History

VMware’s activity on competition is intensifying in this period of the year: after last month’s comments on Citrix HDX performance and Essentials for Hyper-V sales volume, as well as the cost of managing Hyper-V, they focuses on Microsoft hypervisor’s stability.

Eric Gray, Senior Engineer on the VMware Competitive Team, writes on the topic on its personal blog vCritical, suggesting that ESX has a critical advantage over Hyper-V (and Xen and KVM) because Microsoft relies on 3rd party general-purpose drivers while VMware offers hardened, stress-tested drivers — ready for your toughest enterprise workloads.

Gray mentions a presentation performed by the Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, who confirmed that Windows crashes largely depend (70%) by 3rd party driver code (while Microsoft code is responsible only 5% of times).

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BrianMadden.com recently published an extensive review of the VDI platform based on KVM that Virtual Bridges offers since December 2009: VERDE 3.0.

Some key points of the review:

• Almost 100% command line oriented (version 4.0, expected for April, will introduce a server management GUI).
• Supported protocols are RDP and Virtual Bridges implementation of RFB (used by VNC).
  VERDE’s RFB is pretty fast, Virtual Bridges claims it is superior to RDP 5.
  The open source version of Red Hat SPICE protocol is unusable, will be adopted in future if possible.

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Microsoft recently launched a new, free TechNet Virtual Lab where customers can install and try Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 with Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2.

Users will work through the steps to simulate deploying multiple virtual desktops, and will first capture a reference image using the Citrix Provisioning Server for Desktops. Next, the user will verify that the computer can be booted from a diskless client computer. The user will create multiple virtual machines using the reference computer as a template. Finally, the user will use the Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to create a group of virtual desktops and deploy them to end devices. At the end of this lab, the user will have worked through all the steps required to implement Citrix XenDesktop using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.

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Secure Network is an Italian consulting firm focuses on network and application security assessment.
One of its partners, Claudio Criscione, is a long time columnist here at virtualization.info.

Secure Network is working on the first security assessment toolkit for virtual infrastructures, VASTO, and Criscione announced today the public beta at the Troopers conference.

VASTO comes as a set of components for Metasploit, one of the most popular frameworks for penetration testing in the security industry.
The framework consists of tools, libraries, modules, and user interfaces. The basic function of the framework is a module launcher, allowing the user to configure an exploit module and launch it at a target system. If the exploit succeeds, the payload is executed on the target and the user is provided with a shell to interact with the payload. Hundreds of exploits and dozens of payload options are available.

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In December 2009 Microsoft acquired the run-book automation firm Opalis Software.
At that time the company anticipated that Opalis technology would be integrated in the System Center product family and that it would become the automation layer for Hyper-V and Azure virtualization.

Today Microsoft offers additional details about when the integration with happen: integrations packs for UNIX, Red Hat RHEL and Novell SLES Linux will be released in Q2 2010, while integration packs for Service Manager 2010, Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2, Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 will appear in Q3 2010.

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Now that VMware owns a technology that is far away from its primary business, the Spring Java framework and a couple of application servers, one of its primary challenges is building awareness among its customers.

To do so, the company is offering complimentary and perpetual licenses (2 CPUs) of its Tomcat application server called tc Server to any customer buying other VMware products, including vSphere and View.

VMware is not offering the existing editions of tc Server but a new one that integrates with the Spring framework and supports Spring applications.

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While Hyper9 continues to build features on top of its search engine for virtual infrastructures, it also keeps R&D resources busy on parallel projects.

The last one, released a few days ago, is SimDK, an open source tool able to simulate the vSphere behavior.
Users can connect to the SimDK service with VMware clients, like the PowerCLI or the standard vSphere Client.
It’s primarily aimed at developers that want to do QA and testing, verify APIs compatibility or perform load and scalability testing, but it can be used to test, for example, 3rd party scripting tools like the Quest/Vizioncore Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI).

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A new US startup entered the virtualization market in mid-February: Virsto.

Founded in 2007 and sustained by a $8.5M investment led by August Capital and Canaan Partners, the company is managed by Mark Davis, former CEO of Creekpath Systems (acquired by Opsware, which was then acquired by HP). Davis also served as Vice President of Marketing at Monosphere, acquired by Quest.

Davis is leading an interesting team of managers and advisors, which includes the co-founder and CTO Alex Miroshnichenko (former CTO at Acronis), the co-founder and Vice President of Engineering Serge Pashenkov (former Senior Director of Software Development at PowerFile and Veritas – acquired by Symantec), the Vice President of Sales Rafael Santini (former VP of Worldwide OEM Sales at XenSource – acquired by Citrix), and the advisors Frank Artale (current Vice President of Business Development at Citrix), James Phillips (co-founder and former CEO of Akimbi – acquired by VMware) and Shaw Chuang (former R&D Executive at VMware).

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At the beginning of 2010 the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) published the first revision of the OVF standard, released for the first time in February 2009.

OVF 1.1 includes some clarification and new components:

• Capability for file system-based images to increase flexibility at deployment time
• A property attribute to hide password values at the user interface
• Joliet extensions for ISO transport image

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Almost one month ago, immediately after the VMware Partner Exchange conference, TechTarget published a scoop about some new features that may appear in the upcoming version of vSphere, expected later this year.

The list includes:

• Transparent Memory Compression
  This will avoid swap when RAM is overcommited by compressing a set of target pages to a special region. VMware measured the latency of this technique as a hundred times better than the latency of swapping on rotating disks. 
• IO-Resource Manager (IO-RM)
  This will allow the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to assign shares based on disk performance. The more shares a virtual machine will have, the higher priority it will get in accessing a shared VMFS volume.

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