History

Quoting from the PHD Technologies official announcement:

…

PHD has also announced that esXpress v3.1 has entered final beta and will available July 1. In addition to the ability to backup templates, this version will include our popular Auto/Mass Restoration feature that allows administrators to restore an entire datacenter quickly and easily. This feature also allows for scheduled replication to a disaster recovery site allowing for a continuous warm standby datacenter.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

For June 6 (near Copenhagen, Denmark) Magirus Nordic arranged first edition of Virtual Day conference for nordic countries.

I’ll perform the event keynote talking about current situation of virtualization market, challenges virtualization customers and vendors are called to address, and future trends. If you are a virtualization.info reader I hope to see you there.

Check the agenda here (PDF) and register for the event here.

(to see other events where I’ll have a lecture check my speaking schedule)

Mass High Tech reveals US company Quest Software, already controlling a very popular virtualization vendor, vizioncore, is extending its influence on the market acquiring another startup: Invirtus.

Invirtus entered the virtualization space with a shrinker for virtual hard drives, but recently extended its action in the P2V migration segment, with Enterprise VM Converter, competing against PlateSpin, LeoStream and VMware itself.

At the moment of writing nor Quest neither Inviruts released any official announcement about the agreement.

Massimiliano Daneri, famous on the virtualization scene for its free high-availability script, VMBK, working with VMware ESX Server, launches today a new tool: VMTS Patch Manager.

VMTS Patch Manager addresses a critical need for VMware customers, allowing automatic (or manual) patching of ESX Servers platforms.

This first version, only for Windows platforms (including 2003, XP and Vista), is already full of great capabilities, like integration with VMware VirtualCenter and support for Microsoft Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS).

Download it here.

Handling patch management on ESX Server is a complex tasl customers are waiting VMware to address in upcoming versions of the product (possibly a 3.1). Meanwhile other virtualization experts are working on similar toos, like Mightycare ones with their esxPatcher.

On end of May Google silently acquired application virtualization startup GreenBorder.

GreenBorder uses application virtualization for security containment of desktop software like browsers, email clients, rich-media players, archivers, etc.

Despite Google doesn’t reveal in which form will integrate GreenBorder in its offering, it’s very probable the product will be available for free, following a strategy already applied for previous acquisitions like Picasa and SketchUp.

This would put in serious troubles another application virtualization startup using same approach, TrustWare, which got some attention in the security industry with the launch of its BufferZone last year. But depending on how flexible Google will make GreenBorder platform this acquisition may translate in competition against Microsoft, Citrix, and all other application virtualization providers as well.

GreenBorder has been included in the virtualization.info Industry Radar, while Google will not be included until a formal product launch.

After reaching a deal with Microsoft (because of Softricity acquisition) and Citrix (because of Ardence acquisition) in March 2006, Tadpole Technology and its subsidiary Endeavors Technologies, owning Stream Theory patents, now closed an agreement with AppStream as well.

Quoting from the official announcement:

Endeavors Technologies Inc. today announced a broad settlement with AppStream, Inc. ending all legal disputes between Stream Theory and AppStream. Stream Theory, now part of Endeavors, was granted the earliest established application streaming patents, initially filed in 1996, and pre-dating patents filed by AppStream. AppStream was also granted early patents. As the two pioneers of application streaming, the settlement allows both companies to focus their expertise on this rapidly emerging market and continue to develop industry leading technologies…

Tadpole Technology doesn’t seem interested in relaunching Stream Theory brand on the market, since Endeavors Technologies website only exposes an information request form (probably for licensing opportunities).

Virtual Iron continues its tightly release schedule launching version 3.7.

This new edition introduces supports for a new kind of storage unit: logical disks. Beside traditional virtual disks and raw SAN LUNs, now Virtual Iron allows virtual machines storage in phisical disks portions called logical disks.

This new segmentation provides benefits of raw LUNs (like shared access from multiple VMs or cloning capability) and flexibility of virtual disks (like support for iSCSI, FC and local disks).

Download the free edition or the enterprise trial here.

The virtualization.info Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Fedora Linux distribution is slowly integrating virtualization as basic OS capability.

In Fedora Core 5 Red Hat initially integrated Xen hypervisor, followed by a basic GUI for it in Fedora Core 6: virt-manager. Now new version 7 includes Linux kernel 2.6.21 and then offers out-of-the-box its second virtualization platform: KVM.

Integration of kernel 2.6.21 also implies Fedora 7 sports paravirt-ops framework and VMware VMI interface. This means new VMware Workstation 6.0 should be able to run it as a para-virtualized guest (with a major performance boost).

Last but not least Fedora 7 updated embedded Xen package to new version 3.1 (formerly 3.0.5).

Read full release notes about virtualization packages here or download the distribution here.

Making a strong acceleration in its beta program scheduling, Parallels jumps public betas for new Desktop 3.0 and directly launches first Release Candidate.

After introducing the display mode called Coherence in previous releases, Parallels reaches another level in Mac-Windows desktops integration with new SmartSelect, capable of assigning a default application (on host or guests) to any file on both systems. In this way users can don’t even need to drag & drop files from one system to another, completely forgiving they are running a virtual machine.

Parallels Desktop 3.0 also introduces snapshots, already used in competitive products like VMware Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC, or offline virtual disk access with new Parallels Explorer utility.

Parallels also claims capability to run 3D graphics inside virtual machines through existing hardware cards on host system, even if they doesn’t provide further details.

Enroll for this release candidate here.

It’s evident Parallels will launch Desktop 3.0 RTM for Apple WWDC conference later this month, consolidating its dominance on Mac virtualization market much earlier VMware can become a serious threat with its upcoming Fusion.

New beta of popular WinImage disk utility introduces support for VMware virtual disk format: VMDK.

This way on both FAT and NTFS partitions you’ll be able to copy files from the VMDK file to host hard disk, while FAT partitions will also be able to receive files coming from host hard drive.

Gilles Vollant introduced similar support for Microsoft virtual disk format, VHD, at end of 2005 with WinImage 8.0.

Enroll for the beta here.