History

Almost seven months after the launch of a public beta program, Microsoft finally released App-V 4.6 as part of the Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2010.

The new application virtualization platform introduces support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (including 64bit editions), as well as the upcoming Office 2010.

The last point is particularly important because the new virtualized version of Office 2010, dubbed Click-To-Run, depends on this version of App-V.

App-V 4.6 also introduces a new feature called Read-Only Cache Mode, which is particularly useful in VDI environments. Ruben Spruijt offered a detailed analysis of the feature:

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With an email to its VI and vSphere customers last week VMware announced the end of life (EOL) for its Consolidated Backup (VCB) framework.

The company informs that the next version of vSphere, due later this year, will not support VCB and will solely rely on the new vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) introduced with vSphere 4.0.

VCB binaries will be still available and supported on VI 3.x and vSphere 4.0 according to the support policy, but they will not be included in the new platform.

VMware is saying its Data Recovery product already supports VADP, and that most partners focused on backup/restore already support it too (if you are one of those vendors feel free to list your product in the comments).
VMware also promises that more vendors will offer VADP-based solutions in time for the next vSphere release.

During its annual Summit (see virtualization.info live coverage here) Parallels announced the upcoming availability of Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition (PSfMBME ???).

The name is a little confusing: PFfMBME is a type-1 hypervisor which doesn’t need any host operating system to run.
So the “for Mac” in the title just means that this specific version of the product supports Apple Xserve hardware, and thus allows customers to run Mac OS X Server virtual machines.

Parallels offers a version of this hypervisor that supports other enterprise class x86/x64 hardware since October 2009 but of course the Apple EULA prohibits to run Mac OS X Server guest OSes on it.

Both versions share the same engine and so offer the same capabilities:

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The Novell increased focus on KVM didn’t pass unnoticed.
Several news outlets suggested that this may the first step before Novell abandons Xen, following the Red Hat path, which will ultimately turn into the end of Xen as a community-driven open source hypervisor.

The whole idea is not useful to Citrix, which wants as many partners as possible on its side to validate Xen, and certainly it’s not useful to Novell, which needs to avoid that customers start looking elsewhere (read VMware, Citrix, Oracle).

So while Citrix helped to explain why KVM makes sense in some cases but it’s not a full Xen replacement, Novell somehow clarified its intention to support both virtualization platforms.

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A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced a new partnership with Novell on virtualization.

The deal includes two parts.
The first one is focused on providing joint technical support to those customers that run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a XenServer guest OS.
The second one grants the use of Platespin Recon for Citrix and its Solutions Advisors partners.

While Novell could be considered a Citrix competitor because of its implementation of Xen, the reality is that, at the moment, Citrix has no interest in competing with anybody at the hypervisor layer.
The Citrix strategy is focused on placing XenDesktop on top of every possible hypervisor. And this includes ESX, Hyper-V and of course as many Xen flavors as possible.
So the Novell version of Xen is just an additional opportunity to sell VDI for Citrix.

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Now that both Virtual Iron and Sun acquisitions are complete, Oracle owns three hypervisors, a couple of virtualization-friendly enterprise management consoles and a connection broker.
What the company is missing is everything else around the hypervisor, from capacity planning to VMs backup.

Oracle may decide to own the missing pieces, trying to rival the impressive VMware portfolio, or work to build a reach ecosystem, trying to convince several third parties to become virtualization partners. And while it’s true that the VMware aggressive expansion is pushing its partners in new directions, most vendors are mostly looking for deals with Microsoft or Citrix.

For these firms, focusing the limited R&D resources on Oracle VM is a risky move considering its scarce adoption after more than two years on the market.
At the same time anyway, there are two big opportunities in embracing the Oracle way: first of all, the early partners get as many deals as they can without competition; secondarily, if their success is remarkable, Oracle may always consider an acquisition.

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This week virtualization.info is following – for the first time – the Parallels annual Summit that takes place at the lovely Fontainebleau in Miami Beach.

Easy to guess, the leitmotif of this edition is cloud computing, pretty much like everywhere else in the Industry.
Parallels doesn’t specifically use the term to mean virtualization-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), even if it’s a virtualization vendor, but rather as an umbrella that has a major focus on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Serguei Beloussov, Parallels Chairman and CEO, is on stage.

Parallels Summit primarily is a conference for partners, and Beloussov doesn’t waste any time to say that cloud computing is an opportunity for profit when you address SMBs.
To Parallels a typical Small Business is a firm that only has part-time employees or a very small number (like 50), without IT staff or capability to plan, deploy and administer a computer infrastructure.

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Just in case the entrance in the server market and the alliance with EMC and VMware were not clear enough, Cisco decided to clarify even better that taking over HP market share is the primary goal:

And it’s not a secret that EMC and HP compete in the enterprise storage space.
The only problem is that HP is one of the strongest VMware partners today.
The two could move from partnership to fair “co-opetition”, as the Industry likes to call it today, but for how much time?

TechTarget just published an article about the upcoming VMware View 4.5, expected later this year (virtualization.info heard unconfirmed rumors about this summer).

The most interesting part of that piece is that ThinApp will be released as part of it, and that it will support server-side applications.

So far no company except the US startup AppZero (formerly Trigence) has claimed capability to virtualize multi-tier, mission critical server workloads through application virtualization technologies.
Besides AppZero, the only other company that is known for working in this area is Microsoft, which disclosed its plan for a server-side version of App-V in January 2008 and showed a first demo in May 2009 at its MMS conference.
So far Microsoft didn’t disclose any release date for such version of App-V.

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Exactly one year ago two well-known virtualization experts Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants) released an independent, non-sponsored performance analysis comparing ESX 3.5, XenServer 5.0 and Hyper-V 2008.

The benchmark, specifically designed to measure desktop virtualization workloads (served by Terminal Services and VDI platforms), was so valid that Citrix decided to embrace the Virtual Reality Check methodology to measure XenDesktop 4 performance.

Twelve months later the two are back with a new comparison. This time they put side by side Citrix XenServer 5.5, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1, comparing them against their new workload simulator Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) 2.0.

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