History

At the end of the last week Parallels announced the appointment of Birger Steen as its new President.

Steen started in Microsoft in 2002. He led the Norway subsidiary for two years as General Manager, then moved to Russia.
There, in four years, he built a 1000+ people subsidiary spread across 34 locations, achieving a 10x revenue and profit growth.

Parallels says that Steen will report to Serguei Beloussov, Chairman and CEO, and will be responsible for sales, marketing, product management, and support, as well as assisting Mr. Beloussov in transforming the company for the next stage of growth.

At the end of the last week Oracle released another maintenance build for its desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox.

VirtualBox 3.2.8 primarily introduces a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements. The only new feature seems the support for remote installations in the Solaris Installer.

Last month virtualization.info reported that, along with the launch of vSphere 4.1, VMware also disclosed a number of upcoming architectural changes to its virtual infrastructure.
Probably, the most significant one is that the next version of its hypervisor will come without a Console Operating System (COS).

Just in case some customers need an additional confirmation that ESXi is the only way to go, VMware made it clear once and forever, by announcing the ESX end of life:

…Going forward customers will be able to deploy vSphere only using ESXi. Although the infrastructure management tasks once performed by the Service Console are now handled by tasks running under the VMkernel, some ESX users may still depend on the custom scripts, third-party products, or operational procedures that use the Service Console.

Read more

Just before the end of the week Oracle announced an online virtualization event set for August 19: the Online Virtualization Forum.

This is not something uncommon: many vendors arrange day-long online events to market a big number of products all together. And after the acquisition of Sun, Oracle certainly has a big virtualization portfolio to talk about.
Anyway, Oracle may use this occasion to announce something big.

First of all, the event’s tagline is pretty bullish: “Discover How Oracle’s Virtualization Delivers More Value Than VMware”.
Right now the company may have a few issues to justify the statement, considering that Gartner recently recognized VMware as the sole leader in the server virtualization space and Oracle VM is at the bottom of the Niche Players section of the Magic Quadrant.

Read more

Starting May, the Citrix Lead Architect for Worldwide Consulting Solutions Daniel Feller published a series of posts about the top 10 mistakes that can be done when implementing a desktop virtualization solution.

The last one was published earlier today, so here’s the complete list:

1. Misconfiguration of storage
2. Using VDI Defaults
3. Not spending your cache wisely
4. Not Optimizing the Desktop Image
5. Managing the incoming storm
6. Protection from Anti-Virus
7. Improper Resource Allocation
8. Lack of Application Virtualization Strategy
9. Not considering the user profile
10. Not calculating user bandwidth requirements

In November 2008 Microsoft unveiled that the upcoming version of its worldwide popular IDE, Visual Studio 2010, was designed to orchestrate Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to provide a fully integrated virtual lab automation (VLA) environment.

Marketed at that time as a stand-alone edition, and called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management, the first beta of this product appeared in June 2009, while the second beta went public in November 2009.

Now it finally seems that Microsoft is ready to release the product: earlier this week in fact, during its Visual Studio Live! event, Microsoft announced that its VLA platform will be available for web download at the end of August.

There’s a last minute change anyway: the product is no more a stand-alone edition of Visual Studio 2010 but it’s included in Ultimate and Test Professional editions.

At the beginning of the week Citrix released the Service Pack 1 for its VDI platform XenDesktop.
Burton Group, a Gartner subsidiary, named it the first enterprise-ready solution for VDI on the market.

So what’s new in the update that is worth such recognition?

The SP1 (build 5010) contains upgrades to the Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) that improve the reliability of virtual desktops with almost 50 fixes, but the two key new features are related to the connection broker component, the Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC):

• Role-based access control (RBAC) model for administration delegation
• Change logging for administrative tasks

On top of that, now Citrix provides enterprise support agreements (minimum 3 years) for all XenDesktop 4 Platinum Edition components.

With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware also updated a number of related products. One of them is vCenter Orchestrator (vCO).

vCO (formerly VS-O) comes from the acquisition of Dunes Technology in September 2007. VMware decided to include it for free in the vSphere 4.0 Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

The new release (build 581) introduces a few but important features:

• Native 64bit architecture for both client and server tiers
• Optional stand-alone 32bit client
• Engine upgrade to Java 1.6
• Support for vSphere 4.1
• Data migration tool for vCO 4.0 customers
• Extended configuration limits:

Read more

With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware also updated a number of related products. One of them is vCenter Server Heartbeat.

In March 2009 VMware decided to address a serious concern related to its virtual infrastructure: the lack of native fault tolerance for vCenter Server.
To do so, the company closed an OEM deal with NeverFail, rebranding its partner’s product in vCenter Server Heartbeat 1.0 and selling it against 3rd party solutions like the ones offered by CA, Double-Take or Steel Eye.
Somewhere during the last 16 months VMware decided to align the version number of its OEMed product with the one of NeverFail: so today we have Heartbeat 6.3 (build 4316).

The update introduces a number of new features:

Read more

With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware also updated a number of related products. One of them is Studio.

VMware Studio has been launched in September 2008 as a free authoring tool to create and maintain OVF packages.
Exactly one year later VMware launched Studio 2.0, introducing support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) 1.0 specifications and the ability to manipulate its next-generation virtual appliances (VAs): the vApps.

Studio 2.1 (build 1318-268792) introduces a boatload of enhancements:

• Capability to digitally sign an OVF (vSphere 4.1 verifies the certificate before importing)
• Capability to create VAs from VMs that were not originally created with VMware Studio, based on a discovery phase
• Capability to run concurrent builds
• Capability to analyze the list of RPM and DEB packages to locate unused items and reduce the VM’s footprint

Read more