History

While the Apple iPhone and iPad devices continue to conquer market share (and the favor of more and more enterprises), the number of business applications for them is still limited.

Excluding the Citrix Receiver and the Wyse PocketCloud, the virtualization vendors’ effort to embrace these new devices has been minimal.

Independent developers seem much more active. After Gamma VNC, which supports the VMware Fusion native VNC server, today we mention iXen, a XenServer management console for the iPad.

The app supports Citrix XenServer 5.5 and performs most basic tasks:

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The US startup Desktone, which entered the VDI market in April 2008 with a very interesting platform for hosting providers, just lost its Vice President of Strategy: Jeff Fisher.

Fisher arrived at Desktone from Softricity, acquired by Microsoft in May 2006.
After three years at Softricity as Director of Business Development, Fisher remained in Microsoft for less than one year and a half, and then joined Desktone.

He already landed at RES Software, where he’s the new Vice President of Business Development.

After years of silence, the startup RingCube relaunched its flagship product in March, replacing the MojoPac brand (and its focus on the consumer market) with vDesk and a new effort to win the enterprise segment.

vDesk acts like a wrapper for hosted virtualization platforms, which can enforce corporate security policies and that can be centrally managed. It competes against products like Microsoft MED-V (formerly Kidaro Workspaces), Sentillion vThere (acquired by Microsoft too) and VMware ACE.

The company just achieved the OPSWAT OESIS OK interoperability certification for vDesk 3.0.

OPSWAT is a very small US company founded in 2002 which develops and sells OESIS, a software framework that developers can adopt to manage third party security applications.
OPSWAT also maintains a certification program, the OESIS OK, that verifies the compatibility between these security applications, including antivirus, antispyware, personal firewalls, hard disk encryption, VPN clients and much more.

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In March Microsoft announced the upcoming released of a new remote desktop protocol technology called RemoteFX, acquired by Calista in January 2008.
RemoteFX which can be considered an accelerator for RDP over the LAN, will arrive with Windows Server R2 Service Pack 1 and will be integrated in Remote Desktop Services (RDS), possibly by the end of this year.

Immediately after, a number of players in the server-based computing market announced their upcoming support for the technology, including AMD, AppliedMicro, Citrix, DevonIT, HP, Quest, ThinLinx, Via and Wyse Technology.

Ericom joins the group today, announcing full support for RemoteFX within its PowerTerm WebConnect:

Ericom has just completed verifying that Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect supports this new and innovative Microsoft protocol. In fact, PowerTerm WebConnect is the only available connection broker for VDI and Terminal Services today that supports Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and RemoteFX.

Customers that are interested in trying the solution can send an email to the company.

The Canadian startup CiRBA has been quite under the radar for a long time now. Excluding a minor update for its flagship product Data Center Intelligence (DCE), released in May, the company didn’t show much progress (DCE 5.0 was released in June 2008).

So it’s a positive news that the company is working to enter new markets. CiRBA in fact just signed an agreement with Hitachi to offer DCE as a service for the Japanese market. For those customers that want the product on premises, Hitachi can resell it too.

This move is also trying to counter the competition coming from vendors like Lanamark or Liquidware Labs, which initially preferred to approach the market through a network of managed services partners and only now are starting to approach end-users with direct sales.

Just a couple of weeks ago virtualization.info announced that Cisco selected Rent-A-Lab (RAL) to host all Unified Computing System (UCS) road shows and bootcamps arranged in Europe for this year. But there’s much more happening at our busy on-demand data center in Zurich.

Today we are happy to announce that NetApp joined the list of prestigious sponsors that are powering RAL.

Thanks to NetApp, the infrastructure now features two FAS3140v arrays, each with four 4GB FCP ports, six 1GB NICs, one dual-CNA for FCoE and 10GB Ethernet, and one Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) II with 256GB of SLC flash memory.

The PAM II (aka Flash Cache) is an array controller resident, intelligent 3/4 length PCIe card with onboard memory that is used as a read cache and is integrated with DataONTAP via FlexScale which is software that provides various tuning options and modes of operation.
It’s a especially desirable component in VDI environments and we can’t wait to try it with the virtualization platforms we have here.

The two arrays come each with a grand total of 24 300GB SAS 15K RPM drives and a boatload of software: ASIS, CIFS, Cluster, FCP, Flex Clone, iSCSI, Multistore, NearStore Option, NFS, pammii, snapdrive_windows, snapmanager_hyperv, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, SnapVault ONTAP Primary, SnapVault ONTAP Secondary, V-Series (Gateway).

The last feature, V-Series, which defines the “v” in the FAS3140v name, means that these units are able to manage 3rd party arrays (from IBM, HP, HDS, EMC, Fujitsu and 3PAR) and put their storage intelligence on top.

On the side you can see a picture of the new gear already in place in the virtualization.info Rent-a-Lab racks.

In March VMware acquired a number of products from its parent company EMC for $200M, all parts of the Ionix infrastructure management portfolio, and all coming from acquisitions of small technology firms happened between 2006 and 2009.

Now VMware is rebranding the products and adding them to its already wide product portfolio:

• Server Configuration Manager (acquired from Configuresoft in June 2009) is now vCenter Configuration Manager

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Arkeia Software is a US vendor focused on disaster recovery. It’s flagship product, Network Backup, is a backup/restore engine that features agents for multiple applications, databases, file servers and storage arrays in the physical world.

Arkeia also supports all the three major virtualization platforms: Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.
The company just updated the product to introduce support for vSphere, by leveraging the vStorage API.

While Network Backup is only capable to perform a full backup for Hyper-V virtual machines (through the Volume Shadow Service), on vSphere it can also do a block-level incremental backup thanks to the  VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) support.

The product supports the vApp packaging and integrates with the vCenter Server GUI.
The restore process can be managed through a web management interface:

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Earlier this week Red Hat released beta two of its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, the first Linux distribution of the company that completely replaces Xen with KVM as virtualization platform of choice.

The first public beta appeared at the end of April and at that time Citrix, which is the main supporter of Xen, suggested Red Hat customers that invested in Xen to look elsewhere, including the Oracle Enterprise Linux. Oracle in fact, is another key supporter of Xen, used as the foundation of the Oracle VM virtual infrastructure.

Red Hat says that RHEL 6.0 may have a third beta, according to The Register.

The version of KVM included in current beta introduces the following features compared to what’s available in RHEL 5.5:

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So far Citrix released a number of interesting resources about its VDI platform XenDesktop, including a Modular Reference Architecture and a Performance Assessment and Bandwidth Analysis for Delivering XenDesktop to Branch Offices.

Coupled with independent comparisons of its features, like the Burton Group’s Virtual Desktop Evaluation  Criteria or the PQR’s VDI Smackdown, these resources are precious to understand the Citrix’s offering.

Now the company adds one more piece, by releasing a Design Handbook:

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