virtualization.info

Ten days ago Microsoft announced the availability of its Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2009 R2.
As most readers know, this is a special bundle that the company offers to its enterprise customers (Volume License only), and only if they subscribe the Software Assurance (SA) service.

MDOP contains key components of the Microsoft virtualization offering, like the application virtualization platform App-V, acquired from Softricity in May 2006, and the security wrapper for Virtual PC MED-V, acquired from Kidaro in March 2008.

While none of the two technologies is as popular as the hypervisors, both are critical for the Microsoft long-term virtualization strategy.
App-V is specially important and Microsoft is silently working behind the scene to offer it inside servers, not just on desktops like today.

This new MDOP 2009 R2 only updates App-V 4.5 with the Service Pack 1, and the SP1 only introduces support for Windows 7 (which includes support for AppLocker, BranchCache and BitLocker ToGo features).
MED-V 1.0 won’t support Windows 7 before Q1 2010, and it seems that there will not be much more.

Microsoft seems far behind with MED-V. After the Kidaro acquisition, it took 13 months to release a rebranded version 1.0, and now it’s taking another 9-12 months just to release the first service pack.
And it’s worth to remember that the product still supports a hosted virtualization platform, Virtual PC, where Microsoft is not investing at all.

It’s acceptable that Microsoft doesn’t push too hard on App-V until the market is ready to adopt it on a large scale.
This way it has the time to focus on Hyper-V, the time to develop a stronger engine and to port it to the server side, the time to shape a meaningful marketing strategy, while Citrix is containing the VMware early attempts to invade the application virtualization market with ThinApp.

It’s less acceptable that Microsoft is not doing anything concrete with MED-V, which leverages hardware virtualization to secure the enterprise in an innovative way.
Microsoft doesn’t have a lead in the security space. And the perception that the security industry has about Microsoft didn’t improve too much over the years.
Securing the enterprise customers with virtualization is a unique opportunity that Microsoft is wasting, mostly considering that VMware couldn’t win this market with ACE.

Microsoft may be doing this because it doesn’t want to waste any time in developing something on top of an almost death platform like Virtual PC. But so far the company didn’t disclose any plan for the desktop virtualization space.
It may replace Virtual PC with a version of Hyper-V for desktops (which would become a really ubiquitous client hypervisor for VDI) or it may decide to seriously restart the investment on Virtual PC.

Customers have no idea and whatever will happen to this second class virtualization platform it will also impact MED-V.
How an enterprise can trust a non-leading vendor (like Microsoft in the security space) without a clear roadmap and a lethargic development lifecycle? Where’s the value for SA customers in having MED-V inside MDOP?

Labels: Microsoft, Platform Wrapper, Releases

Earlier this week VMware updated its entire desktop virtualization line, releasing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and Fusion 3.0

Beyond the support for Windows 7 and its Aero interface inside the virtual machine, Workstation 7.0 (build 203739) includes a number of remarkable features. For example:

• Autoprotect
  The product automatically takes snapshots of any virtual machine every half hour, every hour or every day
• Encryption
  The product encrypts any virtual machine with the AES 256-bit algorithm
• CPU release
  The product frees CPU resources instantaneously without powering off or suspending if the virtual machine is paused.
• Virtual disks manipulation
  The product can expand and compact a virtual disk (Windows 7/Vista only) without the use of any 3rd party product
• Virtual Hardware version 7
  Support for up to 4 vCPUs, up to 32GB vRAM, up to 10 vNICs
• Support for ESX 4.0
  customers can run VMware ESX 4 inside Workstation 7 as long as their physical hardware features an Intel EM64T CPU with VT-x or an AMD64 10H CPU (and later) with AMD-V, and as long as the virtual machine has assigned two or more CPU cores
• Support for IPv6

Player 3.0 (build 203739) shares with Workstation 7.0 the same engine, so many of the features above are also available here.
On top of that VMware introduce a fully featured virtual machine editor, which turns Player into a Workstation Light:

The last product of this wave is ACE 2.6 (build 203739).
There’s no much to say. Pretty much every feature is about the virtualization engine and not the policy engine, which fully integrated inside Workstation.
It’s not really clear what VMware is waiting for to kill the brand.

Labels: Releases, VMware

In June the new startup Liquidware Labs released the first rebranded version of the VMsight technology acquired in May: Stratusphere 4.2.
They are back this week with the first consistent update and easy to guess the new 4.5 version integrates the technology acquired from Entrigue Systems in September: ProfileUnity.

In details Stratusphere 4.5 introduces support for Citrix XenDesktop 4 and Microsoft Window 7, as well as the preliminary support for VMware View 4 (which still is in private beta).
On top of that the product sports several enhancements in the GUI, in the reports and in the correlation engine.

Anyway the most interesting thing of this release is that now Liquidware Labs allows users to download a trial version of the product.
The company always said that it’s specifically targeting Professional Services Organizations (PSOs), and most of the time this means that you don’t need to have (and promote) a freely downloadable trial.
If Liquidware Labs has just changed this it may mean that it’s also changing its marketing strategy.

Labels: LiquidWare Labs, Releases, VDI

Earlier this week VMware updated its entire desktop virtualization line, releasing Workstation 7.0, Player 3.0, ACE 2.6 and of course Fusion 3.0.

The new version of Fusion (build 204229) introduces a notable number of features, including:

• 64bit engine
• Virtual EFI (to replace the legacy virtual BIOS and grant full compatibility with Mac OS X)
• Embedded P2V migration tool (Migration Assistant for Windows)
• V2V migration from Microsoft VHD format
• Support for 4-way CPUs
• Support for Aero (Windows 7/Vista), OpenGL 2.1 (Windows XP) and DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3
• Support for Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit and 64bit, host and guest OS)

Labels: Releases, VMware

Three months after the launch of one of its newest products, vCenter Chargeback, VMware is ready for the first minor update.

The new version 1.0.1 (build 204097) fixes a number of bugs and introduces a few welcome features:

• Support for Windows Authentication
• Additional computing and billing policies
• APIs (technical preview)

Labels: Chargeback, Releases, VMware

Yesterday VMware released the first version of its new capacity planning product: vCenter CapacityIQ 1.0 (build 199314).

As the name suggests, the product performs capacity planning on virtual infrastructures, applying continuous what-if analysis to figure out the best arrangement for virtual machines in different scenarios.
It offers reporting and recommendations.

CapacityIQ is made of two components: a vCenter plug-in and a virtual appliance that collects data about the virtual infrastructure in a dedicated database.

The product is unable to automatically reconfigure the virtual infrastructure according to its own recommendations, which is probably fine for most customers.
Anyway some companies may find attractive the idea to review the recommendation and just approve them.

CapacityIQ price starts at $1,204 for 1 CPU plus 1 year of Gold support.

The choice to release the product now is strange. Originally announced in January, the version of CapacityIQ that VMware ships today doesn’t support vSphere 4, so customers that are interested in it already know that the adoption will oblige them to stick VI3.x still for some time.

With this product VMware introduces yet another front of competition (and friction) with its partners: Novell/PlateSpin, CiRBa, VKernel, Lanamark, newcomers like Liquidware Labs and 5ninee, indirect competitors like ManageIQ, Embotics and Fortisphere, may be, or will be, impacted over time.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Releases, VMware

Fortisphere is a US startup that launched in November 2007 with a $10M capital provided by venture firms Fairhaven Capital and Globespan Capital Partners.

The company positioned itself as a player in the almost empty VM lifecycle management market segment with the product Virtual Insight 1.0, that was released in January 2008.

In the subsequent months the company has been extremely active in forming alliances, like the one with VMware about VMsafe or the one with RSA, and joining strategic groups, like the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Vendor Alliance.
In terms of product development, it didn’t show a significant progress, changing the product name from Virtual Insight to Virtual Essentials Service Manager in September 2008.

This August Fortisphere replaced its original CEO Michael Harper with Siki Giunta, and started to wipe out everything of the past, including most previous press announcements.
Giunta come from Novell, where she was the Vice President of Strategic Business for 9 months, and from Managed Objects where she was President and CEO for 9 years.

The biggest change emerges today: Fortisphere changes again the product name (the word Essentials disappeared), restarts from version 1.0 and changes market segment.
The “new” Virtual Service Manager (VSM) is now primarily focused on capacity planning (perfect timing considering that VMware just released CapacityIQ 1.0).

The configuration management engine (heart of most VM lifecycle management products) is still there as far at it seems from the features listed in the press announcement, but Fortisphere is now clearly going elsewhere.
We’ll see if the company will have better lack in the increasingly crowded capacity planning space.

Labels: Fortisphere, Releases

Eight months after its previous major release, XenoCode is ready to launch its new application virtualization platform: Virtual Application Studio 2010.

This new edition seems more consistent than the previous one, introducing some must-have features and welcome additions:

• Capability to define expiration date (time bomb) on virtual applications
• Capability to create a single virtual application package for multiple target operating systems
• Capability to publish virtual applications online on the XenoCode content deliver network (CDN) Silver Spoon
• Support for Windows 7

XenoCode may be the first application virtualization vendor to support Windows 7 (if not, comments are welcome).

The web publishing feature is specially interesting, considering that it works also with Microsoft. NET, JAVA and Adobe AIR applications, without the need for users to have these frameworks installed.
To speed up the application launch over the Internet, Spoon automatically identifies a prefetch consisting of the components of the app which must be loaded in order for the user to start using the app. The prefetch is generally around 10% of the total app size, though this can vary considerably depending on the behavior of the specific app. Once the prefetch is transferred, the app launches immediately.

XenoCode is not yet a trusted Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing provider, and the amount of information the company shares about the Silver Spoon facility is too scarce to jump on the bandwagon.
But the price may be very attractive for some:

Labels: Releases, XenoCode

The startup 5nine is back with its third tool.
Launched in June, the company already released a capacity planning solution that includes a P2V migration tool and a firewall for virtual infrastructures.

The third product, currently in beta and scheduled for release later in Q4, is called Optimizer.

While P2V Planner performs what-if analysis and capacity planning on physical server that need to be converted in virtual machines, Optimizer does the same on already virtualized infrastructures.

It’s not clear why 5nine preferred to launch a separate tool rather than enrich P2V Planner with the Optimizer capabilities.
The physical to virtual capacity planning is something that non-enterprise customers do just a few times per year. Sometimes, in certain SMBs, this is done only once.
Optimizer may be used much more frequently than P2V Planner but it’s hard to believe that these customers would pay two times for the same engine.

Labels: 5nine, Capacity Planning, Releases

Last week Novell released version 3.7 of its capacity planning tool PlateSpin Recon.

This new version focuses much on storage (local disks as well as FC/iSCSI arrays), tracking its usage over time in physical and virtual machines.  
Even if the available documentation doesn’t clarify much about the new feature, the effort in this area is always welcome because of the strong investment in storage required to build a virtual infrastructure.

Recon 3.7 also introduces support for AIX workloads.
This is probably the only tool on the market able to analyze AIX machines and include them in the capacity plan.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Novell, PlateSpin, Releases

A couple of months after its first minor update, Vizioncore is ready to introduce Virtualization EcoShell 1.2.

The tool, used in conjunction with Quest PowerGUI, is a powerful environment to develop and execute complex scripts, so far just for VMware VI 3.5 and vSphere 4.0.

This new minor update, available in beta, introduces a major change, which clarifies once again how Vizioncore will slowly open its product portfolio to VMware competitors: the support for Hyper-V.

Specifically, Virtualization EcoShell 1.2 introduces a Hyper-V PowerPack, which allows administrators to manage individual Hyper-V installations using PowerShell.

Labels: Quest, Releases, Vizioncore

Oracle announces today the release of it hypervisor Oracle VM 2.2.

There are two major new features in this new build: the first is that it’s based on Xen 3.4, the second is that it introduces storage connection and provisioning APIs.

Xen 3.4 includes the base code that Citrix is using to develop its upcoming client hypervisor XenClient.
This means that Oracle is potentially able to do the same, which would make sense. 
A client hypervisor is mostly needed for offline VDI, and offline VDI is mostly needed for an end-to-end VDI strategy. Oracle could easily offer such end-to-end VDI strategy now that Sun kindly provided the connection broker and the thin clients.

The new storage APIs, accessible through the new Oracle Storage Connect Program, seem to provide functionalities similar to the ones that Citrix offers today with the XenServer StorageLink technology:

The Oracle VM Storage Connect framework enable Oracle VM Manager to directly leverage the resources and functionality of existing storage systems in the Oracle VM environment, supporting native storage services such as Logical Unit Number (LUN) creation, deletion, expansion, and snapshot. When a storage vendor enables the Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-in, their customers will be able to provision that vendor's storage through the Oracle VM Manager.

The list of vendors that joined this program is notable: AMD, Brocade, Chelsio Communications, Compellent, EMC, Emulex, FalconStor, Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, LSI, Mellanox Technologies, NEC, NetApp, Pillar Data Systems, QLogic,  Symantec and Voltaire.

Oracle VM 2.2 introduces additional new features like:

• maintenance mode for virtualization hosts
• vCPU Scheduling priorities and caps per VM
• capability to import VHD files (thus Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Virtual Iron virtual machines)
• support for Intel Xeon 5500 CPUs (codename Nehalem) and AMD sSx-Core Opteron CPUs (codename "Istanbul")

Labels: Oracle, Releases

After an endless saga started in 2005, Parallels is finally ready to ship its bare-metal hypervisor: Parallels Server 4.5 Bare Metal.

Compared to the hosted version of Parallels Server, launched in June 2008, this edition (which jumps from version 1.0 to 4.5) actually installs on bare metal like competing hypervisors VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle VM Server.

The hypervisor architecture is interesting and created a lot of confusion so far, to us and to other people that compare it to others type-1 VMM platforms:

The diagram above doesn’t really clarify if the product installs Virtuozzo (indicated with the label Container) inside the hypervisor’s primary partition, or if it simply creates a separate logical volume in the hard drive where it installs a Linux flavor with Virtuozzo on top. 

Anyway Parallels Server 4.5 Bare Metal supports:

• virtual machines with up to 12 vCPUs / up to 64GB vRAM / up to 2TB vHDDs  / up to 16 vNICs
• Intel VT and VT-d, FlexPriority and EPT
• AMD-V and Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI)
• 32 and 64 bit guest OSes (including all flavors of Windows, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu Linux, and even FreeBSD)
• USB 2.0
• virtual machines templates and snapshots
• virtual machines live backups (just Windows and Linux guests)
• cold Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) migration between Parallels Servers Bare Metal hosts (VM to VM, or even VM-to-container / container-to-VM) and hot V2V migration (only for containers)
• cold Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) migration from physical servers to virtual machines or containers
• a local management console and a Command Line Interface (CLI) for most tasks within a single host
• support for Parallels Virtual Automation (formerly Parallels Infrastructure Manager) for enterprise management

The price Parallels announced for this product seems to completely ignore that VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Oracle are all offering competing and well-known platforms completely for free:

The Advanced Edition may be interesting despite even at $1,500 per CPU because it bundles Virtuozzo, but Parallels decided to only offer the Linux version of it (and this may have something to do with the architecture described above).

We’ll see how well the market will receive this 5th hypervisor.

Labels: Parallels, Releases

Without any fanfare, at the beginning of September, Parallels released Virtuozzo Containers (formerly Virtuozzo) 4.5.

Version 4, launched in January, unified for the first time the Windows and Linux branches, introducing major new features like virtual SMP masking and support for Microsoft and Red Hat cluster services.

Version 4.5, which is built on this new architecture, brings in a wire range of new capabilities:

• Enhanced resource management (CPU pools, vCPUs remapping on logical CPUs, offline vHD fragmentation)
• Containers cloning
• Containers startup order
• Support for Windows Server 2008 (32/64bit, with or without Hyper-V, up to Service Pack 1) and its new Failover Clustering
• Support for Hyper-V (it’s not exactly clear if this just means that the Hyper-V parent partition can be segmented in containers, or something else)
• Support for TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) NICs inside the containers
• Support for new 3rd party backup and anti-virus solutions (including the ones provided by AVG, CA, EMC, IBM, McAfee, Symantec and F-Secure)
• Support for iSCSI inside the containers (a container can be an Initiator)
• Support for IPv6 addresses inside the containers

It’s not entirely clear why Parallels didn’t promote in any way what is still considered its flagship product.
It is true that the large majority of the attention is focused on hardware virtualization, but the company OS virtualization platform should still have a competitive advantage over VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors in the hosting industry, which is well worth some more marketing effort.

Labels: Parallels, Releases

A couple of months after the launch of the private beta, VMware released Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0 earlier this week.

As we already said in our previous coverage, this is not the 4th edition of the product but the 2nd.
VMware launched SRM 1.0 in June 2008, directly jumping to version 4.0 to explicit the support for vSphere 4.0.

Nonetheless the product is making a notable progress, supporting 12 vendors (a list of 11 is here) that offer fibre channel, iSCSI and NFS storage replication solutions, and supporting 3rd party virtual switches like the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

The most relevant new feature anyway is the support for Many-to-One Failover scenarios, where a single recovery site can receive virtual machines coming from multiple production sites.
Hopefully this is just the prelude to the Many-to-Many Failover that many customers are waiting for.

VMware published a nice walkthrough here.

The company also published three guides to configure SRM 4.0 with the EMC Celerra, with the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and with the NetApp FAS simulator.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Releases, VMware

Less than 10 months ago, Citrix released its own data center orchestration framework: Workflow Studio.

The future of virtualization (and cloud computing) depends on automation, so products like this are very welcome here at virtualization.info.
Unfortunately, for many customers, it’s not easy to recognize their value at today.
A company has to reach a critical mass of virtual machines before it can finally see the benefits of automating a large part of their lifecycle.

At the same time orchestration is often associated with scripting, which sounds like a complex procedure that only the most technical members of the staff can own, and that can be used only in very circumstantiated scenarios. 
Orchestration is much beyond scripting but virtualization vendors in general are not doing a great job in clarifying so, and so it’s still really hard to get the real potential of the technology.

Citrix, like VMware or Novell with their products, didn’t push much its Workflow Studio so far.
Even for the launch of Workflow Studio 2.0 the company isn’t really spending much effort to say what’s new:

• Native XenApp activity libraries (and many other additional activities)
• Remote runtimes
• Simplified management interface
• Enhanced security features
• Simplified installation and configuration
• Improved SDK
• Simplified workflow Designer
• Globalization support

What the above means? Let’s put aside the last six items. Are the first two anything that a non-scripting guy could understand?

Unless the vendors will start to reconsider the way they communicate the value and capabilities of their orchestration frameworks it’s very unlikely that a significant number of customers will get interested.

Labels: Citrix, Platform Orchestration, Releases

At the end of August VMware finally released its authoring product Studio 2.0, which virtualization.info covered at the end of July.

This new Studio introduces the support for vApps, the next incarnation of the VMware Virtual Appliances (VA), and a number of additional, welcome features:

• Support for vSphere 4.0 (including both ESX and ESXi hosts), Server and Workstation as provisioning engines.
• Support for OVF 1.0 and 0.9 formats
• Support for VA/vApp customization (logo, EULA, first-boot script and user management capabilities)
• Support for virtual machines (previously created with Studio) as input
• Support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (32/64 bit)
• Periodically publish critical updates to deployed VA/vApps through VMware Update Manager (VUM)
• Authored VA/vApps have an agent built on a Common Information Model (CIM) Broker and CIM Provider for guest OS management

Labels: Releases, Standards

Last week VMware released a bunch of updates for several products in its portfolio. Each build is primarily for bug fixing but View Manager 3.1.2 also introduces a new feature:

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Lifecycle Management, Releases, VDI, VMware

Reflex Systems (formerly Reflex Security) has been very active since its name change and strategy makeover in November 2008.

In March the company signed an OEM agreement with Dell and hired a new Vice President of Sales from ISS (which meanwhile was acquired by IBM), and in April secured its first round of funding for $8.5 million.

Just before the VMworld 2009 a couple of weeks ago, Reflex Systems launched the second release of its (new) flagship product: Virtualization Management Center (VMC).

VMC 2.0 introduces a significant number of new features:

• a new policy compliance enforcement engine (vTrust) - VMware VMsafe certified
• a new agentless software inventory engine
• support for Cisco Nexus 1000V (Reflex plans additional API-level integration for Q4 2009)
• a new Cloud API (which allows multi-tenant management of the controlled virtual infrastructure)

In may ways, with these new features Reflex Systems is going after ManageIQ and other VM lifecycle management vendors.
We’ll how easy will be for the newcomer to attract the interest of the (few) customers that are already looking at the competition.

It is also worth to note that the Reflex Systems previous product, the Virtual Security Appliance (VSA), is now completely disappeared from the website.

Labels: Platform Management, Reflex Systems, Releases

KACE is the very last company that entered the application virtualization market. It acquired Computers In Motion in September 2008 and released their rebranded technology this March as Virtual Kontainers.

Just before VMworld 2009 the company released Kontainers 2.0, which introduces some interesting features:

• a signature update service (customers can use it to inform KACE about new applications that don’t work properly in the virtual layer)
• the capability to patch/updated a virtual application without repackaging it
• a self-service provisioning web portal
• a command-line interface (CLI)

The first new feature is the most interesting.
KACE deserves credit for trying to solve one of the huge challenge in application virtualization adoption that 3rd party application support is. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter much how quick KACE is in supporting new applications inside Kontainers, for customers what really matters is the support that ISVs accept to guarantee for their applications inside Kontainers.

On top of that KACE has another problem: it doesn’t seem the company plans to release Kontainers as a stand-alone offering anytime soon.
The application virtualization platform is now part of the KACE’s flagship product, the KBOX management appliance, and this may severely limit its diffusion.
Customers need to have a simpler way to get the product if KACE wants a piece of the pie that Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Symantec and Novell (via XenoCode) are trying to eat.

Labels: KACE, Releases

The Canadian startup CiRBA recently released a new minor update for its capacity planning tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

The company is trying to simplify the use of its product, so DCI 5.2 ships with a number of new, pre-defined analysis templates tailored for consolidation in VMware infrastructures.
CiRBA will release additional templates during the next quarter to support Hyper-V and Xen hardware virtualization, as well as IBM AIX and Oracle/Sun Solaris OS virtualization solutions.

CiRBA is one of the many companies that revolves around VMware. But the once preferred partner is about to compete with them by releasing CapacityIQ, somewhere next year. 
So no surprises that CiRBA is now looking around for new opportunities.

Labels: Capacity Planning, CiRBA, Releases

After a couple of months of beta, Quest released the second minor update for its multi-platform connection broker vWorkspace 6.0.

The new build introduces several enhancements in multi-monitor, USB and graphic support, and a couple of new features:

• the integration with NetApp FlexClone technology (only for VMware VDI environments)
• the integration of vWorkspace Web Access portal with Microsoft SharePoint (experimental)

Labels: Provision Networks, Quest, Releases, VDI

In early September while most of the virtualization community was busy in San Francisco for the VMworld 2009, Red Hat was finally releasing the first piece of its new virtualization offering in Chicago at its Summit 2009.

The market expected the company to launch the new Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (RHEVH, a minimal version of RHEL plus KVM that could compete against VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V Server), and the new Enterprise Virtualization Managers (EVMs) for servers and desktops. But Red Hat only released RHEL 4.5.

In March the company announced that these new products would be released sequentially, starting mid 2009 and for next 18 months, but for now the general public knows nothing but a few technical details unofficially published by some a beta tester.

The ones that attended the Red Hat Summit in Chicago (or visited the Red Hat booth at VMworld) knows more. Luckily, Red Hat published some breakout sessions’ videos of the event, so we all can watch the ones related to virtualization:

Linux-KVM.com published an extensive synopsis of the first one above.
Here’s some points that are worth a highlight:

• Red Hat will support ISV software certified on RHEL whether it’s running on bare metal or running on the RHEL kvm or standalone kvm since it’s the same codebase.
• RHEV standalone kvm has a very small footprint of < 100mb in size which makes it easy to do things like pxe boot it.
• Hosts can scale host to 96 cores and 1TB RAM.
• Guests can scale up to 16vcpus and 256GB RAM.
• Supported Linux guests includes RHEL 3,4,5. Supported Windows drivers available for Windows XP, 2003 and 2008.
• NUMA, power management, memory page sharing (ksm) are some other important features. KSM important for density, very important and will be in product from day 1.
  Light workload VMs on a 48 core machine: 256 GB RAM could run more than 600 VMs.
• Testing results from internal and customers showed SAP workloads: 85-95% performance, Oracle OLTP: 80-92% bare metal. LAMP stack showed better than bare metal performance. Java achieved up to 94% bare metal.
• The management tools will be released in later half of 2009.
  Supports high availability by allowing VMs to automatically restart on other host when host having problems. Supports system scheduler at cluster level, live migration and power saver mode. There’s a maintenance manager that will automatically live migrate vms off servers during scheduled maintenance. Also includes monitoring and reporting tools.
  Support image management including templates and thin provisioning
  
  Note from virtualization.info: Red Hat published a video of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager on YouTube that we are featuring in the website sidebar and on virtualization.tv.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat, Releases

In March the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore started the execution of a new strategy to break free from its symbiosis with VMware.

So far the most important step of that execution has been the launch of a new product called vControl, a management console which supports multiple hypervisors and it’s ready for data center orchestration.

The first public version of vControl, released in May, introduced some interesting features and the broad support for VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors.

Anyway somebody at Vizioncore must have decided that the $399/socket pricing wasn’t aggressive enough, so, with a surprising move during the VMware’s VMworld 2009 conference, the company announced the release of the core features of vControl as freeware.

Basically Vizioncore is giving away for free the management console of vControl, while the $399/socket pricing is just applied to the automation engine.
In this way the company does exactly the opposite of VMware, which charges for the management console (vCenter) and offers the automation engine for free (vCenter Orchestrator).

vControl is just the beginning. Vizioncore also released for free vConverter Server Consolidation (SC) and vOptimizer WasteFinder.

Compared to the full version of vConverter, this SC edition doesn’t offer P2V/V2V incremental migration and live migrations (both considered the core feature for disaster recovery), but it still offers file or block-level cloning, parallel conversions, support for VMware RDM format and more. 
Additionally, like vControl, also vConverter SC supports ESX, XenServer and Hyper-V.

The last one, WasteFinder, is a subset of the vOptimizer Pro product, which only does two things: it scans the vCenter database to find allocated and wasted virtual storage and to find those virtual machines that are not aligned on 64K partition boundaries.
The key difference with the fully-featured product is that WasteFinder cannot actually reclaim the wasted space or realign the VMs after the first two operations.

Labels: Quest, Releases, Vizioncore

Finally, after a long time under the scenes, ManageIQ gives a sign of its presence and updates Enterprise Virtualization Manager (EVM) Suite.

The startup had more than one year to extend the already very good EVM Suite 2.0. The new 2.3 version introduce support for VMware vSphere 4.0:

• Agentless management of ESX 4 and 4i hosts
• Federation of VMware vCenter 4.0 and VirtualCenter 3.x
• Support for VMware VMsafe APIs in compliance enforcement
• Integration with VMware vCenter Orchestrator

This support allows ManageIQ to extend vSphere in a number of areas like self-service provisioning, virtual machines lifecycle management, capacity planning and chageback analysis.

virtualization.info had the opportunity to see this new release running live at VMworld 2009 and recognize its huge potential.
Unfortunately it is impossible to report on what we saw because of the complexity and vastness of EVM. Anyway we plan to release a full review in the coming months.

Labels: ManageIQ, Platform Management, Platform Orchestration, Releases

In June VMLogix announced the upcoming availability of a special version of its virtual lab automation product that could support Amazon EC2.

The product, dubbed LabManager Cloud Edition (CE), was released two weeks ago at VMworld 2009.

While the privacy and security concerns expressed in our previous coverage remain, it is true that VMLogix may be one of the first vendors to set the trend for the coming months: those customers that decide to embrace cloud computing may easily recognize the need for management consoles that extend the 3rd party IaaS architectures to achieve specific tasks such as virtual lab automation.

There are evident benefits:

The position of VMLogix as an acquisition target becomes more and more interesting.
Citrix, which already has an OEM agreement with them to distribute LabManager as part of Essential, for sure must be extremely pleased to see how VMLogix is proficient in manipulating Xen-based cloud computing facilities.

Labels: Amazon, Releases, Virtual Lab Automation, VMLogix, Xen

After no less than 2 years, Parallels finally updates its hosted virtualization platform for Windows and Linux.
Formerly known as Parallels Workstation, the product is now called Desktop for Windows & Linux and jumps from version 2.2 to 4.0.

The amount of new features introduced is remarkable and of course come from the Desktop for Mac product where Parallels focused most of its R&D effort in the last years.
Here’s a list of the most significant improvements:

• Support for 64bit host and guest operating systems
• Support for up to 8-way SMP
• Support for up to 8GB vRAM per virtual machine
• Support for Intel EPT nested page tables technology
• Support for Intel FlexPriority CPU migration technology
• Support for up to 2TB virtual hard disks
• Support for up to 16 vNICs
• Support for PXE network boot and port forwarding
• Seamless application publishing (Coherence) (for Windows guest OSes only)
• Snapshots and undo disks
• Virtual machines templates
• P2V migration tool (Transporter)
• Virtual machines image compression (Compressor)
• Command line interface (CLI)
• SDK

With this release Parallels finally demonstrates that it still cares something that is not the Apple market.
Hopefully we’ll not have to wait another two years before the next major release.

Labels: Parallels, Releases

VMLogix is a US startup that entered the virtual lab automation market in October 2006.

Its segment is reasonably empty, with just a bunch of competitors. Unfortunately among those competitors there is VMware and its vCenter Lab Manager.

Despite that, VMLogix always managed to provide valuable features in a timely fashion, like the support for Linux, the support for heterogeneous virtual environments (something that VMware killed as soon as it acquired Akimbi in 2006) or the support for the Amazon Xen-based cloud infrastructure EC2.

The company for sure has no fear of competition, and this provided it a remarkable OEM agreement with Citrix, which now includes the VMLogix flagship product as part of its Essentials package for XenServer and for Microsoft Hyper-V.

Today the company releases LabManager 3.8 which introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (the stand-alone version of Hyper-V).

Additionally the product extends its network fencing engine in two ways:

• the customer can now define some basic firewall rules so that virtual machines can handle inbound/outbound traffic while inside the the lab facility
• the isolated network configurations (IP Zones) can now be applied to multiple virtualization hosts at the same time

Labels: Releases, Virtual Lab Automation, VMLogix

Embotics is a Canadian startup that entered the VM lifecycle management market exactly two years ago.

The alliance programs that the company joined over time, with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, clarify the intention to become the product of choice in heterogeneous virtual environments.

The acquisition of the former Vice President of Global Alliances at PlateSpin, further confirms that Embotics doesn’t want to stick with VMware only, and this makes perfectly sense considering that VMware has its own products in this market segment.

Earlier this week the company released version 3.0 of its flagship product V-Commander.
The product is now rearranged in a new modular architecture, with three modules that customers can license individually to incrementally upgrade the platform:

While this is mostly a licensing change, the new V-Commander 3.0 also introduces some new features, like support for VMware vSphere 4.0 and a number of improvements in the analysis and policy engines.

Overall it doesn’t seem that Embotics is making giant leaps forward or introducing revolutionary new features.

It isn’t clear if Stephen Pollack, the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin, is still helping the company.
The entrepreneur joined the Embotics advisory board in November 2008 after his company was acquired by Novell, but his profile is no more available on the corporate website.

Labels: Embotics, Lifecycle Management, Releases

In December 2007 PlateSpin launched Forge, a hardware appliance which embeds VMware VI 3.x and uses the company’s P2V migration technology to simplify the way customers do disaster recovery.

The company updated the platform to version 2.0 exactly one year ago, months after being acquired by Novell.

Earlier this month Forge reached version 2.5, introducing the following features:

• Support for Windows Server 2008 & Windows Vista
  (both file-based and block-based live replication)
• Support for Block-Based Transfers with 64bit protected systems
• Server Sync Block-Based Transfers
• Physical Machine Server Sync
• Support for replications longer than 24 hours
• Role-Based Access & Multi-Tenancy

Novell offers the following unit packages:

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Novell, P2V/V2V Migration, PlateSpin, Releases

Leostream just released a new version of its Connection Broker.

In version 6.0 the company introduced the full support for Citrix XenServer. With this new 6.2, Leostream completely focus on Microsoft technologies.

Connection Broker 6.2 in fact fully supports Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 as backend hypervisors, plus Windows 7 as virtual desktop guest OS and RDP 7.0 as remote protocol.

On top of that the new version of this product adds a number of interesting new features:

• Multi-monitor support
• USB management
  USB pass-through policies allow administrators to manage classes of devices or individual devices, depending on need. USB policies can be combined with other Leostream policies, such as location-based ones, to support the exact implementation of business rules
• Location-based printing
  Administrators can specify a list of network printers to connect to a particular group of clients based on their location. End-users can select local printers when connected to remote desktops
• Single Sign On for RDP
  Provides seamless access to all versions of Windows virtual desktops from any client device, including Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, and RDP 7
• User profile support

Labels: Leostream, Releases, VDI

In June Xen reached version 3.4 introducing out-of-the-box support for Hyper-V and a series of enhancements that will make the platform a good client hypervisor.

At the beginning of this month Xen further progressed to version 3.4.1, which is just a maintenance release, but the truly interesting things are in the Xen 4.0 roadmap (with our emphasis):

• RDMA Live Migration Support
• Dom0 kernel in Linux 2.6.30 or later
• Dom0 support for Marvell 6480 disk driver
• Pass through USB-Controllers/Devices for PV Guests
• Fault Tolerance - Project Remus and/or Kemari
• Monitor, Limit, Control network traffic coming at DomUs
• Internationalization / Unicode Support
• Configure Virtual Bridge like Real Switch (e.g. Control VLAN, port status)
• VLan tagging per NIC in the VM Config File
• Virtual Ethernet Switch
• Physical Xen boot/install support via native UEFI (pUEFI) and virtual UEFI (vUEFI) support
• Limit I/O for individual disks of VM (similar to credit scheduler weight)
• Dynamic Memory Management for Overcommiting RAM
• PCI CGA Passthrough for VT-d (vendor cards like Nvidia, AIT, etc)
• Full AMD IOMMU Support
• Online resizing of DomU Disks
• Cross compliling Xen and Modular Builds

On top of this very interesting list, Ian Pratt, the Xen CTO (and Xen.org Chairman and XenSource Founder and Citrix Vice President of Advanced Products), informally indicated a few areas where contributors are welcome. And in this list there’s a lot of precious details there (our emphasis again):

• Xen will soon be including the openflow vswitch developed under the openvswitch.org project. In order to integrate support for SR-IOV network hardware, we need a special kind of bond driver in the guest that initially routes traffic via the vswitch, but then can receive instructions from the vswitch to route individual flows to the direct hardware path (falling back to the normal software path via the vswitch if the SR-IOV VF gets unplugged).
• Build on some of the existing work done in Cambridge to use Tungsten Graphics Gallium as a device-independent and API-independent 3D remoting protocol.
• Get the blkback/netback drivers working in a HVM guest, effectively allowing domain0 to optionally be a HVM guest.
• Fully implement domain0 restartability, effectively enabling a dom0 reboot or upgrade without rebooting the rest of the system. (There’s been plenty of work done on this already, but it needs finishing off)
• investigate how a hypervisor could best use large amount of NAND FLASH memory. (not just via a disk API, but as native FLASH)
• Deterministic replay for xen. (see the University of Michigan papers).
• work on the ARM xen port to get it to the same level as the x86 port
• implement UBC Remus for HVM guests and integrate it into the main Xen tree.
• virtualize a GPU in a device-dependent fashion (everyone has been doing it in a device-independent fashion, but there may be big performance and fidelity wins to be had doing it in a device-specific fashion). Since the Intel GPU drivers are open source it should be possible to do this on Intel GPUs.
• Extend Cambridge/UBC Parallax to implement content-addressable hashing to save disk space
• Switch the PV SCSI over to using the netchannel2 ring protocol for improved performance.

Only three major virtualization vendors are currently relying on Xen: Citrix, Oracle and Novell.
Each one will try to innovate with enterprise-grade capabilities to be added on top of this “basic” feature-set.
Customers can can now have a better idea of where the three companies are going. The only problem is that none of them is probably ready to share some release dates for some or all the features above.

Labels: Releases, Xen

A few hours ago the Microsoft virtualization management solution System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 hit the RTM.

As expected the RTM arrives just a few weeks after Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 were released to the Microsoft partners.

The most important new capability included in this release is the long awaited virtual machines live migration.
Anyway Microsoft surprised its audience in early June by adding other welcome features to the SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Candidate, like the Quick Storage Motion and the support for VMware port groups.

The Release Candidate should be considered feature complete but the company managed to squeeze a last unexpected thing to the RTM: the (partial) support for VMware vSphere 4.0.
Basically Microsoft supports the new VMware platform only for the same features that were available in VI3.5. Some of the new capabilities that VMware offers will be supported in a future update of SCVMM.

virtualization.info detailed the entire feature-set here.

Microsoft already released the trial version of the product on its Download website.
The full version instead will be available to its its Volume License customers first, starting on October 1st.

Labels: Microsoft, Platform Management, Releases

Red Hat is definitively preparing for the imminent launch of its new enterprise virtualization offering based on KVM and the Qumranet technologies acquired in September 2008.

A very important piece of the puzzle is how Windows guest operating systems will perform on the Red Hat implementation of KVM.
Most virtual machines on the planet runs Windows, so if Red Hat doesn’t shine here it will have nothing concrete to compete against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors.

In mid-July the company gave a hint on how it plans to manage this aspect of its strategy: it released version 1.0 of its KVM para-virtualization drivers for Windows guest OSes under the open source GPLv2 license.

The set includes the network driver (kvmnet) and the device block driver (viostor) and both already are certified against the Microsoft Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL).

Thanks to Linux-KVM.com for the news.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat, Releases

In April 2009 a new company called HyTrust entered the virtualization market with primary focus on access control and configuration management.

Earlier this month the startup released the first consistent update for its flagship product: Appliance 1.5.

This new version introduces:

• label-based policy enforcement 
  (each object inside the virtual infrastructure can receive one or more labels, labels are embedded to virtual machines even if they are migrated across multiple hosts, only the objects with same labels can interact with each other)
• two-factor authentication using RSA SecureID
  (for direct-to-host and vCenter management)
• support for VMware vSphere 4.0 (including ESXi 4.0)
• support for Cisco Nexus 1000V

Like for version 1.0, HyTrust offers a free version of its Appliance 1.5 which is capped to 3 ESX hosts.

Labels: Configuration Management, HyTrust, Releases

During this August VMware released a round of minor updates for many products:

• vCenter Server 4.0 Patch 1
  This critical patch has been released for those customers that implemented VMware HA and their Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) utilize Class A addresses (see the related KnowledgeBase article).
• Workstation 6.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing but VMware also introduced support for Ubuntu Linux 9.04 as guest operating system.
• ACE 2.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing and security patching: the version of Apache for Windows used by the ACE Management Server has been upgraded to 2.0.63.
• Player 2.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing but VMware also introduced support for Ubuntu Linux 9.04 as guest operating system.
  

Labels: Releases, VMware

In the last few weeks Veeam released a couple of updates for its products.

The most important is the nworks Management Pack 5.0 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007.
Veeam acquired nworks in June 2008 for an undisclosed sum.
Under the new control the nworks management suite received a major update (4.0) in December 2008 and now we have this new one.

This 5.0 release introduces two key things:

• support for VMware vSphere 4.0
  (the product comes preconfigured to monitor VMware DPM, the Host Profiles, the vApps and VMware FT)
• a new web management console to configure the nworks Collectors
• Collectors high-availability (if a Collector doesn’t emit the heartbeat the product automatically redistributes the monitoring activity of the faulty agent to the others available in the network)

Veeam also released a minor update (3.1.1) for its Backup & Replicator product.

This new version, which comes just two months after the 3.1 release, is primary for bug fixing but it also introduces a new feature: the product now supports replication over slow and unreliable links.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Platform Management, Releases, Veeam

Five months after launching its flagship product, Hyper9 has completely left behind its previous life as InovaWave: its product now has an actual name, Virtualization Optimization Suite or VOS, and already hits version 1.4.

The upgrade introduces a number of new capabilities that extend the core search engine:

• Dashboard
• Scheduled searches
• Inclusion of new predefined searches (unused VMs, orphaned VMDKs and files, etc.)
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0

The company also renamed its capability to track and compare performance and history of different virtual machines as VMDNA.

Labels: Hyper9, Releases

As usual VKernel continues to release updates for its products at a very fast pace. Two months after version 4.0, the startup is ready to launch the first minor upgrade for its flagship product: Capacity Analyzer 4.1.

The new build introduces a number of enhancements and some interesting new automated reporting capabilities:

• Automatic generation of alerts upon detection of ”abnormal” system behavior in capacity utilizations.
• Automatic reporting of key environment capacity trends.
• Automatic generation of utilization alerts upon detection of virtual machines’ drives activity

VKernel must have changed the licensing model for this product as one of the new features listed in the release notes says:

[VK–3439] — Implemented socket based license restrictions

Labels: Capacity Planning, Releases, VKernel

In December 2008 Virtual Bridges closed a major deal with IBM to bundle a Linux-friendly version of its Win4VDI connection broker (called VERDE) with Canonical Ubuntu Linux and the IBM Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS), which includes Lotus Symphony, Notes and other IBM products.

The deal was especially relevant because this bundle was designed to deliver a VDI solution based on the KVM virtualization platform that Ubuntu embeds. And IBM was the first major ISV to support its enterprise products inside KVM virtual machines.

Eight months later Virtual Bridges, IBM and Canonical are back with VERDE 2.0.

The first new thing in this release is the product strategy: Virtual Bridges completely replaces Win4VDI with VERDE, avoiding to market and sell two different versions of the same connection broker.

The second and most important news is related to a new key component of the package: a client-side virtualization platform.

The press announcement mentions the term client hypervisor, but in this case we are talking about a lightweight Linux distribution with KVM (which is not a hypervisor architecture).
Like over client hypervisors, this one requires Intel VT enabled so it won’t work on some laptops (courtesy of Sony and Intel).

The virtual desktop can be checked out and copied on the local KVM platform, allowing the mobile user to work in a so-called offline VDI mode.
At that point VERDE 2.0 uses a new Self-Managing Auto Replicating Technology (SMART) protocol to synchronize the local virtual desktop image with the primary one that resides inside the corporate virtual infrastructure.

Labels: IBM, KVM, Releases, VDI, Virtual Bridges

On July 22 Microsoft released the long awaited Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2. The same day anyway Microsoft also released the stand-alone version of hypervisor, called Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

Compared to the first release, which had a subset of the features available in the Windows Server 2008 edition, this new stand-alone Hyper-V seems to match the capabilities of its Windows-embedded counterpart (this post will be updated if we’ll receive different information). And this includes the most-wanted Live Migration capability.

Instead of having something less, this version of Hyper-V R2 has something more: the capability to boot from flash.
This is a major new feature that Microsoft didn’t announce earlier and that may put Hyper-V side by side with VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer in the OEMs pre-installation options.

Like the Windows-embedded version, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is free and will be released to the Microsoft partners through MSDN, TechNet and other distribution channels on August 6.

Labels: Microsoft, Releases

After what appeared to be an endless timeframe, Symantec finally updates its application virtualization platform acquired from Altris in January 2007 and once called Software Virtualization Solution (SVS).

The product name changed from SVS to Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV) and jumped from version 2.1 to version 6.1.

This first public build of the platform (6.1.4108, dubbed as Maintenance Pack 1) introduces a number of interesting features:

• Layer isolation granularity
  The administrator can define what portion of the real OS can be seen inside each virtual layer
• Reset Point
  Like in hardware virtualization with virtual machines snapshots, the administrator can define checkpoints and revert to them if something goes wrong inside the virtual layer. The changes made after a reset point can be integrated back into the persistent part of the virtual layer.
• Cloned layers and dependent layers
  Both the persistent part and the customizations of a virtual layer can be cloned on demand.
  Like in hardware virtualization with clones and linked clones, the cloned virtual layer can depend on its parent.
• Layer Patch
  Updates for applications inside a virtual layer can be delivered without repackaging and reshipping the virtual layer.
  The update happens through a Layer Patch which is the delta between the original virtual layer and the updated virtual layer.
• Autorun from Layer and Deactivate on Last Processes Exit
  Any real application can be obliged to run inside a virtual layer every time it starts.
  The changes that are produced by the user during its use can stay inside the virtual layer or can be destroyed by resetting the virtual layer as soon as the real application is terminated.

The product is made of two components: the Workspace Corporate Server, which supports Windows Server 2003 32 and 64bit, and the Client Workstation, which only supports Windows XP 64bit.

Worldwide customers will appreciate that Symantec saved the Free for Personal Use edition, which is not timebombed despite you must download it from the Trial Ware section of the website.

Labels: Releases, Symantec

After the release of Migrate 8.1, Novell releases Protect 8.1.

Both Migrate and Protect come from the original PlateSpin PowerConvert. Novell split it in these two products after completing the acquisition of its subsidiary.
The idea behind this move is that customers may want to use the P2V migration engine for disaster recovery (something that PlateSpin evangelized for years) and so they want to have specific features for this task.

The new Protect 8.1 introduces the following features:

• Live incremental replication with block-based transfers
• File-level restore
• Support for live incremental replications in V2P migrations
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Novell, P2V/V2V Migration, PlateSpin, Releases

Richard Garsthagen, the popular VMware Senior Evangelist behind the organization of VMworld Europe, released a new free tool called vAudit.

This tool allows to track a VMware View 3.x environment is being used by the users, auditing their activity on the virtual desktops (logon and logon failures, working hours, logoff and disconnection) and showing it on a timeline.

vAudit is not an official VMware product but if extremely popular the company may decide to include its capabilities in the next version of View.

Meanwhile you can enjoy this free version and download it here.

Labels: Releases, VDI, VMware

As expected, Microsoft announces today the sign off of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, which includes Hyper-V R2.

The finalized feature list is known since June, when Microsoft released the Release Candidate:

• support for virtual machines live migration (expect Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition)
• support for virtual disks hot plug
• support for up to 64 logical processors (8 cores for up to 8 physical processors) 
• support for up to 1TB physical RAM (Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition only supports 32GB)
• support for up to 384 1-way virtual machines (8 vCPUs per logical processor)
• support for Processor Compatibility Mode (migrate the virtual machines across different generations of the same CPU vendor)
  
  
• support for Core Parking and CPU power consumption control
• support for Second Level Address Translation (SLAT, formerly called nested page tables or NPT - specifically AMD RVI and Intel EPT)
• support for TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs)
• support for Jumbo Frames
• support for Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq)

Additionally, it’s worth to mention that Hyper-V R2 is now declared ready for VDI, as the new Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services (RDS, formerly Terminal Services) include a basic connection broker component: Remote Desktop Connection Broker.
The company is now promoting the adoption of VDI through more friendly licensing terms and the effort of partners like Citrix and Quest.

Nothing changes about the licensing terms: Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition allows to have only one “free” virtual machine, the Enterprise Edition allows up to 4 virtual machines and the Datacenter Edition allows unlimited VMs.

The new hypervisor will be available to worldwide customers October 22, but the Microsoft partners can download it today from the MSDN and TechNet websites.

Some of the other products in the Microsoft virtualization portfolio already support Hyper-V R2: Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit 4.0, released last week, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, currently in Release Candidate and soon to be released as well.

In the the coming weeks virtualization.info will release a new edition of its Buyer’s Guide to include VMware vSphere 4.0, XenServer 5.5 and this new Hyper-V R2.

Labels: Microsoft, Releases

After launching its own remoting protocol and securing a grand total of $18 million in funding, the startup Pano Logic releases an update for its VDI platform Pano System.

The new version 2.7 introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0, some performance enhancements and a couple of new features:

• Policy-based installs and updates
  This allows to perform group policy installs and updates of the Pano Direct Service seamlessly and automatically, and allowing for Pano Manager to also be updated from within the administrator interface
• Remote user logoff and disconnect commands
  This enables the administrators to use the Pano Manager interface to logoff and disconnect users accessing their desktop virtual machines (DVMs) via Pano Devices for one-console management

Labels: Pano Logic, Releases, VDI

Just one month after the first major release in years, PHD Virtual is back with a quick minor update for its flagship product esXpress.

The new esXpress 3.6 launched today introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0 and a significant performance enhancement:

• Improved file level restore speeds are now up to 4x faster
• Data Restoration and Archival via Windows' Shares are now up to 4x faster
• Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to 2x as fast
• Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded 2x the previous rates

Labels: Disaster Recovery, PHD Virtual Technologies, Releases

After a short public beta program, Vizioncore released the fourth major release of its vRanger Pro.

As detailed in the previous post, the product is evolving into something articulated, a Data Protection Platform (DPP) as Vizioncore calls it, that will be released in three phases.

During this first phase the company delivers the new pluggable architecture called Direct-To-Target.
Direct-To-Target allows to extend the product with additional components that provide support for multiple protocols and storage targets.
It’s likely that the company will release these components in the second or third phase, and that will offer them as a-la-carte options. For now vRanger Pro 4.0 supports SFTP and CIFS repositories.

The virtual machines backup and restore now happens without the need to plug into VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), going straight from the virtualization host to the backup repository and vice versa.
vRanger is also able to perform multiple ESX backups in parallel.

On the restore front, vRanger Pro 4.0 supports disk-level and file-level restores but in future the product will also offer object-level restores: when the backup involves, for instance, a database or a directory services server, vRanger will be able to restore a deleted table or a deleted user.
To do so Vizioncore will probably leverage the technology that its parent company Quest is already offering through dedicated products like LiteSpeed for SQL Server or Recover Manager for Active Directory.

Easy to guess, vRanger Pro 4.0 supports VMware vSphere 4.0. The product also offers scripting capabilities through Microsoft PowerShell support, a language that became critical in the Vizioncore strategy in the last few months.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Quest, Releases, Vizioncore

After the acquisition of PlateSpin, Novell made several changes inside its subsidiary.
virtualization.info already published some of them, like the migration of the development team in India and the replacement of several members that left after the acquisition.

Novell also split the original PlateSpin PowerConvert in two products: Migrate and Protect.

Migrate gets a new update this week, reaching version 8.1.
The product now supports Windows Server 2008 (it’s not clear if this includes the imminent R2 edition but probably not), Windows Vista and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. But the major new feature of this release is the support Sun Solaris 10.

This support is very specific: the P2V migration can be performed only from a physical Solaris box with SPARC architecture to a Sun Solaris 10 Container (aka Zone).
The other way around is not available at the moment, and it’s not possible to perform a live migration.

The capability is supported through a dedicated version of the product called Migrate for UNIX, which Novell prices at $1,495 for a flat, perpetual license.

PlateSpin is the first company to offer such capability and it certainly is a welcome addition to the already rich feature-set that PowerConvert always offered. Anyway it’s worth to note that Sun offers a free P2V migration tool that perform a similar task since October 2007: it migrates Solaris 8 and 9 physical SPARC boxes on a Solaris 10 container (of course still on SPARC architecture).

The time of the announcement is not casual: now that Oracle acquired Sun, nobody exactly knows what will happen to the Sun Solaris operating system and the SPARC architecture.
If Oracle wants to kill SPARC as some are predicting, Sun customers may have to drop their systems sooner rather than later, and in many cases the mandatory, intermediate step is to consolidate them into fewer boxes.

Labels: Novell, P2V/V2V Migration, PlateSpin, Releases

Just a few weeks after the launch of Connection Broker 6.0, Leostream is back with the first minor update.

Connection Broker 6.1 introduces enhancements to its policy management and reporting layers, plus the following new features:

• Web Access to Citrix XenApp
  End-users can launch Citrix XenApp desktops and applications via the Connection Broker web browser.
• Wake-on-LAN for Physical Machines
  Connection Broker can interact with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) power up physical machines through Wake-on-LAN.

Labels: Leostream, Releases, VDI

Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and vCenter AppSpeed 1.0.

AppSpeed 1.0 (build 36919) is powered by the technology that VMware acquired in May 2008 from B-hive.
It is able to discover the elements of the virtual infrastructures (physical hosts, virtual machines, clusters, etc.), the applications running inside them, and even some structures inside the applications (like tables inside a database).
Once tracked the applications, AppSpeed sniffs their traffic to understand their “normal” behavior (like the response time, the performance) and build some baselines.
At this point the product compares the baselines with the actual application performance to recognize potential slows down (or lack of availability) that affect the user experience.

The new AppSpeed pricing starts at $1,250 per CPU.

In some ways this approach seems similar to the one that Liquidware Labs/vmSight is taking to understand the user experience in a VDI environment and plan the environment capacity accordingly.

In both cases the self-learning technology is precious for the virtualization administrator, who often has to prove that the hypervisor is not responsible for a performance degradation. When an application doesn’t work as expected the first component to blame is the newest one, the virtualization layer, but AppSpeed tracks the software behavior day by day so there’s some concrete information to investigate.

Like Chargeback 1.0, AppSpeed has huge potentials: combining its capabilities with a change management solution (VMware will release one called vCenter ConfigControl later this year) it may track down which modifications in the virtual infrastructure negatively impact the behavior of one or more virtualized applications.

Anyway the most interesting thing is that AppSpeed is another component that may easily work on physical infrastructures but doesn’t.

virtualization.info already suggested how VMware is slowly turning into an infrastructure management company, getting ready to compete with the big four BMC, CA, IBM and HP.
The company keeps saying that it’s not interested in managing the physical infrastructures, even if it recognizes that a lot customers out there don’t migrate 100% of their systems inside virtual machines and those customers are interested in a solution that manages everything.

At today, the VMware’s answer to those customers is to offer integrated end-to-end solutions mixing together their products with the ones of the big four above.
But the point it that while VMware doesn’t have yet all the pieces needed to become an infrastructure management company, the ones that are in place (like AppSpeed) are purposely limited to the virtual data center. And this is the biggest potential that VMware has today.

Labels: Performance Monitoring, Releases, VMware

Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and AppSpeed 1.0.

The need for chargeback capabilities is growing at a fast pace as the virtualization technologies mature and multiple departments of the same organization start to use the same virtual infrastructure with confidence.
This is why startups like VKernel are growing in popularity and seasoned players like Vizioncore start to include the chargeback feature in their performance monitoring products.

With a perfect timing VMware enters the segment and releases this new module for vCenter Server 3.5 and 4.0.

Chargeback 1.0 (build 175384), which comes as a virtual appliance, sports the following capabilities:

• Support for multiple cost centers
  The product allows to segment the virtual infrastructure in multiple chargeback hierarchies which group the various hosts and virtual machines assigned to different departments, cost centers, or business units in an organization.
• Support for multiple cost models
  The product tracks CPU, Memory, Storage, Network Received and Transmitted, and Disk Read and Write. These resources can be analyzed against three cost models: fixed costing, allocation-based costing and utilization based costing.
• Support for cost comparison reports
  The reporting functionality allows to generate cost reports for a hierarchy and for any entity or set of entities within a hierarchy. A cost comparison report can be generated by using two different cost models.
• Support for local users and LDAP users (Active Directory only)
  Different users with specific permission sets can be created and predefined roles can be assigned. A user can have different permissions at different levels within a hierarchy and across hierarchies.
• Support for high-availability
  More than one instance can be installed and added to a cluster. All the instances in a cluster are automatically synchronized, use the same database and can be accessed through a load balancer.

The Chargeback pricing starts at $750 per CPU.

As the list above highlights, the product is fairly granular and rich enough for a 1.0 release. Some of the competitors in this space don’t even have three different cost models.
The tight integration with vCenter and the huge potential (cost prediction, what-if cost analysis, etc.) makes this product a highly desirable addition for the enterprises that demanded for chargeback capabilities for a long time.

Of course this is not exactly a good news for VMware partners, which have less room to add value.

So far the company defended its current strategy by saying that it’s natural for a vendor that grows like VMware does to expand its product portfolio in many directions, that the customers specifically asked to have all the features that are being launched, and that the product portfolio competes with the partners’ offering just in part, because VMware only offers basic capabilities.
While the first two are perfectly reasonable points, the last one doesn’t seem applicable anymore looking at how complete Chargeback is at its first release.

virtualization.info stressed out much so far about this expansionistic behavior not to blame VMware, but to highlight how the company strategy is basically opening new opportunities for its primary competitors (namely Microsoft and Citrix) which still lack of a rich partner ecosystem and miss a number of highly desirable 3rd party tools (chargeback is one of them).

VMware still is the cash cow of virtualization and everybody wants to partner with them, but compared to three years ago, a startup with limited funding may have to choose between playing the catch up game with the market leader or bringing value to its competitors which offer big opportunities to grow (mostly when one of the competitors is Microsoft) in the mid term.

Rather than trying to slow down this natural opening to multiple hypervisor as they enjoy a wider adoption and turn into more interesting revenue opportunities, VMware is accelerating the shift.
So, ultimately, this is a message to all those non-VMware customers: the VMware partners are coming, sooner rather than later the tool that today only supports ESX and vCenter will eventually become available to everybody.

Labels: Chargeback, Releases, VMware

Today VMware releases the fourth generation of its virtual lab automation tool Lab Manager.

The new 4.0 version (build 1140) introduces the following features:

• Support for multiple workspaces (isolation of resources in multiple workspaces in the same organization, sharing of configurations across different workspaces)
• Host spanning across network fencing (network-fenced virtual labs can see the same host) 
• Resource usage monitor
• Configuration history and archiving
• Support for vSphere 4.0 (excluded VMware FT and Linked Clones technologies)

The new Lab Manager pricing starts at $1,495 per CPU.

The biggest news anyway is that VMware killed the other product derived from Lab Manager: Stage Manager.
Stage Manager was launched 13 months ago and since then received just a single minor update.
At the launch time virtualization.info reported how this product was sharing much of the Lab Manager engine (and even its agents), wondering why VMware didn’t simply extend the former to provide the staging functionalities of the latter.
Over one year later the company seems to finally agree and merges back Stage Manager with Lab Manager 4.0.

The now defunct Stage Manager 1.0.1 is here.

Labels: Releases, Virtual Lab Automation, VMware

Microsoft releases today the RTM version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit 4.0.

As anticipated during the beta program, this new version supports Hyper-V R2, that will be part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM between today and tomorrow, and the inventory of VMware Server Hosts and Guests.

The product is still free of charge.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft, Releases

Today VMware releases the first minor update for its disk and file backup/restore product Data Recovery, included in bundle with vSphere 4.0 Plus, Advanced and Essential Plus licenses.

The new build (176771) doesn’t introduce any new feature but fixes a number of bugs and improves the performance.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Releases, VMware

Despite vSphere 4.0 is finally out VMware didn’t stop to release major updates for the previous platform.

The new Update 5 (build 174841), available today for vCenter Server 2.5 only, introduces support for up to 80 virtual machines per host in a HA cluster.

Reaching the new limit requires some modification on the virtual infrastructure that are described in the knowledgebase article 1012002.

Labels: Releases, VMware

Now we are talking. Today Altor Networks releases today the third generation of its Virtual Firewall (VF) which features a brand new kernel that fully leverages the new VMware VMsafe APIs.

The choice to rewrite the core part of the product will probably raise concerns about its stability, but there was a good reason to do so.

VMware offers two modes to use the VMsafe network APIs, called Slow-Path and Fast-Path.
By using the Slow-Path, a security vendor asks for a copy of the virtual traffic inside a dedicated VMsafe virtual appliance, plugging into the virtual switches that connect the protected VMs.
This approach is slow (it obliges to perform context switching) and implies some potential risks  as the VMsafe virtual appliance itself could be targeted for an attack.
By using the Fast-Path instead, a security vendor can process the virtual traffic from inside the ESX vKernel, in a truly transparent mode.
Unfortunately the Fast-Path integration is harder to implement but pays off in terms of performance, flexibility and security, so different vendors are using both modes to deliver a hybrid solution.

Altor Networks decided to rework its product kernel to use only the Fast-Path mode, and it reports a performance improvements over its competitors from 10x to over 20x, even on a very cheap hardware (and without the new Intel Xeon 5500 CPUs), as this throughput analysis is summarizing:

Additionally, as the Fast-Path approach doesn’t oblige to touch the virtual network configuration and deploy multiple vSwitch instances, Altor Networks could immediately support the Cisco Nexus 1000V, something that is not possible otherwise.

VF 3.0 also includes a intrusion detection system (IDS) module based on the overwhelming popular open source engine Snort. Altor Networks has OEM agreement with the company that maintains Snort, Sourcefire, to resell their commercial attack signatures and allow the customers to recognize several 0day attacks.
Compared to many other security firms, Altor Networks is not just trying to bundle together security engines gluing them with a unified interface.
The company is working on a deeper integration, using the information coming from the IDS (and other modules in the future) to dynamically rearrange the VF rulebase.
There are complexities in this approach but it’s certainly more interesting than many other apparent all-in-one solutions.

Last but not least the new VF 3.0 includes all redundant components, without paying any premium, with hot stand-by copies of its management and control modules.
These pieces can be externally managed through a dedicated API that Altor Networks developed for cloud computing providers that want to control the fail-over with their own tools.

Altor Networks has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: Altor Networks, Releases, Security

Last week Sun released the third generation of its hosted virtual machine monitor (VMM) called VirtualBox, acquired from the German company innotek in February 2008.

Sun put a serious effort on this product, launching two major updates in less than 18 months, plus several minor releases.
Sometimes the company strategy is concerning as it seems to suggest that its hosted VMM can compete with a bare-metal VMM like ESX, XenServer or Hyper-V, or that its product can run a virtual desktop infrastructure. Nonetheless Sun has executed very well on the engineering side of this project.

The new version 3.0 introduces the following new features:

• support for up to 32 vCPUs (as long as you have an Intel VT or AMD-V powered CPU)
• support for OpenGL 2.0 on all guest OSes (Windows, Linux and Solaris)
• experimental support for Direct3D 8 and 9 for Windows guest OSes

For now VirtualBox remains open source and free of charge for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X. The customers are still wondering if this will continue after Oracle will have completed the Sun acquisition.

Labels: Releases, Sun

5nine is a brand new startup that entered the virtualization market less than one month ago.
It launched a capacity planning tool for Hyper-V that goes beyond the planning phase, actually executing the P2V migration.

Rather than trying to capitalize the attention obtained with its first product, 5nine launches a second one, called Virtual Firewall, once again for Hyper-V.

So basically this startup goes solo in the Microsoft territory, while most security firms are competing to release an innovative product for VMware environments that could use the VMsafe APIs.

The heavy critics expressed to those vendors before they started to leverage VMsafe, applies to 5nine as well: delivering a software firewall inside a virtual machine doesn’t make it a virtual firewall by any mean. At the best, the performance of such product become “virtual” as it’s totally unpredictable how many virtual machines will compete to access the physical resources of the host. 
And this of course applies to 5nine, to Microsoft (which supports its ISA Server inside a Hyper-V VM) and to any other vendor, until Hyper-V will provide a VMsafe-like approach to transparently interact with the hypervisor kernel without interacting with the virtual networking and the guest operating systems.

Beyond this the first version of Virtual Firewall is severely limited as it can only filter the traffic that goes to and from the host. There’s no way at the moment to inspect and block the intra-VMs network activity.
Last but not least the product seems to be powered by a simple packet filtering engine when the entire security industry is offering advanced stateful inspection.

It’s understandable that 5nine is trying to offer something easy for the SMB audience that is supposed to adopt Hyper-V, but this first attempt is a little too weak and loses hands down against free but extremely powerful products like pfSense. Yes, their developers don’t call it a “virtual firewall” but customers can still deploy it in a virtual machine and reconfigure the virtual networking to be fully protected.

Labels: 5nine, Releases, Security

As part of its renovation plan, in October 2008 PHD Virtual (formerly PHD Technologies) acquired the software division of a popular UK consulting firm, Xtravirt.
The company rebranded the Xtravirt tools and offered part of them for free in March, hoping to attract a large number of prospects that could be also interested in its flagship backup product called esXpress.

After a break to release a long overdue new version of esXpress, PHD is back on its plan to distribute for free the Xtravirt tools and launches Patch Downloader 6.0, a product that automates the download of VMware ESX patches in a file repository of choice.

There’s a number of similar tools and scripts out there and, like Patch Downloader, all of them are free.
One, called VMTS Patch Manager, was released by Massimiliano Daneri, of VMBK.pl fame, before he joined VMware.
Another one, called esxPatcher, was released by the German consulting firm Mightycare.

And of course there’s the VMware Update Manager (VUM) which is part of VI3.x and vSphere 4.0.
PHD Virtual says that their new tool is an alternative to VUM when the VMware customer doesn’t have a license to use it or can’t access the Internet from vCenter or the ESX hosts.

Labels: PHD Virtual Technologies, Releases

While opening the beta program of the next Fusion major release, VMware also keeps updating the current product which now reaches version 2.0.5 (build 173382).

Fusion 2.0.5 is mainly for bug fixes but it also extends the support to the following host and guest operating systems:

• Host OSes
  Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit only, experimental)
• Guest OSes
  Mac OS X 10.5 (on new Intel Xeon 5500 and 3500 Series)
  Ubuntu 9.04
  Mac OS X 10.6 Server codename Snow Leopard (32bit only experimental)

Labels: Releases, VMware

Citrix just release the first minor update for its P2V/V2V migration tool XenConvert 2.0.

This version introduces the support for OVF contents created with VMware vSphere 4, plus it enhances support for OVF and VMDK files created with other VMware products, including VI 3.x, Workstation 6.5.2, Studio 1.0, OVF Tool 0.9, Converter 3.0.3 and 4.0.

The product is free and available here.

Labels: Citrix, P2V/V2V Migration, Releases

In May 2008 Credit Suisse launched a very interesting spinoff company called DynamicOps, which is competing in the VM lifecycle management space with Embotics, Fortisphere, ManageIQ and very soon with VMware too.

The first release of their product, Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), was available in July but this didn’t stop the marketing department from numbering the version as 3.0.

Almost one year later VRM 3.2 hits the market and the company announces that it can go beyond tracking the physical resources wasted by the so called VM sprawl phenomenon. It can now automate the reclaim and recycle process of the abandoned virtual machines.
The company forgot to update the website in time for the press announcement release so there’s no way to see some documentation about how this works exactly.

Another new feature that can’t be investigated at the moment is the Software Developer’s Toolkit that can be used to integrate with 3rd party management solutions.

At today the company counts 25 employees according to the Company Profile that DynamicOps manages on LinkedIn. Some of them may want to focus on producing technical and marketing literature to support the announcements.

Labels: DynamicOps, Releases

A little more than three years ago a new US startup called Moka5 joined the virtualization industry with a simple plan: to change the market by streaming secure virtual machines in every possible consumer device.

The plan didn’t work well so far.
After a little more than one year the company decided to replace its CEO, its Vice President of Engineering and its Vice President of Marketing.
After two years the company also decided to change the brand and the business model, focusing on the enterprises.
After two years and a half the company, now called MokaFive, decided to replace its CEO again.

At the end of all of this, the startup is now in the middle of a risky competition with VMware ACE, Sentillion vThere and most of all Microsoft, which acquired Kidaro in March 2008, rebranded its Workspace product as MED-V and distributed it as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

Now MokaFive is back with version 2.0 of its corporate product but, being afraid of not confusing enough its potential customers, it changed its name again: from Virtual Desktop Solution to Suite.

MokaFive Suite 2.0 extends the centralized management capabilities of the previous version with the support for Active Directory and software distribution solutions, and with the support for two-fact authentication systems.
On top of that the new release is able to keep user data persistent.

The press release also mentions as a new feature the capability to offer the virtual machines as Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) because of course this is exactly what Moka5 planned to do three years ago. But the term is new today so the feature must be market as new as well.

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

Labels: MokaFive, Releases

At the end of the last week VMware published a new minor update for its application virtualization technology ThinApp, acquired from Thinstall at the beginning of 2008.

The new build (3313 if you follow the Thinstall numbering, 169725 if you follow the VMware one) is introducing a very minor change in a configuration file and a number of bug fixes.
Most of all it seems that this version was released to grant compatibility with the VMware vSphere 4.0 client.

As virtualization.info highlighted in March for the ThinApp 4.0.2 release, VMware didn’t deliver a major upgrade for this product for over a year now, and it doesn’t seem ready to clarify the strategy behind the acquisition as also others have recognized.

Labels: Releases, VMware

Oracle doesn’t seem interested in clarifying what will happen to its hypervisor in the near future, or how it will integrate with the virtualization technologies acquired by Sun and Virtual Iron.
The only thing we know for sure is that the merge is going to be painful for somebody.

In a way or another Oracle believes that its current customers will continue to upgrade their existing Oracle VM implementation instead of freezing any activity before the strategy is clear, and so it releases a minor update.

Oracle VM 2.1.5 is mainly for bugfixes but it also introduces a brand new Command Line Interface (CLI)  (soon to be released through the Unbreakable Linux Network update site) and a Web Services API, both for Oracle VM Manager.

Labels: Oracle, Releases

After 5 weeks of public beta program, Citrix released today XenServer and Essentials 5.5 (codename project George).

The list of new features is well known since a while but so far Citrix did a poor job in detailing what is included with the free XenServer and what is instead only available in Essentials Enterprise and Platinum editions (the release notes are identical for both packages).
While waiting for an official clarification virtualization.info guesses the breakdown as follows:

XenServer

• Active Directory integration
  Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
• Expanded guest OS support
  RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.
• Snapshot support in XenCenter and CLI
  Create and manage virtual machines live snapshots from within XenCenter or the xe CLI.

Essentials

• StorageLink integration
  CLI-only support for a new StorageLink Gateway SR that adds native standards-based support for HP MSA, HP EVA, EMC Clariion, and NetApp storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel with optional automated initiator/fabric/array management.
• LVHD
  Fast cloning and snapshots are now supported on all SR types through integration of our software VHD stack and LVM-based Storage Repositories (SRs)
• Workload balancing
  Guest and host performance metrics are used to create star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance.

Of course XenServer 5.5 stays free while Essentials 5.5 starts at $2,500 per server.

Labels: Citrix, Releases

Yesterday, with a single step, a new startup called 5nine entered two crowded and market segments: the P2V migration and the capacity planning ones.

P2V migration tools have been progressively included into every major virtualization platform: VMware, Microsoft and Citrix for sure have their own, and Oracle has three R&D departments now to produce a cool one as well.
The fact that all of the are available for free negatively impacted the business of the other vendors in this segment, which are struggling to survive.

So far none of the competitors in this space had the farsightedness to merge the migration tools with a capacity planning platform, so to accelerate the virtualization adoption and justify the existence of stand-alone P2V tools. 
5nine seems to have exactly this strategy.

The US startup was probably founded earlier this year and seems privately funded.
It doesn’t expose much about its management team right now. The only two executives we know about are Dr. Konstantin Malkov, CTO, and Ratmir Timashev, Director.
Malkov comes from PWI Corporation, a consulting firm where he was the owner and CTO.
Timashev is the well known President of Veeam, so it’s easy to guess that in the future 5nine and Veeam will do business together.

The first product released by this startup is called P2V Hyper-V Planner.
As other capacity planning tools, it builds and maintains an inventory of the physical machines in the data center, tracking the usage of the application workloads and calculating different migration plans depending on business constrains and what-if scenarios.

5nine offers a free version of this product which seems only able to perform P2V migrations and provide basic reports.

The competition in the capacity planning space is remarkable, with VMware, Novell/PlateSpin, CiRBA, Lanamark and recently Liquidware Labs/VMsight.
On top of that it’s worth to highlight that Microsoft already offers a capacity planning tool for Hyper-V called MAP which is completely free.

5nine is now included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: 5nine, Capacity Planning, P2V/V2V Migration, Releases

Almost one month ago a new startup called Liquidware Labs entered the VDI space. 
Behind it there are the founder and former CEO of Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008) and the founder of Foedus (acquired by VMware in January 2008).

At the foundation of Liquidware Labs there’s the technology of another startup called vmSight, which has been acquired while in stealth mode and that is now rebranded as Stratusphere.

The new company continues from where vmSight left, using the same Connector ID technology to rate the physical desktop candidates for VDI environments or to identify poor user experience in an existing VDI environment.

On top of that Stratusphere 4.2 introduces the following major features:

• New VDI Assessment Module
  Stratusphere 4.2 add an entire new module for VDI Assessment. This includes new capabilities to deploy dissolvable Connector ID Keys to physical desktops to gather extensive real-world data on existing configurations and application usage patterns, as well as baseline performance and resource utilization, and a complete set of reports and analysis tools to assess the environment and plan for a migration to VDI. Analysis tools include the Inspector workbench with Machine Configuration, Resource Utilization and Configuration Cluster analysis, along with a complete set of VDI Assessment reports.
• VDI Fit and VDI UX Breakthrough Metrics for VDI
  Stratusphere 4.2 introduces two key new metrics, VDI Fit used in assessments to rate the fitness for a target VDI environment, and VDI UX used in diagnostics to rate the user experience of existing VDI deployments. Each metric relies on multi-variate analysis profile, and puts the tools to adjust the profile and rating system in the hands of the practitioner. The metrics can be adjusted and analyzed, and in the end provide a Red, Yellow, Green rating on all machines, users and applications. Analysis plot graphs are also provided so administrators can quickly identify the groupings and problems in their environments

Brian Madden published additional insights about the company roadmap:

Ultimately Liquidware Labs plans to have five products, although only the first two are available today. From a functionality standpoint, their products will include:

• Assessment module (available now) Gathers configuration details of physical desktops and measures actual workloads, establishing the baseline for the VDI environment. Creates VDI "fitness" reports and identifies clusters of desktops, resource requirements, etc. (more on this later)
• Diagnostics module (available now) Builds upon assessment data to collect detailed usage information about apps, networks, storage, etc.
• Capacity planning module (not yet available) This is the “what if” engine... What if I decided to go win7, or switched hardware, or let people use hulu? You could even stand up and pilot and then model it to scale.
• Migration module (not yet available) This is a component that can automate some of the actual migration work, like maybe tying into app compatibility lists and packagers, making sure that the right people have the right apps available (based on the assessment data)
• Support Center module (not yet available) This is a tool for Level 1 and Level 2 support personnel, with potential for user self-service. It will hook into the VDI environment and pull data from the other modules.

Labels: Capacity Planning, LiquidWare Labs, Releases, vmSight

A couple of weeks ago Diskeeper released a new disk defragmenter specifically designed to work with Microsoft Hyper-V: V-Locity.

Diskeeper has been one of the first companies to support virtualization (already in 2006) and its flagship product, can be already executed inside a Microsoft and VMware virtual machine or but the new V-locity has some new features that are worth a check:

• a new architecture that synchronize the defragementation process across all the virtual machines and the host (this requires to install a component on the host and one inside each VM)
• a shrinking capability that is automatically invoked as soon as the defragmentation inside the VM is finished

The first version of V-locity supports Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V only (so no Hyper-V 2008 Server) and Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 as guest OSes..

Labels: Diskeeper, Releases

In the last two weeks Veeam updated two key products of its portfolio: Monitor and Backup & Replicator (formerly Backup).

Both releases introduce support for VMware vSphere 4.0. On top of that Veeam included the following new features in Monitor 4.0:

• Storage monitoring
• Hardware monitoring (it uses the CIM/SMASH APIs provided by VMware)
• Process monitoring (both Windows and Linux guest operating systems)
• Scheduled reporting

Veeam offers a free version of Monitor 4,0, that doesn’t have the storage and process monitoring capabilities, the performance history, the capacity planning data in scheduled reports, and the unlimited alarms.

Labels: Releases, Veeam

In the last months the security vendor Tripwire took several steps to shift its business focus on the virtualization market, where its configuration management and compliance technology is badly needed.

At the beginning the company extended the capabilities of its flagship product, Tripwire Enterprise, to support VMware virtual infrastructures, but this approach is rarely the best option to enter a new market.

So the company developed and launched a new solution, just for virtualization, called vWire.
This new product extends the capabilities of two free tools that Tripwire released so far, OpsCheck and ConfigCheck, to offer something that goes beyond the configuration management.

In this first version in fact vWire is able to track changes and critical events in the virtual infrastructure, allowing the user to automate a reaction (like restoring a previous configuration), but in a future release the product will be able to correlate the configuration changes with the performance measurement of the virtual infrastructure, which is much more insightful way to troubleshoot the environment.

With its search engine and automation engine supporting PowerShell, vWire may compete in a short time with a lot of other vendors in different segments, from consolidated players like Vizioncore to young newcomers like Hyper9.

For now Tripwire only supports VMware Infrastructure 3.5, but it’s very likely an extension to Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors as soon as VMware will release its own configuration management solution ConfigControl.

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

Labels: Configuration Management, Releases, Tripwire

In March the startup Hyper9 (formerly InovaWave) hired a well-known virtualization professional: Andrew Kutz.
At that time Kutz, who is now a Senior R&D Scientist at the company, was developing a management solution for multiple hypervisors that could be used on mobile devices that support Java: the Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM).

Easy to guess, Hyper9 didn’t just hire Kutz, but also acquired the intellectual property of VMM, and it’s now ready to launch the first release.

VMM 1.0 offers the following features:

• Monitor virtual machines, hosts or data centers’ CPU and memory consumption
• Manage virtual machines power and network state
• Support for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and vSphere 4.0, VMware Server 2.0, Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 and Citrix XenServer 5.0.
• Interface customization

VMM is free to manage up to 5 virtual machines. From 6 to 1000 Hyper9 offers it at the introductory price of $199.00.

VMM seems far from the search engine that Hyper9 released in March and that is considered their flagship product. The decision to launch it as a stand-alone solution rather than release it as a feature of the main product, or release it completely for free to increase the brand awareness, suggests that the company is reconsidering its strategy and may get deeper into the virtualization management space in the future with several separated tools.

Labels: Hyper9, Releases

As mentioned in our coverage of the vSphere 4.0 release, the only product of the VMware portfolio that currently supports the new platform is Converter.

VMware upgraded it to version 4.0.1 (build 161434) last month exactly for this purpose.

In details the new product provides support for:

• vSphere 4.0 as source and destination targets:
  • Support for configuring target disks as thin provisioned disks
  • Support creation of IDE disks on vSphere 4.0
  • Support for backup products to restore vSphere 4.0 virtual machines backed up using VCB
  • Support for creation of virtual hardware version 7.0 virtual machines on vSphere 4.0. targets as well as migration of hardware version 7.0 virtual machines from Workstation and Server platforms to vSphere 4.0
• importing OVF 1.0 single virtual machine images
• customization of Windows Server 2008 guests

The product is of course still completely free. It can be downloaded here.

Labels: Releases, VMware

Today the hardware virtualization subsidiary of Quest, Vizioncore, updates two products of its growing portfolio: vOptimizer Pro and vFoglight.

The first one, a technology that Quest acquired from Invirtus in July 2007, now reaches version 2.2 and introduces:

• Infrastructure Scanning
  Locating and determining the amount of unused virtual storage across the virtual infrastructure enables the customer to see exactly how much storage is being wasted. Furthermore, the product can estimate the total potential savings gained from reclaiming wasted storage and generate a report for use within the business
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0
• Support for Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (32/64bit)

vFoglight (formerly esxCharter and then vCharter) instead hits version 5.2.6 and introduces:

• Capacity Planning - Determining the required infrastructure resources needed to support organizational growth and change is among the greatest challenges for VM administrators. To help combat this challenge, a new capacity planning module, included with vFoglight Pro, builds on the "Migration Modeler" to allow “What If ..?” scenarios for moving VMs to or from actual or hypothetical physical servers.
• Measured Resource Utilization (Chargeback)
  For customers who meter for the use of infrastructure, vFoglight includes Measured Resource Utilization (MRU). MRU is based on measured consumption of IT resources in the infrastructure and can, for instance, help IT understand which user, group or application is using physical servers or VMs.

This last update is specially interesting as it further clarifies how Vizioncore is silently working to extend its capabilities well beyond the performance monitoring.
Very soon the company may become an aggressive competitors even for startups like CiRBA, Lanamark, Novell/PlateSpin, VKernel and of course the former best partner ever VMware.

Labels: Quest, Releases, Vizioncore

After almost three years PHD Virtual Technologies (formerly PHD Technologies) has finally released a solid update for its flagship backup solution: esXpress 3.5.

This new version, released at the beginning of May, includes the following features:

• Multi-user global deployment and configuration application featuring hierarchical, policy-driven configuration to significantly reduce deployment time
• Patent pending source-side global de-duplication across the entire ESX farm to greatly reduce LAN traffic and disk space usage
• Multi-user file-level restore for instant access to compressed data
• Built-in incremental replication which can replicate newly changed blocks and inject them directly to into the replicated virtual machine
• Date-smart dynamic export with pre-defined date-based directories, providing critical flexibility in deciding what data is exported to a choice of tape or disk

esXpress v3.5 price starts at $1,000 per host for 4 concurrent backup streams.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, PHD Virtual Technologies, Releases

StartWind software is famous company in the world of storage because of their free iSCSI target for Windows systems (which is supported inside VMware, Microsoft and Citrix virtual machines).

The company has recently increased its activity in the virtualization space and released yesterday a free Virtual to Virtual (V2V) migration tool dubbed V2V Converter.

The tool is able to turn a VMware VMDK virtual hard drive into a Microsoft Hyper-V VHD one and vice versa.
If customers want the tool can even convert the vHD in the IMG format that StarWinds uses for its iSCSI Target.

V2V Converter, which performs a sector by sector copy on the selected target, is available without limitation here.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration, Releases

The Canadian startup Lanamark continues to release new modules for its hosted capacity planning suite.

After the recent Desktop Analysis Pack, now the company launches a Storage Design Module.

The module assesses physical disks usage and I/O requirement, helping to properly size the SAN to host a virtual infrastructure for server consolidation or VDI scenarios.
This new component is also able to evaluate what-if scenarios taking care of technical constrains that may depend on the HBAs, FC switches and storage arrays that the customer wants to use.

Designing (or redesigning) a storage area network is one of the most critical and challenging tasks when embracing virtualization, and it’s where many companies discover many hidden costs.
Thus the new Storage Design Module is a needful component of the Lanamark Suite.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Lanamark, Releases

In September 2008 Surgient, one of the first startups in the virtual lab automation space, partially re-tuned its strategy, changing the name of its product suite and adopting a new licensing model.

At the end of April 2009 the revamped solution, dubbed Virtual Automation Platform (or VAP, formerly Virtual Q&A Management System or VQMS) received its first minor update.

VAP 6.1 includes the following new features:

• Partial Host Pooling
  Maximize resource utilization and minimize the need for additional hosts with the ability to divide large hosts (RAM, VMs, etc.) across different groups of users and different pools for more granular distribution of today’s larger hosts’ resources.
• License Sprawl Protection
  Actively track and manage the number of licenses used within a private cloud or virtual pool to prevent resource sprawl, assuring license compliance and eliminating excess license costs.
• Third-Party Post Deployment Actions
  Specify post-deployment actions to be executed directly within Surgient environments on deployed physical and virtual servers from Symantec Altiris Deployment Solution or HP Server Automation. Mainly used for patching and upgrading guest OSs, automating load test data, initiation of nightly builds, and other environment customizations, this enhancement allows the provisioning of configurations and other data center automation actions into deployed virtual pools or private clouds.
• Integration with VMware vCenter
  Capitalize on broad functionality and existing investments in templates from VMware vCenter Server by importing and exporting them into the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform with this new integration with vCenter.
• Support for VMware ESXi
  Leverage a broad range of enterprise hypervisor technologies, including VMware ESXi, VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V.
• Customizable User Interface
  Many Surgient customers create private clouds to demonstrate their software offerings to potential buyers. The new version provides functionality to embed company and product branding into the user interface, providing additional marketing benefit from the product.

Interestingly, Surgient is now publishing some information about its business on its website, so we discover that the company, founded in 2003 and active since mid 2004, has a little more than 70 customers (even if some of them are really significant).
So far Surgient had to compete against a very small group of opponents, which unfortunately includes VMware and its Lab Manager (a technology acquired by Akimbi in 2006 for $59 million) and VMLogix with its LabManager, which was selected by Citrix as the OEM partner for Citrix Essentials.
Unless Microsoft or the new potential virtualization giant Oracle are interested in an acquisition, Surgient will have much more to do to survive the competition.

Labels: Releases, Surgient, Virtual Lab Automation

As announced in late April (see the virtualization.info coverage) VMware made available its new vSphere 4.0 (aka ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0) in late May.
And as already detailed in a previous post, the rest of the company portfolio doesn’t support the platform at the moemtn.

To fill the gap VMware has to release updates for almost every product. Converter is the first one, introducing support for vSphere with its version 4.0.1 (build 161434).
It may take longer time for the others: for example View has been just upgraded to version 3.1 but it doesn’t see vSphere yet.

VMware is also working to update the training and certification paths: Mike Laverick reports on his blog the official announcement sent to all the VACTs:

• If you are NEW to VMware
• Attend the VMware vSphere 4: Install, Configure, Manage course OR attend the VMware vSphere 4: Fast Track
• Take and pass the VCP on vSphere 4 exam
• If you are currently a VCP on VMware Infrastructure 3
• Take and pass the VCP on vSphere 4 exam.  This option will only be available until December 31, 2009.  Beginning in 2010, VCPs on VI3 must attend the VMware vSphere 4: What’s New class in order to upgrade.
• If you are currently a VCP on ESX 2.x
• Take and pass the VCP on VMware Infrastructure 3 exam
• Take and pass the VCP on vSphere 4 Exam. This option will only be available until December 31, 2009.  Beginning in 2010, VCPs on VI3 must attend the VMware vSphere 4: What’s New class in order to upgrade.
• If you are not a VCP on VI3, but have attended one of the prerequisite classes (Install & Configure; Deploy Secure & Analyze; or Fast Track).
• Take and pass the VCP on VMware Infrastructure 3 exam OR attend the VMware vSphere: What’s New course.Take and pass the VCP on vSphere 4 Exam.

Labels: Releases, VMware

In early March, the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore finally unveiled its plans to move beyond VMware, launching a management solution that supports multiple hypervisors and applies to them a sophisticated automation layer.

That plan became an actual product in at the beginning of May with the launch of vControl 1.6.

At its first public release, the product features many typical capabilities you’d expect in a platform management tool:

• Support for multiple virtualization platforms (VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. Sun Solaris Zones will be added in a future release)
• Administration web portal
• Self-Service web portal
• Automation workflows
  A system that provides out-of-the-box workflows and actions as well as a visual workflow editor to build new workflows, combine actions and incorporate home-grown scripts as well as a Web Services interface and SDK to enable integration to third party systems.
• Virtual machines fail-over
• Virtual infrastructure discovery

Interestingly, vControl is able to import and use the script developed with the other new product that Vizioncore recently launched: the free Virtualization EcoShell.

vControl price starts at $399.00 per socket.

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

Labels: Platform Orchestration, Quest, Releases, Vizioncore

A few weeks ago VKernel has released version 4.0 of its Capacity Analyzer.

The product is now able to analyze the root cause for any vCPU, vRAM and vHDs problems, and provide resolution recommendations:

VKernel Capacity Analyzer 4.0 is available starting at $199 per socket.

Labels: Performance Monitoring, Releases, VKernel

A few days before virtualization.info broke the news about the PlateSpin executives mass exodus and the move of the development in India, Novell released PlateSpin Recon 3.6.

There are no new features. Just a new report (about resource reclamation), the extended support to Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and Oracle/Sun Solaris Containers, and a new licensing scheme (which Novell doesn’t detail in the press release or elsewhere in the website).

PowerRecon doesn’t get a major update since over one year, when PlateSpin (still on its own) released version 3.0.
Version 3.1, released in September 2007, was significant in terms of new features, but after that one it seems that the amount of resources dedicated to this product were severely reduced.

Labels: Novell, PlateSpin, Releases

After almost 2 years since the last major release, Leostream finally pushes out Connection Broker 6.0.

The main new feature introduced is the support for Citrix XenServer.
Connection Broker supports Citrix ICA protocol since version 1.0 and the new XenApp 4.5 implementation since version 5.3, released last February, but this is the first time that the product is fully certified to run on the Citrix hypervisor.

It’s clear that Leostream is now joining the ranks of those long-time, loyal VMware partners looking for alternative opportunities now that the VMware world gets smaller and smaller.

Connection Broker 6.0 also introduces support for multiple monitors.

Labels: Leostream, Releases

Last week VMware released a minor update for its desktop virtualization product Workstation, introducing the support for the new Intel Xeon 5500 CPU family and a bunch of additional guest operating systems.

A round of new guests are now supported on VMware Server as well, which was upgraded to version 2.0.1 (build 156745) at the end of March:

• Asianux Server 3.0 Service Pack 1
• CentoOS 4.7 / 5.2
• Windows Essential Business Server (EBS) / Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 Service Pack 2 / 2008
• Windows XP Service Pack 3
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Labels: Releases, VMware

Last week the Canadian startup Lanamark launched a new module for its hosted capacity planning service.

The new component, dubbed Desktop Analysis Pack, is specifically tailored to perform a capacity planning of VDI environment.

It does some very interesting things like recognizing if a target computer is a laptop or a workstation (this way it recognizes the mobile users), recognizing which applications are really used and which ones are just installed, recognizing if there are hardware constrains like monitors, printers, scanners.

The Lanamark competitors (like VMware, PlateSpin and CiRBA) are completely focused on servers, so this may be a first in the industry.

It’s hard to tell if the hosted model that Lanamark is using will pay off but for sure this company has some numbers.

Labels: Lanamark, Releases

After more than one year after the acquisition of Kidaro, Microsoft is finally able to release its version of Managed Workspace, now renamed as Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V).

MED-V is a platform wrapper for Virtual PC that envelops virtual machines in a security layer where the administrator can define granular corporate policies, deciding which physical networks can be accessed, when the VM expires, if the virtual hard drive is encrypted, etc.

The user can’t run more than one virtual machine per time with MED-V. Its image can be updated from a central management console.

MED-V has an enormous potential but Microsoft is mainly selling this product as a solution to maintain legacy applications inside the company while updating to new OSes (namely Vista and very soon Windows 7).

Microsoft has just three competitors in this space at the moment even if none of them is using the same marketing message: VMware, with its ACE (but please note that the ACE capabilities are being moved directly inside VMware Workstation and the product as is today will possibly disappear soon), Sentillion with its vThere and the just arrived Tresys Technology with its VM Fortress.

MED-V 1.0 is distributed as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2009, along with App-V 4.5 Cumulative Update 1 and other non-virtualization products.
MDOP is only available for those Microsoft customers that bought the Software Assurance.
Despite the numerous complains about this sales model, Microsoft says that it’s very happy about it and claims 14.4 million MDOP customers.
Maybe it’s true but it’s legit to wonder how many customers Microsoft would get directly selling MED-V and APP-V instead.

Labels: Microsoft, Platform Wrapper, Releases

Yesterday Sun released a new minor update of its desktop virtualization product: VirtualBox.

The new build introduces support for the just ratified OVF 1.0 standard.
Additionally, VirtualBox 2.2 introduces new, welcome features like:

• support for 3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris applications using OpenGL
• support for Apple Mac OS X codename Snow Leopard
• support for up to 16GB vRAM per virtual machine
• support for host-interface networking mode

Anyway there are a couple of other things that make the press announcement quite interesting:

1. Sun dropped the word xVM from the product name.
   Sun included VirtualBox in its xVM product family immediately after the innotek acquisition in February 2008.
   So far Sun has been very careful about its naming convention so this is unlikely a mistake.
   Maybe the company doesn’t want to promote a virtualization portfolio that seems unable to release, or maybe it’s thinking about some name changes.
2. Sun started to use the word hypervisor to describe VirtualBox
   It’s not clear if Sun is doing so to change the users perception about its product (now that it’s sold as a valid platform for VDI environments) but for sure VirtualBox is not a type-1 virtual machine monitor (VMM), aka hypervisor.
   It’s a type-2 VMM pretty much like VMware Player/Workstation/Server, Parallels Workstation/Desktop/Server for Mac or Microsoft VirtualPC/Virtual Server. 
   Messing with the technical terminology just confuses the customers which may lose the trust in the vendor, a mistake that Parallels did as well in the past.

Update: VirtualGuru published an interesting insight about the new virtual hardware that this release introduces.
It seems that the compatibility between VirtualBox 2.2 and VMware 5.x (and ESX) is now very high.

Labels: Releases, Standards, Sun

Last week VMware released a minor update for its desktop virtualization product Workstation.

Despite the numbering anyway the new build (156735) introduces the much needed support for the just release Intel Xeon 5500 CPUs (codename Nehalem) and the extended support for a number of guest operating systems:

Labels: Releases, VMware

At the beginning of this month VMware released the Update 4 for its management tier vCenter.
Yesterday the company also pushed the big update for the hypervisor itself.

The new Update 4 (build 153875) is available for both ESX 3.5 and ESXi and includes:

• support for Intel Xeon 5500 series CPUs (codename Nehalem)
• support for Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 (both Server and Desktop, both 32bit and 64bit), Ubuntu 8.10 (both Server and Desktop, both 32bit and 64bit), Windows PE 2.0 as guest OSes
• support for new SATA Controllers (from PMC, Intel, CERC and HP)
• support for new NICs (from HP, NetXtreme and Intel, including the just announced ones with VT-c)
• support for new storage arrays (from Sun)
• support for new management agents (from Dell and HP)
• an enhanced VMXNET driver for Windows XP and 2003 (which will require the re-installation of VMware Tools)

Labels: Releases, VMware

At a point of its history VMware must have decided that leading the hardware virtualization market was not enough. To actualize its long-term strategy (whatever it is) the company figured out that it would need at least an additional layer of virtualization.
So, in January 2008, it acquired the US startup Thinstall.

The first rebranded version of Thinstall technology came out in July 2008 under the name of ThinApp 4.0.
It included a couple of interesting features (Application Sync and Application Link) but was not a groundbreaking major release.

After 8 months (or 13, if you start to count from the acquisition announcement) ThinApp just reached version 4.0.2 (build 3089), a bugfix release that came out earlier this week.

It’s well-known that most of the VMware focus now is on the release of vSphere 4.0 in Q2 2009, but given this lack of significant upgrades it’s legit to wonder if the company is encountering more challenges than expected in developing the Thinstall original code.

Or, maybe, VMware just believes that the market is not ready yet for application virtualization and then the ThinApp development stays in low priority for now.

Labels: Releases, VMware

In October 2008 Veeam extended the capabilities of its Reporter tool by launching a new Enterprise edition.
The main difference between the standard edition and this one is that the latter has a specific focus on reporting the changes happening in large-scale virtual infrastructures.

This week Veeam releases the version 3.5 of this new Enterprise edition and introduces a couple of most-wanted capabilities:

• Support for Microsoft PowerShell
  a new Veeam PowerShell Extension allows to run custom queries against Virtual Infrastructure data gathered by Reporter Enterprise 3.5 and get details about the current state or earlier points in time.
• Support for custom reports
  Custom templates for your Raw Data Analysis reports can be created by including any custom branding or even custom reports to meet your daily reporting requirements.

The new 3.5 version also extends the number of predefined reports and collects additional data about the networking layer.

Labels: Releases, Veeam

In August 2008 PHD Technologies secured an undisclosed amount of money from an unnamed venture capital firm.
It used part of that money to rebuild its management team (a new CEO, a new EVP of Worldwide Sales, a new Executive Chairman) and to acquire the software products developed by Xtravirt.

The CEO, Sridhar Murthy, seems already gone but at least PHD Technologies relaunched its brand and released the Xtravirt products as free tools.

Under the new name of PHD Virtual Technologies (even if the logo just says PHD Virtual), the company launches today:

• VMNetBac 1.2.0
  VMNetBac allows customers to backup and restore the network configuration of a virtual machine. VMNetBac is a quick recovery tool to minimize the risk of losing network configurations when intrusive or mass-upgrade type tasks are performed.
• Virtual SAN 1.0.0
  This Virtual SAN appliance for VMware ESX 3 Server provides the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN. It utilizes, otherwise unused, local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise-level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA.
• SnapHunter 0.5.3
  SnapHunter is an ESX 3 Service Console utility which reports back on the Snapshot status of virtual machines from multiple ESX Servers.
• KS QuickConfig 1.3.0
  KS QuickConfig is a Windows GUI utility that reduces the time needed to deploy and configure VMware ESX 3 servers, and to eliminate inconsistencies that can arise with manual operations.

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

Labels: PHD Virtual Technologies, Releases

Yesterday Citrix released under GPL2 open source license a new component of its Project Satori, the software stack for paravirtualized Linux guest OSes that run on Microsoft Hyper-V.

The core of this software has been already released by Microsoft under the name of Linux Integration Components in September 2008.
It included the hypercall adapter for Hyper-V, the optimized disc driver (called StorVSC) and the optimized network driver (called NetVSC).

The package missed an optimized mouse driver (called InputVSC) that implies poor performance when the Hyper-V console is remotely accessed and the use tries to interact with the Guest OS from inside it.

The InputVSC driver is now available here.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, Releases

In September 2008 the management system company KACE announced the acquisition of a small application virtualization firm called Computers In Motion.

Six months later KACE is ready to launch on the market the acquired technology, rebranded as Virtual Kontainers, and start a harsh competition with Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and all the other companies that we list on the Virtualization Industry Radar.

KACE is offering this product as part of their KBOX appliance that provides centralized management:

It’s not clear if it will be available as a stand-alone software but for now it seems evident that KACE is trying to mimic Altiris: the company (acquired by Symantec in January 2007) used to offer an application virtualization platform (SVS) which could be centrally administered by its enterprise management console.

The Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Labels: KACE, Releases

After over one year of development, started after the company changed its identity from InovaWave to Hyper9, the first product of this reborn startup is ready.

The actual name of this solution is unclear. In one of the previous news from the company it seemed to be called VI Search and Analytics, but now the entire marketing literature just reports Hyper9 everywhere.

Whatever the product is called, it is a search engine that integrates with vCenter and indexes the information stored inside the VMware Infrastructure inventory.
Once the index is build, Hyper9 allows to find any detail about your virtual infrastructure (VMs, virtual networks, data stores, applications inside the Guest OSes, etc.) through a search engine interface that is much more similar to Splunk than to Google.

Once the administrator receives the Splunk-like results he can save his query, share it with other co-workers or further filter the obtained data by comparing the results with the ones received a previous day, or the ones coming from a completely different query.

The price of this solution starts at $300 per ESX host / year.

Labels: Hyper9, Releases

While everybody waits to know if IBM will swallow Sun, Sun continues to execute its (controversial) virtualization strategy.
The third version of its VDI connection broker, simply called VDI, is finally ready.

Announced in January, as expected the product introduces support for xVM VirtualBox, the hosted VMM that Sun acquired from innotek in February 2008.

As previously highlighted, it’s unclear why Sun believes that its customers may want to run a resource hog like a virtual desktop infrastructure on top of a platform that is much slower than a hypervisor.
The reason can’t be the price: even if VirtualBox is free there are several free hypevisors available at this point.

Anyway there are other features that are more interesting:

• the support for Microsoft RDP remoting protocol (finally!)
• the support for Microsoft Active Directory
• the integration with Solaris ZFS

Sun is pricing this version at $40 per concurrent user / year.

Labels: Releases, Sun, VDI

VKernel continues to release little, useful and often free tools for the virtualization community, mimicking the successful marketing approach of Veeam in its early days.

This time the startup launches SnapshotMyVM, a simple utility to automatically document the details (and the performance history) of any VMware Infrastructure 3.5 virtual machine.

The product interacts with vCenter and allows the administrator to select one or more VMs at the same time.
As soon as the process starts, SnapshotMyVM collects all the VM details and populates a report that can be manually modified to improve its accuracy and then exported in XML format.

At that point the report can be imported inside Microsoft Excel or any other tool that can read and manipulate XML sources:

Documenting a virtual infrastructure can be a real pain and today there are a very limited number of solutions available on the market to address the need.
So SnapshotMyVM certainly is worth a check.

Download it for free here.

Labels: Releases, VKernel

A big part of the Veeam success depends on its winning early-days strategy, when the company became popular thanks to several free, efficient tools solving daily administration duties.

Veeam is no more a startup but continues to give away quality tools for free.

Today the company announces the third version of its FastSCP, the free file management tool that released as second product in October 2006.

FastSCP 3.0 introduce support for ESXi (both commercial and free edition) and can perform ESXi-to-ESXi copies.

Available for free here.

Labels: Releases, Veeam