History

In September 2008 a new US startup called BlueBear entered the virtualization space, previewing a promising management console, Kodiak, able to support VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.

Unfortunately, in more than two years, the company didn’t manage to deliver at least version 1.0 of Kodiak, and eventually went out of business.

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Microsoft is increasing its marketing effort in promoting its VDI platform since a few months now.

In early April the company published a bunch of Microsoft publishes Deploying Personal Virtual Desktops guides. Now it’s time for the Deploying Remote Desktop Connection Broker with High Availability paper.

The 23-pages step-by-step guide describes how to configure Remote Desktop Connection Broker (RD Connection Broker) in a Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise or Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter failover cluster, as part of a configuration that provides users with access to personal virtual desktops or virtual machines in a virtual desktop pool through RemoteApp and Desktop Connection.

After more than one year since the last version, Veeam releases this week version 4.0 of its performance reporting tool for VMware vSphere: Reporter (formerly Reporter Enterprise).

Reporter 4.0 introduces a number of new features:

• Web-based access interface to the reporting engine
  A new reporting engine, based on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), enables users to access reports via a web-based interface.
  The interface can be customized and integrated with third party tools like Microsoft SharePoint.
• New Change Management reports
  Improved change management reports, including new audit information for changed objects, enable users to see the “who, what, where, when and how” of every change. If a VM suddenly disappears, slows down or stops working altogether, users can quickly identify not only what changed but also who made the change.

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Yesterday Oracle released a new update for its hosted desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox, which is now officially called Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Version 3.2, in public beta since March, introduces a number of remarkable new features:

• Memory ballooning to dynamically increase or decrease the amount of RAM used by a virtual machine 
  (64bit host operating systems only)
• Page Fusion automatically de-duplicates RAM when running similar VMs thereby increasing capacity.
  (Windows guests OSes on 64bit host OSes only)

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virtualization.info already reported about several aspects (features, GA availability and strategy) of the new Citrix client hypervisor launched two weeks ago at Synergy 2010 (see event coverage).

Now, while additional feedbacks about the release candidate are being published by early adopters, and while Citrix is busy answering VMware on the value of client hypervisors for BYOC models, we are able to share additional details about its internals.

During the conference in fact, Ian Pratt (Chairman of Xen.org and Vice President of Advanced Virtualization Products at Citrix) and Tom James (Desktop Virtualization Manager of Business Client Platform Division at Intel) shared interesting details about the XenClient and Synchronizer internals.

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Open Virtual Switch (or Open vSwitch) is the open source answer (supported and sponsored by Citrix) to the Cisco Nexus 1000V and the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch architecture.

Citrix announced the project in June 2009, but the early, public lines of code didn’t appear before August.

It took almost one year to move from version 0.90.4 to version 1.0, which introduces a number of features:

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Last week, during its Synergy 2010 conference (see virtualization.info coverage), Citrix announced the availability of XenServer 5.6.

This is the first update since Citrix decided to release XenServer as a free and open source hypervisor in February 2010, and with it Citrix completely changed the naming convention for the product.
The stand-alone product called Essentials for XenServer doesn’t exist anymore: the enterprise management capabilities that it offers have been integrated in the XenServer package, and distributed across four different editions: Free (the one fully open source), Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum.

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When VMware announced the VMsafe APIs more than two years ago, virtualization.info praised the effort and suggested that the advent of the technology was the best thing ever happened to the security industry in a long time. It could have been, assuming a solid strategy behind it, and a proper execution.
But more than two years later, it’s safe to say that VMsafe has gone nowhere so far and that the execution of the strategy has been all but flawless.

This may well depend on the incapability of VMware to approach the security world (their ACE product has been a colossal fiasco that still exists only because it’s being super-slowly integrated into Workstation for free), but the company is not the first one to blame for this failure.
Security vendors in fact did nothing so far to secure virtual infrastructures in a proper, more effective and efficient way.
A large-scale, concrete adoption of hardware virtualization platforms can be tracked back to 2006 so, even accepting that security vendors have been careful in approaching the emerging technology, it’s still true that they had four years to do something. Instead, in 2010, top players like McAfee, Symantec, TrendMicro, and a myriad of smaller others, have yet to address the customers need for security in the virtual data centers.
Worse than that, hardware virtualization is facilitating the advent of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platforms, where the security challenges are even bigger, and the security vendors above haven’t demonstrated any commitment on these platforms at all.

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Earlier this week, Citrix unveiled the public Release Candidate of its client hypervisor XenClient, beating on time VMware and its upcoming Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).

The VMware’s reaction has been instantaneous: the day after the announcement, the company released an article about the Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) IT governance model, claiming that its current approach is way better and the real one.

Like Citrix in fact, VMware delayed multiple times the release of its client hypervisor, at the point that the upcoming release 4.5 of View, will not include it, as many have hoped.
VMware rather preferred to remove the experimental label from an existing feature of View Client for the so-called offline VDI scenarios that is simply called Local Mode.

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This is not exactly a bright moment for Red Hat, which received severe critics from VMware about several aspects of its Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform.

While it’s true that this a 1.0 version and it’s then acceptable that it has a number of limitations, it’s still true that Red Hat is supposedly developing this product since at least one year and a half (as soon as it acquired the startup Qumranet) and that it has to immediately deliver a very competitive product if it wants to play against VMware.

And probably to accelerate the process of maturation of RHEV, this week the company announced that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) will become an open source project.

Unfortunately this won’t help still for a long time.

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