History

Microsoft just announced an on-premises version of its Azure cloud computing platform that will be available to hosting providers and customers through an appliance (or better: a large number of racks of appliances).

Microsoft is still mum about the Azure capability to run as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, and there’s no trace of this feature in the online version of the platform, at the point that there are doubts about the company’s plans to compete against Amazon EC2 as previously announced.

But a new confirmation arrives exactly from this new Azure appliance. The just published FAQ page about the product in fact, clearly mentions the IaaS capability:

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After vConverter, Vizioncore finally updates another product of its portfolio: vOptimizer.

Sometimes in the H1 2007 Quest Software acquired the US startup Invirtus, merging its offering with the Vizioncore’s one in September of the same year, and turning Invirtus VM Optimizer into Vizioncore vOptimizer.

Vizioncore released just one major update of vOptimizer at that time: version 4.0.
The product was then renamed as vOptimizer Pro 2.0 in early 2009.
It received a further, minor update in June 2009, introducing a new infrastructure scanning capability.

vOptimizer Pro reaches today version 3.0, which sports support for Linux virtual machines (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and 5.4 only at this point) and thin provisioned virtual machines. Pricing is set at $299.

The way Vizioncore shaped the marketing message clarifies how the company is going VKernel with this product. This shouldn’t surprise much considering that vFoglight too is in direct competition with the VKernel offering.

SPICE is the high performance protocol developed by the Israeli startup Qumranet. More than one year after the startup has been acquired by Red Hat, SPICE has become an open source project.

In April 2010 the remoting protocol has been included in the freedesktop.org project, an 10-years old effort to promote the X Window System.

This week SPICE reached version 0.5.2, showing some progress.
Despite 0.5.x is the unstable branch, this version brings in the first stable API.
It also introduces full support for off-screen surfaces and a 80% integration with QEMU.

The project homepage features a rich roadmap:

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The 2010 edition of the VMware’s conference VMworld is approaching fast. The company already published the session catalog which, easy to guess, has a strong focus on private cloud computing and the upcoming vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly codename Project Redwood).

virtualization.info recommends a few sessions:

• DV7180 – ThinApp : What’s New and Future Vision
  This session will detail new features and enhancements to the ThinApp product since VMWorld 2009, including the 4.0.3, 4.0.4, and 4.5 releases as well upcomming releases that occur between now and VMWorld 2010. The second half of the session will present part of our vision for the future of application virtualization and demonstrate some demos of possible future technology.
• MA7140 – vCloud Architecture Design Strategies and Design Patterns
  This session focuses on the building blocks for a vCloud architecture. Using Design Patterns is fundamental for a successful design and deployment. We will provide a Conceptual Model including the requirements and constraints and conceptually represents what we are trying to produce. The Logical Design shows the relationship of the components.
  This session uses the experience of the VMware TS Cloud Team for deployments with Enterprise Private Cloud and with Cloud Providers.

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The announcement of vSphere 4.1 is officially set for next week, July 13, virtualization.info has learned.
We cannot confirm yet if the product will be actually shipped that day or just announced.

virtualization.info already published the list of features that will be shipped with this new major release, as well as a VMware report about the performance improvements of many components.

An additional interesting detail is how VMware has enriched the offering for the SMBs. 
The new Essentials Plus edition in fact will include more features:

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus—This kit includes all the features of vSphere Essentials, plus High Availability and Data Recovery to automatically recover your data and restart your virtual machines in the event of system failures; with vMotion technology, now you can completely eliminate planned downtime during server maintenance.

The first details about the third version of Hyper-V and the overall Microsoft vision for it appeared online yesterday on a French publication.

Apparently, Hyper-V 3.0 will be integrated in Windows 8 too, working as a client hypervisor (an interesting scenario considering the new VMware’s position about type-1 VMMs for offline VDI).

According to the article, Hyper-V 3.0 will not run a full copy of Windows 8 in its parent partition, but a minimal part of the OS internally codenamed MinWin.
MinWin is subset of Windows that exists since Vista. It includes the OS kernel, the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), the file system and the networking support. In one of its iterations it had a disk footprint of 25MB and a RAM footprint of 40MB, according to several information released by Microsoft in 2007 and 2008.
Codename MinWin is smaller than the Windows Server Core edition.

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VMware announced the client edition of its hypervisor in September 2008. Dubbed Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), the product’s launch was planned somewhere in Q4 2009 but, like its competitor Citrix, VMware missed its own deadline.

In September 2009 the company updated the roadmap, suggesting that CVP won’t arrive before H1 2010.
In March VMware postponed the release again, this time to the end of 2010.

Now, in a new interview with a company executive, it seems that VMware is no more committed to any specific date. This either means that CVP is finally ready and the vendor wants to surprise its competitors, or that the technical challenge is more significant than expected and the vendor doesn’t see the project as a priority anymore to justify additional investments on it.

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virtualization.info first appeared online September 11, 2003. Over the last seven years, we’ve tracked the birth and the evolution of a completely new, billion dollar market, the rise and fall of over 100 vendors, and the mainstream adoption of this disruptive technology that is virtualization.
In doing so, virtualization.info has been visited by millions of readers, from all continents, from all industries. Today most Fortune 500 and Global Fortune 2000 companies read our daily news, along with hundreds of thousands of smaller firms all around the globe, from US to Japan (did you know that Japan visits virtualization.info JP more than UK visits virtualization.info EN?).

The evolution of this market is all but complete.
Virtual infrastructures can mature in so many different areas, from orchestration to security, that we really have just started. While the industry continues to make progress in these segments, and prepares to enter the next big phase with application virtualization, another completely new, billion dollar market is forming these days: cloud computing.
We want to track the birth and evolution of this market in the same way we did for virtualization. So today virtualization.info announces a sister publication: cloudcomputing.info

While virtualization.info will continue to track hardware, OS and application virtualization technologies, cloudcomputing.info will focus on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) markets.
There will be some overlap around the IaaS market, as IaaS clouds are built on top of virtual infrastructures, and so you’ll see some cross-posting between the two sites.
Beyond that, cloudcomputing.info will expand our coverage, discussing new vendors and technologies that didn’t find a place here so far.

Feel free to visit the new website, subscribe the RSS feed or the email newsletter, follow the Twitter account, or like the Facebook page.

We hope you’ll enjoy our expanded coverage at cloudcomputing.info. Thanks to everyone for their support of virtualization.info over the last seven years!

P.s.: Just in case you are wondering:

1. we are hiring writers, for both publications. If you are interested please send a resume and a writing sample.
2. we are evaluating early sponsorships. If you are interested please send an inquiry.

A few weeks after the release candidate status, the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) reaches version 0.5.

As virtualization.info reported at that time, even if not marked as 1.0, the Xen.org team informs that “XCP-0.5 is intended to be a *stable* release, suitable for long-term production use.”

The new build include the following components and features, including:

• Xen 3.4.2
• Linux kernel 2.6.27
• Open vSwitch 1.0

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Yesterday Vizioncore released a new major version of its physical to virtual (P2V) / virtual to virtual (V2V) / virtual to physical (V2P) migration tool: vConverter.

The previous milestone, vConverter 4.0, arrived in November 2008, with just one minor update released in September 2009, so this is a long overdue refreshment.

vConverter 5.0, priced at $299 per physical system, introduces P2V migration support for Microsoft Hyper-V and V2V migration support between VMware and Microsoft virtual machines.

The new capability is part of the Quest grand plan to support Hyper-V in all its Vizioncore product portfolio. A plan that became evident in March 2009 and that involved vControl first and vFoglight later.