History

A few Microsoft customers know that the company is offering a patch management solution for offline virtual machines since July 2008.
The tool is called Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (OVMST) and uses PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).

Despite the importance of this product, which is released for free, so far Microsoft spent minimal effort in developing and promoting it.
Version 2.0 was released exactly one year ago. And today OVMST only reaches version 2.1, introducing support for the R2 wave of products.
This includes Hyper-V R2 (released in July for partners, in October for public), SCVMM 2008 R2 (released in August), SCCM 2007 SP2, WSUS 3.0 SP2, and Windows 7/2008 R2 guest OSes.

It’s very concerning to see that Microsoft doesn’t recognize the security of virtual data centers as a top priority.
The company should do much better that this to build confidence in its upcoming Azure-based private cloud offering.

Last week VMware announced the availability of Fusion 3.0.1 (build 215242). 
While it seems just a minor update, it introduces a couple of key improvements.

First of all, the Windows virtual machines gain now from 20% to 80% better performance on Mac OS X 10.6 (codename Snow Leopard) for 3D and video tasks.
It seems that part of the slowdown experienced with Fusion 3.0 on Mac OS X depends on the VMware Tools which are now improved.

Additionally, Fusion 3.0.1 introduces a brand new 64bit networking stack, which was not available when VMware launched the Fusion 3.0 64bit engine.

Finally, the new product supports Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (codename Karmic Koala) as guest OS and Parallels Desktop 5.0 virtual machines for importing.

With a surprising move Microsoft today announced the acquisition of Sentillion, the US startup that launched in summer 2006 the virtualization product called vThere.

The company’s press announcement doesn’t mention at all vThere, solely focusing on the startup presence in the healthcare industry and its solution there.

vThere is what we call here at virtualization.info a platform wrapper. It’s a piece of software that integrates with a hosted virtualization platform and wraps its virtual machines in a security layer.
The wrapper enforces corporate policies defined by the administrator like the VM expiration date, the encryption of the virtual hard drive, the capability to join certain networks, etc. 

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Red Hat embraced hardware virtualization a long time ago by adopting Xen as part of its Enterprise Linux operating system.
Despite that the company never penetrated the market enough to become a serious competitor for VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.
In the attempt to increase its chances to become a key player in the virtualization space, Red Hat is making some courageous choices.

First, it replaced Xen with KVM, becoming the first major vendor to sell and support this relatively new platform inside enterprise (IBM supports KVM too, but just for VDI and just for a very specific software stack).

Now, right before launching its VDI offering, Red Hat has open sourced the SPICE remote desktop protocol, acquired from Qumranet in September 2008. And this is a major step, one of the few that could make a difference.

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Microsoft is definitively preparing to launch Azure as an alternative to Amazon EC2, the RackSpace Cloud, both based on Xen, and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offerings based on VMware vSphere.

virtualization.info spotted some early signs at the end of September, and the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie briefly confirmed the plan a couple of weeks ago.
NetApp seems to be involved too at some level.

Another hint about what the IaaS cloud strategy will be arrives as an official announcement released a couple of days ago: the Windows Azure group and the Windows Server & Solutions group are now merged into a new Server & Cloud Division (SCD), which is part of the Server & Tools Business organization led by Bob Muglia.

In details:

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On November 23 VMware released the first updated for its vSphere 4.0 platform. The patch is especially important if the customers are implementing or evaluating VDI because it introduces support for View 4.0, and for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 guest OSes.

Update 1 also introduced a Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool to recognize configuration issues and minimize the downtime during the upgrade.
Unfortunately it seems that the patch itself causes downtime and VMware had to re-release it the portion for ESX today:

We’ve released a new version of ESX 4.0 Update 1 that resolves the issue with the ESX 4.0 Update 1 install failing, timing out and resulting in the host entering an usable state.

The new version is called ESX 4.0 Update 1A.

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Yesterday Novell announced the future launch of two new products with the PlateSpin brand.

The first one, codename Atlantic, will be a self-service provisioning portal, while the second, codename Bluestar, will be a configuration management and monitoring solution.

Novell also plans to release another product, part of the ZENworks portfolio (which has been merged with the PlateSpin one twelve months ago), codenamed Workbench, a master repository and change/control system for workloads, from which they can be deployed on-demand to any environment.

With this move Novell is going to have a remarkable number of new competitors, considering the amount of startups and leading players that already saturate these segments.

If your major partner becomes your major competitor then its major competitor becomes your major partner. This is what VKernel must be thinking since the launch of VMware CapacityIQ.

Just two weeks ago the startup first released a free product called Capacity Modeler to attract more potential customers and show them the (claimed) superiority over CapacityIQ.
Now the company announces a new beta for its flagship Capacity Analyzer, stressing that it supports Microsoft Hyper-V. VKernel also clarifies that its other products will support Hyper-V as well.

It is not that the current strategy is turning VMware into a less independent vendor. It is that the current strategy is turning the VMware partners into a less dependent ecosystem.

A couple of months after releasing the whitepaper Designing an Enterprise XenDesktop Solution (for 10,000 VDI seats), which was focused on version 3.0, Citrix is back with another interesting document, this time on version XenDesktop 4.0.

This one, titled High Availability for Desktop Virtualization – Reference Architecture, is an architectural blueprint to build an end-to-end environment that is fault tolerant at several levels: at the virtual desktop hosting platform (aka the hypervisor) one, at the guest operating system delivery one and at the application/user environment delivery one.

The architecture involves the use of technologies like NetScaler, XenDesktop Roaming Users and XenServer Pools and XenMotion.

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In early October VMware released Site Recovery Manager 4.0 (it should be 2.0 actually, but the marketing aligned the numbering to vSphere 4.0).

On this new product the company recently published a 20-pages performance study called VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 Performance and Best Practices for Performance.

The paper details how the recovery time is impacted by different storage backend technologies, network latency, amount of protected VMs, recovery plan configuration and more.