History

The analysis firm Burton Group, recently acquired by Gartner but still operating as an independent subsidiary, recently published its Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria.

The document, that has been created as a guidance for enterprise-scale VDI deployments, includes over 100 features, divided in Required (over 50%), Preferred and Optional.

Both Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 and VMware View 4.01 have been measured against the criteria and a couple of extremely interesting things emerged.

The first one is that XenDesktop beats View in every category, surpassing the competitor even in the Required feature-set.

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By now virtualization.info readers should know that Microsoft is planning to extend its Azure cloud computing platform in a way it can rival with Amazon EC2 (public claims and multiple evidences confirmed this).

Today EC2 features an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architecture, while Azure is based on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture.
Ironically, while the latter is working to have a IaaS piece, the former may be well looking around to be a PaaS cloud too.

Azure is a highly optimized version of Hyper-V, stripped down of unnecessary components and drivers to reduce the platform footprint / surface attack and improve performance. Or at least this is the official high-level description of the architecture that Microsoft recently offered to virtualization.info.

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VMware has just released the first minor update for all its hosted virtualization platforms: Workstation / Player and Fusion.

Workstation, Player and ACE 7.1 (build 261024) include the following new features:

• Support for 8 vCPUs / VM
• Support for up to 2TB virtual hard drives
• Support for OpenGL 2.1 (Windows Vista and 7 guest OSes)
• Support for OVF 1.1 specifications
• Support for Intel Advanced Encryption Standard instruction set (AES-NI) to speed up encryption/decryption performance
• Autologon for Windows guest OSes

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This week Vizioncore released the first major update for its backup/recovery product vRanger Pro since the 4.0 version made available in July 2009.

With this release, still part of the Data Protection Platform effort, Vizioncore is clearly going after PHD Virtual, as two key new features are part of competing products or have been announced to be part of them.

Specifically, we are talking about the support for vSphere vStorage APIs and the Change Block Tracking (CBT) technology, that provides the list of blocks that have changed inside virtual disks, avoiding to rescan the VMDK file and thus reducing the time to complete the incremental and differential backup. 
PHD Virtual introduced this support in Backup for VMware ESX (formerly esXpress) 4.0.

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Veeam released today version 5.5 of its nworks Smart Plug-In (SPI) for HP Operations Manager.

The add-on integrates VMware monitoring capabilities in the HP management platform, and supports vSphere since version 5.0.

The new SPI 5.5 introduces three new features:

• Capability to define at which frequency the VMware data has to be published on Operations Manager
• Failover Groups
• A deployment toolkit that includes an online calculator for pre-deployment planning that recommends the number of collectors required, as well as a built-in wizard for ongoing analysis as enterprises grow

This week the Linux distribution Fedora reaches version 13. As reported in January, it brings a number of additional capabilities for KVM, including:

• Kernel Acceleration for KVM Networking
  Network latency has been reduced by a factor of five and bandwidth availability has been improved from 90% native to 95% native on some systems thanks to a new kernel driver.
• KVM Stable PCI Addresses
  KVM guests in Fedora now have stable PCI addresses, reducing the chance that Windows guests will require reactivation as guest configuration is modified.
  KVM guest virtual machine devices retain their PCI address allocations as other devices are added or removed from the guest configuration.

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In November 2008 the company Digital Networks UK (DNUK) released a self-contained open source management platform called Openvirt, using Ubuntu Server 8.10 as underlying operating system and supporting the KVM build included in Linux kernel 2.6.27.
At that time the product leveraged Libvirt 0.4.4.

After one year and a half the company is back with Openvirt 2.0 which has a number of new features.
This time the OS is Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS and the KVM build is the one included in kernel 2.6.33.
The new Libvirt version used is 0.80.

The Openvirt minimal UI allows to perform basic virtual machines administration tasks (power on/off, suspend, edit configuration, etc.) as well as more complex activities like VMs live migration, templates management and real-time performance logging.
Guest OSes can be accessed through a Java console.

The new capabilities introduced with this 2.0 version include:

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Apparently, in the virtualization world, marketing fight doesn’t just happen between VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

Just yesterday, in a new article on the corporate blog, the Canadian startup Lanamark commented on the release of Liquidware Labs Stratusphere 4.6 (virtualization.info coverage of that release has been mentioned in the Lanamark post).

The two companies are competing in the capacity planning space and Lanamark has been quick in pointing out that the last Liquidware Labs press announcement may have had a better wording about the agent deploying model of Stratusphere 4.6.

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So far the Microsoft efforts to push Hyper-V have been primarily focused on changing the customers perspective about its hypervisor. But now the company has begun addressing sales partners. And it’s doing that in a completely new way.

Last week in fact, David Greschler, Director of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft, published a call-to-action on the company’s partner network channel, directly mentioning competition with VMware:

Every partner knows about the great opportunity to sell virtualization technology and services. For a while, that meant one thing: working exclusively with VMware.

Times have changed.

The statement is remarkable as it openly admits that so far Microsoft virtualization platforms have not been a real alternative for solution providers.

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Wil van Antwerpen recently collected and published a number of evidences that may prove VMware has no plans to continue the development of VMware Server, once called GSX Server.

One is that the security advice VMSA-2010-0007 includes the following warning:

End of General Support for VMware Server 2.0 is 2011-06-30, users should plan to upgrade to the newest release of either ESXi or VMware Player.

The last version of Server released has been 2.0.2, out more than one year ago, but the 2.0 major update came out in October 2008.

During this time frame, apparently, VMware didn’t fix a number of issues (like VMSA-2009-0016 and VMSA-2010-0005) despite the customers support agreements in place.

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