History

This week VMware has announced a partnership with Novell to use SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) as guest operating system of choice for its virtual appliances.

The partnership goes beyond that, as the OEM agreement allows VMware to give away SLES patches and updates support agreements as part of the vSphere licensing:

Customers who want to deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware in VMware vSphere virtual machines will be entitled to receive a subscription to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server that includes patches and updates as part of their newly purchased qualifying VMware vSphere license and Support and Subscription.

The terms of the agreement in details are:

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Sometime in April VMware lost Andrew Lee, its former Director of Corporate Business Development.

Lee has been in VMware for over four years, with a major role in the merge and acquisition strategy of the company.
He has been responsible for six acquisitions, including the SpringSource one, and even the $20M investment in Terremark.

Lee left VMware to join the venture capital firm Battery Ventures as a principal.

Without much noise, VMware yesterday released Update 2 for its vSphere 4.0 virtual infrastructure platform, which includes ESX/ESXi hosts (build 261974) as well as the vCenter Server (build 258672).

The Update for ESX/ESXi primarily introduces additional hardware support:

• Fault Tolerance (FT) support for Intel Xeon 3400, Xeon 5600 and i3/i5 CPUs
• IOMMU support for AMD Opteron 6100 and 4100 CPUs

ESX/ESXi 4.0 U2 also introduces support for Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating system.

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Less than three months ago the Spanish startup Abiquo was preparing to release version 1.5 of its management console for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms.

The company is back with a new beta program for version 1.6 which is fully focused on programmable interfaces.

Abiquo 1.6 beta in fact comes with a Cloud Service API, to automate the migration of existing virtual machines into the cloud platform of choice through the VMware vCloud API standard, and a Cloud Operator API, to automate the workload balancing inside the cloud platform through capacity rules.

Plus, Abiquo 1.6 introduces support for Citrix XenServer as backend hypervisor, support for Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and support for a number of networking technologies, including:

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Earlier this week Leostream announced the availability of Connection Broker 6.5.

The company has set a pace of a new minor release every two months, each one coming with significant additions.

Version 6.5 features:

• Support for Citrix XenApp
  End-users can start an ICA session to access XenApp applications and desktops through the integrated Citrix Client for Java.
• Dynamic client display matching
  Administrators can create display plans that automatically match the layout and resolution of the client displays for viewer protocols that support it.
• Support for OpenLDAP authenticated users as virtual desktop local users

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Vizioncore, soon to become the Quest Software Server Virtualization Management Group, released last week vEchoShell 1.2.6 (formerly Virtualization Ecoshell).

vEcoShell is an extension for the Microsoft PowerShell IDE called PowerGUI that Quest offers for free since a long time. 
The tool was launched in April 2009 but Vizioncore declared it out of beta only now.

The new version introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and a major change in the way connections to ESX and vCenter are handled: now vEcoShell leverages the VMware PowerCLI to interact with the hosts, allowing the script to be executed outside the PowerGUI environment without problems.

The product remains freeware.

Just five days after the release of VirtualBox 3.2.2, Oracle publishes another minor update.

Like the previous one, VirtualBox 3.2.4 is a maintenance release introducing just bug fixes.

Today virtualization.info is in New Orleans for our first live coverage of the Microsoft TechEd conference.
Microsoft has hinted that the opening keynote, performed by Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business division, will be focused on cloud computing.

Microsoft has already showed a glimpse of its technology roadmap at the MMS 2010 conference (see virtualization.info coverage), demonstrating the upcoming version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and the recently acquired Opalis orchestration framework, but the company still has to clarify if it really plans to compete against Amazon and others on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market.

Hopefully today we’ll have an answer to this.

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James Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, continues to offer interesting details about his company’s strategy around cloud computing.

He recently said that clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins and now he’s openly saying that Red Hat is looking for acquisitions in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

What companies may be interesting for Red Hat?

The vendor is working to deliver a commercial implementation of the Deltacloud open source meta-APIs, but it seems that the product won’t be ready before 2011.

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After unveiling the list of features that will appear in the next major release of the VMware vSphere platform (currently numbered 4.1, but likely to change in 4.5 to align with the upcoming release of View 4.5), virtualization.info can now share full details about the performance improvements introduced by some of them, like Scalable vMotion, Wide VM Numa, Memory Compression and others.

Let’s start with the new configuration limits that can vSphere 4.1 can reach:

• 3,000 virtual machines per cluster (compared to 1,280 in vSphere 4.0)
• 1,000 hosts per vCenter Server (compared to 300)
• 15,000 registered VMs per vCenter Server (compared to 4,500)
• 10,000 concurrently powered-on VMs per vCenter Server (compared to 3,000)
• 120 concurrent Virtual Infrastructure Clients per vCenter Server (compared to 30)
• 500 hosts per virtual Datacenter object (compared to 100)
• 5,000 virtual machines per virtual Datacenter object (compared to 2,500)

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