History

In mid-February virtualization.info missed the release of View 4.0.1 (build 233023).

The maintenance version introduces support for VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5, but it mostly introduces new support for virtual printing.

VMware has an ongoing OEM agreement with ThinPrint which allows it to include its .print driver inside several products. One of them is View.

So far .print has been supported in View environments only when thin clients use RDP protocol. But with View 4.0.1 the ThinPrint technology support has been extended to thin devices that use PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol.

Citrix recently released a new open source tool to simplify virtual machines migration from the open source Xen hypervisor to its open source implementation XenServer and the upcoming Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

The virtual to virtual (V2V) migration utility is written in Python and can either perform an offline conversion of a Xen VM into that XVA format that XenServer and XCP understand, or live streaming the VM to the two target platforms.

The tool supports both para-virtualized and hardware-virtualization-assisted (HVM) virtual machines but it still is in its early stage and Citrix warns about issues and bugs.

Yesterday VMware announced that hired the founder and lead developer of Redis: Salvatore Sanfilippo.

Redis is an open source, journaled key-value data store.
By some degrees it can be considered a database server what can operate in two modes: it can keep its entire dataset in RAM and save it on disc asynchronously from time to time, or it can save every change in the dataset as it happens, using an append file.  

Redis is not yet fault tolerant. It should get clustering capabilities after version 2.0 is released.
It’s written in ANSI C and supported in a number of programming languages, including Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, C# and Java.

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Today IBM launches version 2 of a new cloud computing platform for software development and testing.
The offering seems similar to the virtual lab automation facility similar to the one that the US startup Skytap offers since April 2008.

CNET reports that this infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud is powered by the new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH), which is based on KVM.
If confirmed this would be the biggest and most important case study for the new Red Hat virtualization platform at today.

IBM published a short video to show how it works:

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Spiceworks is a private US-based company founded in 2006 that offers a completely free system management platform for hardware/software/licenses inventory, change management, helpdesk, OS remote control and network mapping.
The platform is aimed at the SMB market (over 1,000 monitored it starts to be slow) and is supported by advertising that is displayed inside the console.

Over the last four years the company made notable progress, extending its discovery capabilities to Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac OS X physical machines as well as network devices, supporting mission critical applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Active Directory.

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Some of our readers may be familiar with the virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab facility.
Operated by our trusted partner Kybernetika, Rent-A-Lab (RAL) is a cutting-edge data center located in Zurich, equipped with some of the latest and greatest servers, storage and network gears a virtualization professional may ever desire.

RAL is available for rent to worldwide customers. virtualization.info and Kybernetika offer unrestricted, on-demand (24/7) access to its bare metal since January 2007.
Customers can use it to install complex, multi-tier virtual infrastructures (our hardware is supported by every player in the market, including Citrix, Microsoft and of course VMware) and do whatever they want with them: training classes (the most common scenario), product evaluations, benchmarks, etc.

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Five months after the release of Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and Fusion 3.0, VMware is ready to launch the public beta program for .1 version of its desktop virtualization platforms.

New features included in this first beta build (240242) of Workstation 7.1 / Player 3.1 and ACE 2.7 are:

• OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests
• 8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size
• OVF 1.0 support
• Fedora 12 guest OS support
• Direct Launch (integration between guest and host OSes start menu)
• Guest OS autologon (for Windows guests only)

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Somewhere in Q4 2009 VMware lost a significant amount of people in PR and AR departments.

The first one is Melinda Marks, former Senior PR Manager, who left the company in October 2009, after 6 years in VMware.

Marks was one of the key interfaces with the press world and one of the early developers of the VMware’s Global Customer Reference program.
She now has a role as Director of Communications at Qualys, the security vendor that also hired Robert Dell’Immagine, former Director of Community Program at VMware.

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Microsoft has a free hypervisor: Hyper-V.
Citrix too (and it’s open source now): XenServer.

Microsoft has a virtualization management console: System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
Citrix too: Essentials for XenServer.

Microsoft has a VDI connection broker:  Remote Desktop Connection Broker.
Citrix too: Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC, part of XenDesktop 4).

Microsoft has an application and streaming virtualization platform: App-V (acquired by Softricity in 2006).
Citrix too: Application Isolation Environment (AIE, part of XenApp 6).

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Dave Convery, VMware vExpert and Virtualization Architect at Anexinet, published a short but very interesting report on current limitations of vShield Zones, the firewall that VMware acquired from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008 and that offers for free as part of vSphere 4.0 Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

He specifically mentions three shortcomings related to:

• Networking
  …there is an unprotected Port Group (ORIGINAL Network). This needs to be added to the vSwitch AFTER the vShield Agent is installed. If the ORIGINAL Network is already a part of the vSwitch, it will need to be removed BEFORE installing the vShield Agent. In order to avoid an outage, you will need to disable DRS and manually vMotion all VMs off of the ESX/ESXi host before installing the vShield Agent and modifying the port groups.

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