History

Thincomputing.net discovered a new, unannounced product appeared on the official website: the Citrix Desktop Server.

Citrix has silently launched a new product page with a product called Citrix Desktop Server. All though there is very little information on the web page, an educated guess would be that this is the first real product in the whole Citrix VDI Dynamic Desktop Initiative.

The first step Citrix made into this space was of course the Citrix Remote Desktop Broker. This looked like kind of a “hasty” solution just so Citrix could step into the VDI hype. One of the drawbacks of the Remote Desktop broker is that it is a double-hop solution: RDP through ICA.

The next step was an announcement of a project called PortICA, which is a the more mature product, which will it’s the successor of the Remote Desktop Broker. One of the main features is that it brings the ICA protocol to Windows XP (and Vista). This eliminates the double-hop problem that the Remote Desktop Broker imposes.

This PortICA product will probably be one of the core components of Citrix Desktop server. What will undoubtedly also be a part of Citrix Desktop Server is some of Virtual Desktop-provisioning software, so that (pools of) VMs can be dynamicly managed. Think creation, deletion, suspending here. What they also clearly have big plans for is Citrix Edgesight. This will probably also be a part of Citrix Desktop server…

Read the whole article at source.

The name is hilariously confusing: is it a desktop or is it a server…?

Quoting from the QLogic official announcement:

QLogic Corp., a leading supplier of iSCSI host bus adapters (HBAs), today announced that its SANblade(r) 4050 Series iSCSI HBAs are the first in the industry to support VMware Infrastructure 3.

QLogic SANblade QLA4050 iSCSI HBAs offer high performance, low CPU utilization, and server connectivity directly to iSCSI storage or to iSCSI storage through an Ethernet network. These 1Gbps iSCSI-to-PCI-X HBA solutions offer several key features and benefits including:

• Offloading iSCSI + TCP/IP Processing
  SANblade iSCSI HBAs provide access to a high performance iSCSI SAN without sacrificing server performance. Interrupts, CPU utilization, memory bus utilization and host bus access associated with iSCSI and TCP/IP are significantly reduced by offloading the tasks onto the SANblade iSCSI adapter. With iSCSI offload engines, fewer servers are required to maintain application performance. Server CPU utilization testing with typical applications and current servers demonstrates that QLogic SANblade iSCSI HBAs can save 30 percent or more of the server CPU. This can be a 100 percent improvement over software initiator implementations. Recent testing by Network Computing’s Storage Pipeline magazine shows less than three percent CPU utilization by QLogic iSCSI HBAs for large block tests.
• Broad Platform Support
  Realizing the cost and ease-of-use benefits of iSCSI HBA standardization requires drivers for multiple operating systems. Drivers for popular operating systems are available for the QLogic iSCSI HBAs including Windows, Solaris, Linux and VMware ESX Server.
• Boot from External Storage (SAN)
  Managing several operating system “boot images” is a complex and time-consuming task for system administrators. By consolidating operating systems on and booting servers from external storage, changing, adding and removing servers is easier and faster. The SANblade QLA4050 includes “boot-from-SAN” capability, enabling this cost and time saving strategy.

After announncing its support for VMware Infrastructure 3 in August 2006, now LeftHand Networks achieves official certification.

Quoting from the official announcement:

LeftHand Networks announced today that iSCSI SANs powered by SAN/iQ 6.6 and the HP ProLiant DL380 server have been certified with VMware ESX Server 3, a component of VMware Infrastructure 3, and are listed on the Storage / SAN Compatibility Guide for VMware ESX Server 3. This certification extends LeftHand’s commitment to technical industry standards, a key component of the company’s open iSCSI SAN leadership.

…

The breadth of SAN/iQ powered platforms include the HP ProLiant DL380 server, IBM System x3650, LeftHand NSM 260 and NSM 160. The first x86 server to be certified with SAN/iQ and VMware Infrastructure 3 is the HP ProLiant DL380 server…

This article was moved to the new section virtualization.info TechTalk.

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To enforce their new partnership Virtual Iron and DataCore arranged a new webcast for February 8th:

Virtual servers and virtual storage attack the same fundamental challenge – improving resource utilization and optimizing data center resources so that they can be readily deployed when and where they are needed. These solutions are especially powerful when are used in combination to create Virtual Infrastructure.

Virtual Iron and DataCore are delivering on this promise with enterprise-class virtual infrastructure management capabilities at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. This webcast will highlight the combined Virtual Iron and DataCore solution and how it enables users to drive down enterprise data center costs and create a more flexible and agile infrastructure that can respond to the needs of the business. The presenters will also demonstrate comprehensive capabilities for:

• Hot backup
• Rapid provisioning
• High availability with virtual servers and virtual storage
• Disaster recovery
• Automated capacity management

Register for the event here.

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software, today announced that DataCore Software’s SANmelody virtual storage solutions are now certified for use with Virtual Iron.

…

SANmelody software converts PC servers into cost-effective disk servers and virtual SANs. Their capacity appears as additional internal drives to disk-starved servers on LANs or SANs. Simple, low-cost networked storage combined with virtual infrastructure enables benefits such as no downtime maintenance, automatic capacity management, and business continuity without spare hardware…

VMware released a most wanted 22-pages paper about performance tips for ESX Server in following categories:

• CPU
• Memory
• Networking
• Storage
• Resource
• DRS
• Benchmarking

Read the whole whitepaper at source. Highly recommended.

Still in beta, the upcoming benchmarking methodology for virtualization platforms from VMware, VMmark, received some critics about requirements needed to perform measurements, leading the company to slightly change it.

Quoting from the VMware Performance Team blog:

…

We heard from almost everyone that the memory footprint of 7GB per tile should be reduced.

…

Looking at the trends in the mid-range space, the feedback makes sense. Many current two-socket, 4-core systems have only 8 DIMM slots. One would have to break the bank buying 4GB DIMMs to get 8GB/core and 4-core chips are arriving. Ultimately, I hope the hardware vendors add more memory slots to address this looming imbalance. But for now, if we are going to measure these types of systems, we’ll need to reduce the memory usage of VMmark.

…

Three of the workloads in a VMmark tile, the web, file, and standby servers, together consume only 1GB of memory. They are already pretty lean, so squeezing memory from them would have limited benefits. The remaining three workloads, the database, mail, and java servers, use 2GB each. Databases tend to like a large, well-tuned buffer cache. I’d rather leave that one alone since it is a fairly typical database size. That leaves the java and mail server VMs as candidates. If we cut both of those VMs down to 1GB each, the total memory footprint drops to 5GB. In this configuration, 3 tiles will fit into 16GB, which should max out a current 2-socket, dual-core system using the cheaper 2GB DIMMs while leaving plenty of headroom for quad-core with 4GB DIMMs…

Read the whole article at source.

A team of developers is working on a WinForms management tool for Microsoft Virtual server called Bliss, which aims to replace current web administration interface (depending on IIS) on Windows XP machines.

It doesn’t allow management of multiple running virtual machines, but it’s indeed interesting.

Download Bliss 1.0 release candidate 1 here.

Many virtualization.info readers are already familiar with the Virtualization Industry Roadmap launched in April 2006: it shows all product releases appearing in the virtualization market, including platforms, tools, operating systems featuring virtualization platforms and even CPU virtualization capabilities.
Some of them even founded a printed version in the VMware VMworld 2006 welcome bag, thanks to huge effort of virtualization.info sponsor vizioncore.

I had feedbacks it helped so far several IT managers recognizing best period to start a new project, virtualization professionals showing market maturity and evolution in roadshows and conference, vendors tracking competitors or their own release timeframe (yes, not joking).

Today virtualization.info relaunches its Virtualization Industry Roadmap, introducing a slightly new graphical appearence and a new layout:

• From now on every past year, starting from 2005, will have its own roadmap, while current year will be included in a biennium roadmap as soon as new products are scheduled for next year (it will be interesting to see how yearly maps will get more and more crowded)
• Roadmaps are now published on a dedicated virtualization.info area, which has a dedicated RSS feed (to better track new additions and chances)
• The printing format is now based on standard A4 sheet (portrait mode without borders), horizontally extend by multiples when needed (2006 roadmap is 2xA4, 2007-2008 roadmap will likely be 3xA4 or more)
• Tracked products are now limited to virtualization platforms (upper side / dark blue) and virtualization products (lower side / dark grey), with usual label orientation (towards left: past products / towards right: future products)
• Past releases are no more ordered by exact day, but just month (this greatly simplifies elements arrangement)

While some of this changes reduced available details, overall aspect should be improved, still providing useful informations. If not, any feedback and suggestion will be welcomed as usual.

Enjoy the new virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap!