History

Exactly one year ago IBM and Virtual Bridges announced a partnership to resell an end-to-end desktop virtualization solution based on KVM.
That solution includes VERDE, a subset of the Virtual Bridges VDI connection broker (Win4VDI) that only supports Linux guest OSes.

Eight months later, Virtual Bridges completely replaced Win4VDI with VERDE 2.0, introduced support for Windows guest OSes, and added a lightweight Linux distribution which features KVM which customers can install on clients.

Today the company releases version 3.0, which introduces several new features like:

• Capability to replicate a virtual desktop gold image across WAN links
• Integration of VoIP capabilities (Skype) into the client-side KVM platform
• Support for Microsoft Windows 7 virtual desktops
• Support for Apple Mac hardware

In October Microsoft launched a new product called Windows XP Mode to help its customers to migrate to Windows 7 more easily.
Windows XP Mode is a preconfigured and fully patched copy of Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 that can be downloaded and executed inside the Virtual PC copy that comes with Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions.

This new version of Virtual PC sports the seamless window capability, allowing to run XP and 7 applications side by side without caring too much about which one is virtualized.
Unfortunately it requires a CPU which has the Intel VT-x extension enabled so not every Microsoft customer can use it. For example the ones that own a Sony VAIO can’t.

A new startup called VMLite is trying to address this issue, allowing Microsoft customers to run the Windows XP Mode VM inside a customized version of the Sun (soon to be Oracle) VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE).

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Chad Sakac, the Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, published today an extensive and informative article about the Virtual Compute Enviroment (VCE) coalition products called Vblocks.

Along with the fresh news about Acadia, this helps a lot to understand the big picture of how the virtualization ecosystem may change in the near future.

First of all, Sakac informs that the coalition is developing a formal certification process to properly recognize as Vblocks a group of core elements that VMware, Cisco and EMC recommend.
This is to avoid that Vblock-like solutions popup everywhere.

Secondarily, and most importantly, Sackac details some of the capabilities of the Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM), the management platform that EMC released to control the Vblocks as a whole:

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Not like we didn’t see this coming. Today Microsoft and NetApp announces a three-year alliance on virtualization, cloud computing and storage management.
The pact includes joint product development, technical integration, sales and marketing activities.

Finally the Hyper-V enterprise users will have a solid alternative to Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) for virtual machines live backup when using the Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) technology.

The two companies together will release architecture blueprints for disaster recovery with virtualization (like this one), snap-ins to manage the NetApp storage inside the Hyper-V console, management packs for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).
On top of this NetApp will work with the recently formed team that is working on the Microsoft Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, to be the storage partner of choice when Azure customers ask for private clouds solutions.

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Along with the announcement of the Virtual Compute Environment (VCE) coalition in November, Cisco and EMC also announced the creation of a joint venture called Acadia, which has the purpose to design the Vblocks products, operate them on behalf of the customers and transfer them from hosting partners to customers data centers if required.
VMware and Intel invested in this joint venture too.

So far there was no additional information about the company but the fact that it will start operating in 2010. Yesterday NetworkWorld provided a lot of details about the board of Acadia:

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In the November 2008 VMware unveiled a plan to bring the hypervisor to mobile phones. 
It announced its Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) project and the acquisition of Trango, one of the few startups working in this new market segment.

At the last two VMworld conferences (in Europe and US), the company showed a prototype (a Nokia N800 smartphone) that was able to switch between two different virtual machines, one running a personal environment, and one running the corporate environment. Each one with its own embedded operating system (Microsoft CE 6.0 and Google Android 1.x), each own with independent and isolated user profiles and data.

ComputerWorld is reporting that that prototype was only able to boot one VM at time, and that VMware now plans to run both VMs concurrently, but as far as we saw on stage the parallel execution was already there during the demonstration.
Anyway the article is interesting because it provides insight about the status of the project.

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Any customer interested in client virtualization knows that 2010 will be a critical year for VDI because a number of vendors, including leading players like Citrix and VMware, will begin to release their client hypervisors.

Thanks to the client hypervisors customers will be finally able to adopt server-based computing solutions without losing mobility and flexibility.

Citrix announced that it’s working with Intel on XenClient in January 2009. It was expected to be released before the end of the year, but it seems that it won’t come out before Q1 2010.
VMware too is working with Intel on its Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), which won’t appear before sometime during H1 2010.

Both client hypervisors seem to rely on the Intel vPro technology. And this may be a problem.

At the end of November the Japanese website PC Watch published several Intel documents detailing the company roadmap for its new processors Core i3, i5, i7 and the imminent i9.
One of those documents clarifies which CPUs versions will have vPro and which ones will not:

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In late October virtualization.info described how Fortisphere is slightly changing its go-to-market strategy, revamping its flagship product, now called Virtual Service Manager (VSM).

After just one month the company announces a new VSM feature called vRadar.

vRadar accesses the virtual infrastructure inventory that VSM offers and connects the elements in a logical map.

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A couple of days ago Microsoft published a video series about MED-V that potential customers may want to check out while waiting to understand what the company really plans to do with this product.

The series, which is not available online but can be downloaded here, includes 8 videos:

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There’s much interest around the new major release of Xen because of the rich roadmap that has been proposed and published this summer.

Now we community has a tentative release schedule: January/February 2010.

The news was given by Keir Fraser, Senior Architect at Citrix, during his speech at the Xen Summit in Asia just a few days ago.

Fraser also told that the Xen.org team plans to maintain two branches (3.4.x and 4.x) until the new one is mature enough for the switchover and that a new major release is planned every six-nine months.