weeks Simon Crosby, CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Computing division at Citrix, spent some time to clarify the need for a more sophisticated virtual switch:

OpenFlow based virtual switches in each server can be logically pooled into a single fabric by an external distributed virtual switch controller to build a dynamic, multi-tenant, programmable datacenter fabric that supports key innovations in cloud computing, as well as allowing us to take advantage of standard x86 CPUs to run a set of rich edge packet-processing functions to secure, direct, filter and otherwise control the delivery of cloud based applications.
With the Open vSwitch in place, the Open Stack open source cloud orchestration layer will be able to exert direct control over the data center fabric to deliver a rich, enterprise ready network layer with powerful controls for security, multi-tenancy, load balancing, monitoring, compliance, charge-back and more.

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After almost two years since the public announcement, Citrix finally delivered its first client hypervisor: XenClient 1.0 (formerly Project Independence), as part of the XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 2.

Originally expected at the end of 2009, the new product has been postponed to the point that the first public beta appeared only in May 2010. Despite the delays, Citrix managed to release the product before its competitor VMware, which has been indefinitely postponed its Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), replacing it with a hosted (type 2) virtualization platform included in View 4.5 and called Local Mode.

virtualization.info previously published some details about the architecture and the capabilities of the client hypervisor.
A key point of the platform is the mandatory support for the Intel vPro technology feature set: at the GA time the Hardware Compatibility List includes 23 supported laptops (9 from Dell, 8 from HP and 6 from Lenovo), ranging from Intel Core 2 Duo to Core i7 CPUs, all featuring vPro.
Another limitation is the current lack of support for NVDIA display cards: all machines listed above only support Intel GPUs, in most cases the GMA 4500.

Citrix incrementally added capabilities until the very last minute, to both the hypervisor and the Synchronizer component.

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Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants) and Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect at PQR) announced the release of phase 3 of their Virtual Reality Check benchmark.

This is the third version of the benchmark results which compares VDI workloads (Windows XP and Windows 7 virtual desktops) running on top of leading back-end hypervisors: VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. The first version was released in February last year and will continue to evolve in the future.

To measure the hypervisors performance they use the free of charge, Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI).

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While his LinkedIn profile in not yet updated, ARNnet reports that Citrix has hired Andrew Susa, a former Alliance Director of VMware to join the company as Senior Director for the Asia-Pacific region.

Susa worked more than 4 years for VMware, where his last role was Global Alliance Director, IBM STG and Tivoli. Before that he was Director of OEM and SI Alliances for the Asia-Pacific region. Susa landed at VMware from BEA Systems, where he was Director of Channels and Alliances for the Asia-Pacific region.

Just yesterday Lanamark released a new addition to its Suite 2010, launched in March. Called Terminal Services Analysis Pack, it extends the Lanamark capacy planning platform to gather detailed user access, bandwidth consumption, application usage and terminal server performance metrics.
It work with hosted applications and hosted shared desktops in Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, as well as Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environments.

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Some virtualization.info readers may remember that VMware and Samsung partnered sometime last year to deliver new PC monitors with out-of-the-box support for the VMware/Teradici PCoIP remoting protocol.
Now maybe Microsoft is working to do the same, and even more, with LG Electronics.

Reuters in fact reports about a new partnership between the two around cloud computing:

Under the pact, LG will introduce monitors integrated with Microsoft software. The monitors will function as virtual computers, allowing multiple users to run programs off a single standard PC, LG said…

The alliance will primarily target the market for virtualization solutions for educational institutions, aiming to become a leader in the segment with a 25 percent share in 2012…

LG and Microsoft will also team up to introduce monitors for cloud computing, a technology that allows users to access data and software over the Internet…

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