History

Oracle just released a minor update for the VDI connection broker inherited from Sun.

Version 3.0, formerly called Sun xVM VDI, came out more than one year ago.

At that time Sun introduced support for VirtualBox side by side with the existing support for VMware ESX. A odd choice considering that VirtualBox is a hosted virtualization platform (aka type-2 virtual machine monitor or VMM) and is not supposed to perform as well a bare-metal hypervisor (aka type-1 VMM) as ESX. 
In March 2009 the Sun hypervisor, xVM Server, wasn’t ready for prime-time yet, so the company preferred to support VirtualBox rather than just stick with the competing platform.

Today Oracle introduces VDI 3.1.1 which comes with a major new feature: support for Microsoft Hyper-V.

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Yesterday Microsoft released the first version of a new free tool dubbed Application Virtualization Dashboard.

It packages together charts, gauges, and tables to track any App-V dataset in near-real time, so customers can monitor usage, health, and compliance of all their virtualized applications.

It supports both App-V 4.5 and 4.6, and offers the following capabilities:

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Today Citrix released XenServer 5.6, announced a few weeks ago at the Synergy 2010 conference (see virtualization.info coverage of the event and our article about the new features and packages).

For the occasion John Humpheys, Senior Marketing Director at Citrix, shares some numbers about the market penetration of XenServer.

The most important information revealed is that XenServer is now the backend hypervisor for more than half of all XenDesktop installations worldwide.

One may think that this number is pretty low, and indeed there’s a lot to do here to leverage the opportunity with a more sophisticated and compelling integration, but the fact that many XenDesktop clients don’t choose XenServer isn’t really surprising.

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iPhone and iPad are quickly becoming preferred endpoint devices for business. Citrix recognized the opportunity a long time ago and has been quick in releasing its Receiver for both the Apple devices.

While VMware still doesn’t seem interested in pursuing the opportunity, somebody else is doing on its behalf.
Yesterday in fact, a new remote desktop application for the iPad (and the iPhone) has been published on the AppStore: Gamma VNC.

As many similar apps in the store, this is a VNC viewer. Anyway there are a couple of interesting features. The first one is that it’s free (and it won’t stay that way much longer if it gets some popularity).
The second and most important is that it natively support the VNC server that comes as part of VMware Fusion:

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In April the startup Hyper9 lost his Senior R&D Scientist Schley Andrew Kutz, popular on the virtualization scene thanks to his reverse engineering work of the VMware vCenter plug-in architecture, and father of many tools that the company released in the last year.

Hyper9 hired Kutz just one year ago, bringing in his intellectual property about the Virtualization Manager Mobile and the SVMotion GUI plug-in.
Kutz moved to EMC where he’s working as Principal Software Engineer.

On top of that, Hyper9 loses today its founder and CTO Dave McCrory, virtualization.info has just learned. McCrory just left to pursue new opportunities and he’s rumored to be working on a new startup already.

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In July 2009 VMware hired Fred King, former General Manager of Technology Alliances & Channels in the Australian & New Zealand region at Oracle, as his new Director of Partners for the same geography.

Less than one year after that, King leaves the company as ARN just reported.
VMware doesn’t have a replacement yet.

Now that CloudShare is getting some traction thanks to the involvement in the VMware and Salesforce partnership, the company is expanding.

They’ve just hired a Vice President of Global Sales: Steven McDermott.

McDermott comes from Panasas, where he covered the same role for two years. Before that, he has been Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Topio before the acquisition from NetApp at the end 2006.
He remained in NetApp just five months.

TechTarget recently published an article about the involuntary information leak on VMware’s corporate website, revealing the roadmap for the upcoming vCloud Service Director (codename Project Redwood) that virtualization.info extensively described in January.

Apparently, vCloud Service Director (vCSD), which is in private beta right now, will be formally announced at the end of August, during the VMworld 2010 conference.

Much more interesting is the fact that vCSD will leverage the jclouds Java library to access 3rd parties public clouds and mesh them with vSphere-based on-premises private clouds, creating what the industry now calls a hybrid cloud.

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The guys at Windows8beta.com made a scoop discovering a new job announcement from Microsoft about a career in the Remote Desktop Virtualization team for the upcoming Windows 8 platforms wave.

The Software Development Engineer in Test II job announcement says:

…Remote Desktop team has taken on the fight for hosted desktops with first version of the Microsoft VDI released in Windows Server 2008 R2. In Windows 8, we plan to take it to the next level with different roles like Remote Desktop Web Access (RDWA), Remote Desktop Connection Broker (RDCB), RemoteApp and Desktop Publishing (RADC), Remote Desktop Virtualization (RDV) and Remote Desktop Publishing working together to create a very easy to setup and robust solution for small and medium business and a very promising platform for our partners to build solutions for large organizations…

A little more than two years ago, virtualization.info covered an emerging project called OpenNEbula (formerly GridHypervisor) which was one of the earliest open source solutions to manage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing architecture built on Xen.

The project, based on a research started in 2005 by Ignacio M. Llorente and Rubén S. Montero, matured a lot in these years. It now offers cloud management capabilities for most virtualization platforms, including Xen, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, VMware Server and any other virtual machine monitor that supports the libvirt libraries.
Plus, it offers capability to manage hybrid clouds, through the support for public clouds like Amazon EC2 and ElasticHosts.

Version 1.4 of OpenNebula was released in December 2009, and an upcoming 1.4.2 is expected to introduce support for Oracle VM VirtualBox.

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