History

One of the biggest limitation of Virtual Server 2005 was the impossibility to backup the running virtual machines with NTBackup.

When Microsoft moved to Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V this limitation was finally removed, but the capability is not exactly out of the box.

To achieve the goal customers must manually create some new keys in the Windows Registry so that the Hyper-V Volume Shadow Service (VSS) writer can interact with the new Windows Server Backup (WSB).

The configuration also has some serious limitations:

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Did you see the new VMware video about vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and would like to try it firsthand?
You only have three choices:

• Configure your own lab
• Rent the proper enterprise equipment at our own virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab
• Setup the whole thing in a consumer box

The last scenario may sound a little hard to realize (and certainly not the best one for some serious evaluation) but it can be done: VMware published an official 20-pages guide describing all the steps to configure a two-sites environment with SRM in a single consumer box.

To achieve the (magic) goal VMware suggests to use a 64-bit laptop with Intel VT and at least 3GB RAM, VMware Workstation 6.5, LeftHand Network virtual SAN, and of course VI 3.5 plus SRM 1.0.

Richard Garsthagen, Senior Evangelist at VMware, just published a new video featuring a live demo of vCenter Site Recover Manager (SRM).

The video is 15 minutes long and really worth a look if you are not familiar with the new VMware disaster recovery solution.

You can see it on a new website that virtualization.info is building (still in very beta): www.virtualization.tv

As most readers know the European edition of VMworld, the hugely popular VMware conference, is set for February 24-26 in Cannes, France.

This year VMware is formally announcing a Call for Papers, looking for proposals in the following areas:

• Networking
• Security
• Storage
• Real World Stories from Customers
• Programming and Scripting
• Business Continuity
• Green Computing and Cost
• Automation

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SearchServerVirtualization.com is breaking the news today revealing that Citrix will release a management suite for Microsoft Hyper-V in Q1 2009.
The product, dubbed Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V (codename Encore), will bring in some most wanted features like the virtual machines live migration that Microsoft will be unable to deliver until Windows Server 2008 R2, somewhere in 2010.

Citrix continues to advertise the same strategy since the XenSource acquisition: deliver value on top of the Microsoft hypervisor as it did for Terminal Services in the last decade.
But with virtualization the situation is different: Citrix doesn’t have a solution that depends on a Microsoft product. Citrix has a complete virtualization stack that could totally replace Microsoft in a customer environment. So what’s the strategy for the overlapping components and features?

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In November 2007 Oracle decided to enter the virtualization market and announced its own platform: Oracle VM.
The product is based on the open source hypervisor Xen, it’s offered free of charge, and features an enterprise management console called Oracle VM Manager.

So far the product was mainly pushed to those customers that were virtualizing Oracle Database on other platforms (read VMware) so that many potential customers didn’t even notice its presence or didn’t take the offering too seriously.
But the reality is that the company bills Oracle VM as a general purpose hypervisor that supports for many different workloads.

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It’s not a secret that Vizioncore has been loyal to VMware for years. Since its first product launch the company never supported any hypervisor but ESX.
Several customers managing heterogeneous environments would love to have some Vizioncore products like vRanger running on additional hypervisors or even support cross-platform disaster recovery. But the company always kept its focus on VMware, trying to add value on top of the VMware solution.

The mission is getting harder and harder to accomplish as VMware continues to extend its product portfolio, practically touching every aspect of the virtual data center.

In the last twelve months Vizioncore slowly changed its go-to-market strategy, partially because it embedded Invirtus, a company that was focused on Microsoft technologies, partially because Quest, which is a strong Microsoft partner, completed its acquisition.

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In early September virtualization.info broke the news about the upcoming features expected with ESX 4.0 and vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 3.0.

Few days after VMware formally confirmed them presenting its new vCloud strategy at VMworld 2008.
Despite that, nor during the keynotes neither in the breakout session the name VMware Infrastructure (VI) 4.0 was mentioned.

The reason was that VMware is changing the bundle name pretty much like it changed almost every product name: VI 4 is now vSphere 4.0, as Jason Boche revealed on his personal blog.

This name seems to imply some clear changes in the product positioning, not necessarily related to the new cloud computing mission: the sphere is a 3D circle and the circle usually represents a 360 degrees solution.
VMware may be trying to say that vSphere is the core of the datacenter,  addressing all the challenges its management implies, in every possible direction, no matter if we are talking about servers, desktops or mobile devices.

XenoCode is a company founded in 2002 popular for its .NET code obfuscation technology.
In June it completely changed its focus entering the application virtualization market with a product called Virtual Application Studio 2008 (read virtualization.info coverage).
The move immediately raised some attention and XenoCode was able to close an OEM agreement with Novell just three months later.

Prepared at the speed of light, now the company unveils its next step: an enterprise management solution for its virtualized applications.

The product is dubbed Virtual Desktop but has nothing to do with the approach that we typically see in a VDI environment.
The XenoCode Virtual Desktop is a three-tier application that centrally manages multiple virtual applications through a service, a file server and a client.

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Veeam is definitively getting aggressive in driving away customers from Vizioncore.
For this holiday season the company releases a free version of its new Monitor 3.0 that works with VMware ESX and ESXi.

This edition has a remarkable number of features (for a free product), including support for multiple vCenters.
The full version of Veeam Monitor instead features additional capabilities including access to performance history, trend analysis and capacity planning, unlimited alarms and alarm modeling, and drill-down into a VM.

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