History

When Intel announced its Hybrid Cloud platform in July, cloudcomputing.info published an article to clarify if it’s really a cloud computing technology or not:

The Intel Hybrid Cloud is a physical server (a Lenovo ThinkServer TS200v or a white label machine that meets the hardware requirements) that Managed Service Providers (MSP) can buy and deploy at a customer’s site.
MSPs remotely control the server out-of-band by leveraging the Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) 6.0, part of the vPro technology.

Inside the server there’s Microsoft Hyper-V, ready to serve a number of pre-configured and pre-deployed virtual machines, including Windows Server and Small Business Server (SBS) 2008, firewall, backup, disaster recovery, VoIP PBX and other software platforms. Additional applications provided by Intel partners will be published through a software catalog. The MSPs will be able to preinstall their own applications inside the server to differentiate the offering.

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Earlier this week, the Fedora Linux community announced the availability of Fedora 14 beta 1. As expected the distribution now includes the remote desktop protocol Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) 0.6, released in mid September.

SPICE adds a QXL display device to QEMU and provides drivers for this device for both Linux and Windows (XP, Vista and 7) clients.
The features currently supported in this version are:

• Accelerated 2D graphics
• “Hardware” cursor support
• Audio playing / recording
• Image compression, both lossless and lossy (for WAN support)
• Video detection with MPEG streaming
• Encryption
• Client side mouse pointer support

This should be considered a technology preview only, as SPICE 1.0 apparently won’t be available before H2 2011.

The US startup Virtual Computer is in a very nice spot right now. Its recently released NxTop 3.0 includes a pretty sophisticated client hypervisors that is free for the general public and that doesn’t require Intel vPro to work. Plus, the imminent release of Citrix XenClient and the recent acquisition of Neocleus from Intel are turning the company into a highly desirable acquisition target. 
For these reasons, and more, Virtual Computer is rated Worth Watching in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

But the death of Alex Vasilevsky, Virtual Computer had to reassure its current and potential customers about its technology leadership and long-term vision.
So today the company announces that Simon Graham has been named Chief Scientist.

Graham has been the Lead Architect at Stratus Technologies for 11 years. His responsibilities at the company included:

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VMware recently published a new paper titled: VMware Network I/O Control, Architecture, Performance and Best Practices. The paper contains 28 pages and is written by Sreekanth Setty, which is a member of the Performance Engineering team at VMware.

The Network I/O Control (NetIOC) feature available in VMware vSphere 4.1 (“vSphere”) addresses these challenges by introducing a software approach to partitioning physical network bandwidth among the different types of network traffic flows. It does so by providing appropriate quality of service (QoS) policies enforcing traffic isolation, predictability and prioritization, therefore helping IT organizations overcome the contention resulting from consolidation. The experiments conducted in VMware performance labs using industry-standard workloads show that NetIOC:

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VMware has made available version 5.3 of its vCenter Configuration Manager (vCM) product. VMware Configuration Manager is one of the products which was part of the Ionix infrastructure, which VMware acquired from its parent company EMC in March this year. EMC acquired the product in June 2009 from ConfigureSoft which at that time was called Server Configuration Manager.
 
vCM is a system compliance management tool. vCM can work across virtual and physical servers and desktops, ensuring compliance by collecting, fixing, provisioning and managing configurations.

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Microsoft released beta 2 of its P2V migration for Software Assurance tool. The first beta was released earlier this month.

The P2V migration for Software Assurance tool leverages the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit(MDT) and Sysinternals Disk2VHD to convert a user’s existing Windows XP SP3, Vista or 7 environment to a virtual hard disk.

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To pitch its upcoming conference, the analysis firm Gartner just published a new forecast about virtualization: only 25% of all server workloads will be in a virtual machine by year-end 2010.

The Vice President of Research Philip Dawson also added:

Virtualization will continue as the highest-impact issue challenging infrastructure and operations through 2015, changing how you manage, how and what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan and how you charge…

Even more interestingly, Gartner reports that licensing still is a key challenge in virtualization adoption:

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In mid July Citrix hired the SAP Chief Virtualization Evangelist Roland Wartenberg. As virtualization.info already wrote at that time: in 2006 he developed the virtualization strategy for the SAP Labs division, actively pushing the company’s marketing message about virtualization through the many SAP Virtualization Week events arranged around the world in the following years.

The investment returned almost immediately, as Citrix recently announced SAP full support and certification to run its applications on a Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES) virtual machine hosted by XenServer:

SAP customers can now take advantage of a full certified and supported end-to-end process, including XenServer as an underlying platform in the data center for SAP application execution or for XenApp delivered SAP end-user interfaces, NetScaler for secure employee or customer access to SAP applications via the network, and Citrix Receiver for delivery of the application to the SAP end-user’s virtual desktop.

Microsoft just released version 3.0 of their free Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST). This version is the follow-up of version 2.1 which was released in December 2009 and is the result of the beta which started in May this year.

The VMST is a patch management solution which can be used to update stopped or saved state VM’s on a Hyper-V or Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 host . And also VM Templates, offline VM’s and offline Virtual Hard Disks(VHD) stored in the VM Library of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). In order to achieve this, the tool applies updates to the VHD using so called Servicing Jobs.

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Kaviza announced the release of version 3.1. of their VDI-in-a-box connection broker Software. Version 3.1 is the follow up of version 3.0 which was released in July 2010.

Kaviza offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require a shared storage and dedicated, load balanced connection brokers.
The customer just has to deploy the vendor’s virtual appliance on its hypervisor of choice and he’s ready to go.

Version 3.1. introduces the following enhancements:

• Support for Citrix Receiver as a remote desktop software client
• Smart Card Support including the Department of Defense (DoD) Common Access Card (CAC) cards
• Support for 64-bit virtual desktops

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