virtualization.info

In perfect sync with the release of Citrix XenApp 6.0, VMware announces ThinApp 4.5, the application virtualization platform that acquired from Thinstall in January 2008.

After the acquisition VMware released only one major update for ThinApp: version 4.0, in July 2008.

Version 4.5 (238809) released today introduces a number of new features that the former CEO of Thinstall, Jonathan Clark, discusses in details on the corporate blog. The list includes:

• Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
  Existing packages can be upgraded through a new Relink utility. Need to rebuild or repackage applications.
• Support for MSI packages larger than 2GB without requiring multiple CAB files
• Support for capturing on partially non-clear PCs (experimental)
  When installing an MSI based application ThinApp 4.5 can automatically detect files and registry entries that the application requires even if those entries already exists on the capture PC. This results in correct captures even in the case where some libraries are installed on the PC.
  VMware solution for detecting dependent registry keys and files is generic and should work with other libraries but at this point the company only tested the VMware Tools scenario and using a clean PC is still best practice.
• Quality Reporting
  Virtualized applications can be configured to report anonymous information to VMware once every 10 days.
  This includes: application vendor, name and version; OS version; the number of time the application was executed and the number of crashes detected over time; total execution time of the application and more.
• Journaling of Virtual file system meta data and virtual registry
  Actually introduced in ThinApp 4.0.4, VMware decided to unveil it with 4.5.
  The purpose of journaling is to support the ability to recover gracefully in the event disk writes are incomplete or the disk state becomes inconsistent when sets of disk writes are not flushed atomically.

The Quality Reporting feature is rather interesting. VMware says that its goal is to build a database of applications that work well on ThinApp and understand where to focus more their support effort. But the intelligence provided could be extremely useful well beyond that, considering that the company has started to make acquisitions in the application market.

ThinApp 4.5 also introduces a number of improvements in different areas, including:

• I/O performance for VDI
• Memory sharing for suites of applications and Terminal Server
• Startup time
• Application white listing

Labels: Releases, VMware

While Hyper9 continues to build features on top of its search engine for virtual infrastructures, it also keeps R&D resources busy on parallel projects.

The last one, released a few days ago, is SimDK, an open source tool able to simulate the vSphere behavior.
Users can connect to the SimDK service with VMware clients, like the PowerCLI or the standard vSphere Client.
It’s primarily aimed at developers that want to do QA and testing, verify APIs compatibility or perform load and scalability testing, but it can be used to test, for example, 3rd party scripting tools like the Quest/Vizioncore Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI).

SimDK can even emulate the vSphere APIs against a different hypervisor (like Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V).
What happen here is that the tool acts as a proxy, translating the commands issued through the VMware APIs in something that other virtualization platforms  can understand.

Here’s a video of the product in action:

Labels: Hyper9, Releases, Tools

At the end of January VMware released a couple of minor updates for its desktop virtualization platforms for Windows and Linux: Workstation and Player.
For some reasons we missed this product update, so we are reporting about it now.

The new build (227600) is primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces support for a number of guest and host operating systems:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 (host and guest)
• Windows Vista SP2 (host and guest)
• Ubuntu 9.10 (host and guest)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (host and guest)
• CentOS 5.4 (guest only)
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 (guest only)

Labels: Releases, VMware

After releasing Capacity Modeler to counter the new VMware CapacityIQ, last week VKernel released another free tool to keep the virtualization community engaged.

This one is called Capacity View. It is an extremely simple dashboard for Windows that summarizes the virtual infrastructure elements (data centers, clusters, hosts, virtual machines, resource pools, data stores), the resources allocation (both physical and virtual) and the amount of alerts that VMware vCenter is raising at any given moment.

The approach is quite brilliant: under each alert group (Performance Problems, Available Capacity and Over-allocated Resources) there’s a link to a relevant product that VKernel sells.
Many administrators may desire to monitor the virtual infrastructure with this single-window, essential console during the day, jumping on the fully-featured vCenter control panel only when it’s truly needed.
And while they may have no interest in the other VKernel products, there’s a daily reminder that those products exist under their nose. This is more than enough to develop a strong brand awareness and instill doubt that those products may be actually useful.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Releases, VKernel

ConVirt (formerly XenMan) is an open source management console that supports multiple hypervisors, including Xen and KVM.
Originally started in 2006, the product was relaunched in March 2009, demonstrating a significant potential.

One year later, the company behind ConVirt, Convirture, releases version 2.0, which once again features notable capabilities:

• new architecture
  made of an AJAX web front-end which supports multiple administrators and a back-end data repository for the entire virtual infrastructure
• performance trends reporting
  capability to produce interactive charts about historical information in the data repository
• template compliance tracking
  capability to track how much a virtual machine changed from its original template and to flag discrepancies
• datacenter-wide monitoring
  both storage and network resources can be monitored from a single console rather than checking each host configuration

The company is still offering the product as open source, but it’s also trying to monetize it with the introduction of an Enterprise Edition (currenty in beta).

This product will add to the open source edition the following capabilities:

• dynamic resources allocation (through the use of resource pools)
• high availability (through hosts and virtual machines fail-over)
• virtual machines backup (both scheduled and on-demand)
• network and storage automated configuration (VLAN and SAN setup across multiple hosts)
• role-based access control
• alerting and email notification
• CLI and APIs

Labels: Convirture, KVM, Platform Management, Releases, Xen

Last week VMware released a patch specifically for the version of Update Manager (VUM) that is included in vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

The new version (build 231675) is needed to fix a couple of bugs affecting capability to upgrade the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch and the time required to scan and patch hosts in a cluster.

Thanks to Yellow Bricks for the news.

Labels: Releases, Security, VMware

Last week VMware updated its disaster recovery solution Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to version 4.0.1.1 (build 236215).

The new version is primarily for bug fixing and features enhancements. There are no new capabilities. Yellow Bricks published the complete list.

This version of SRM supports storage replication adapters from:

• 3PAR
• Compellent
• Dell | EqualLogic
• EMC (for CLARiiON, Symmetrix, Celerra and RecoverPoint)
• FalconStor
• Fujitsu
• Hitachi
• HP (for EVA, LeftHand and XP)
• IBM (for DS, SVC ad XIV)
• LSI
• NEC
• NetApp (both NAS and SAN products)
• Sun (acquired by Oracle)

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Releases, VMware

Trilead is a Swiss startup that entered the virtualization market in Q3 2008 with a backup solution for VMware virtual machines.

Its product, VM Explorer, reached version 1.5 in November 2008.  After long time, the company released version 2.0 last week.

This build introduces support for ESX 4.0 and for vCenter, which means that protected VMs are tracked even when they are moved on different hosts with vMotion or DRS.

Labels: Releases, Trilead

Trustware is a US startup that entered the virtualization market in August 2006.
The company offers an application virtualization engine, BufferZone, that primarily targets consumer market.

The company released version 2.0 in January 2007 and version 3.0 in June 2008.
Now, after no less than one year and a half, Trustware launches version 3.30.

The new build is primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces support for Windows 7 (32bit only).

BufferZone key selling point is that it keeps your computer secure (more than an anti-virus) because of the isolation that application virtualization offers.
Maybe it’s true, but if Trustware can’t update its engine more frequently than once per year, it’s hard to believe that this product can defend itself against software exploits.

Labels: Releases, Trustware

A couple of weeks ago, VMware released the second minor update for its desktop virtualization platform for the Apple market: Fusion.

Fusion 3.0.2 (build 232708) only fixes a bug that prevents latest build of Mac OS X 10.6 Server from running as a guest OS.

The interesting thing anyway is that with this release VMware introduced two versions of the product:

• Fusion, that includes a 12-months complimentary subscription to McAfee VirusScan Plus 2009
• Fusion Light, that doesn’t include any 3rd party bundle

Labels: Releases, VMware

Oracle just released its first updated for VirtualBox after the acquisition of Sun.

The list of bugs corrected in version 3.1.4 is long but there are no new features .

An interesting thing is that the company decided to change the default behavior of the engine: now VirtualBox tries to leverage hardware virtualization acceleration by default, and this includes both VPDI and nested paging, provided by Intel VT-x and AMD-V RVI enhancements.

Labels: Oracle, Releases, Sun

Almost seven months after the launch of a public beta program, Microsoft finally released App-V 4.6 as part of the Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2010.

The new application virtualization platform introduces support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (including 64bit editions), as well as the upcoming Office 2010.

The last point is particularly important because the new virtualized version of Office 2010, dubbed Click-To-Run, depends on this version of App-V.

App-V 4.6 also introduces a new feature called Read-Only Cache Mode, which is particularly useful in VDI environments. Ruben Spruijt offered a detailed analysis of the feature:

App-V 4.6 now supports the ability to configure the App-V client to use the package cache as a read-only file. This capability was added to support multiple App-V client machines access to a single package cache this functionality is very useful in Server Hosted Virtual Desktops (VDI) and Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) scenarios. With VDI there is a big impact on (central) storage. The IO and capacity increases while using vDesktops. Storage needs much attention while designing and maintaining a VDI environment. Microsoft App-V shared cache functionality will decrease the storage capacity impact.  The App-V package cache normally exists inside of a file with .FSD filename extension.

The FSD file must be placed in a location that can be accessed by the vDesktops; the location of the package cache should have read-only access and should perform well.  Direct Attached Storage (DAS) or central (SAN) storage will meet the storage criteria…

Microsoft updated its Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide to include information about App-V 4.6 new features.

Labels: Microsoft, Releases

Veeam just released the third major version of its popular file manager for VMware ESX hosts: FastSCP.

Version 3.0.2 introduces support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Interestingly, the company reports that FastSCP now has a user base of over 120,000 virtualization professionals.
This audience was conquered after a little more than three years: FastSCP 1.0 was released in October 2006 while version 2.0 arrived in February 2007.

Labels: Releases, Veeam

Just one week after the release of Stratosphere 4.5.3, the US startup Liquidware Labs announces version 4.5.4.

In this build the company included an Application Virtualization Assessment feature clarifying that its interest goes beyond hardware virtualization and VDI.

With the new capability, Stratusphere 4.5.4 can build an application inventory by assessing physical desktops and laptops.
The inventory includes the following information:

• Executable size
• System services installed and used per application
• Device drivers installed per application
• Total number of application users
• Average launch delay (application load time)
• Application usage (total and average time)
• Application resource requirements (total and average CPU, memory, IO)

Basically Liquidware Labs is betting on the advent of application virtualization as a mainstream technology, something that doesn’t seem to happen anytime soon.
It’s not the only one. A few weeks ago another startup, Lanamark, silently introduced a similar feature which completely passed under the radars.

Labels: LiquidWare Labs, Releases, VDI

Leostream announces today a new minor version for its Connection Broker that arrives over five months after the 6.2 release.

In this update the company introduces a number of new features:

• support for the open source version of Xen (the one released by Xen.org)
• support for Sun Secure Global Desktop Software
• support for Ericom Blaze (which comes from the technology partnership signed in November 2009)
• a web client to access virtual desktops over HTTP/S connections
• control over the remote desktop protocol used by remote clients when multiple protocols are available
• a more granular set of roles and permissions that separate end users and administrators rights

While every feature above is welcome, the most interesting one is the support for Sun SDG.
The Oracle acquisition of Sun, and its declared intention to continue investing in the existing virtualization portfolio, is translating into new opportunities for those vendors that are struggling to compete with VMware in its own domain. And competing against VMware View can be pretty hard these days.

Labels: Leostream, Releases, VDI

At the end of last week VMware updated its Lifecycle Manager product, reaching version 1.1 (build 227208).
The product has been in beta for over six months, but it doesn’t introduce any major new feature.

It’s primarily for performance enhancements, and comes with internationalization support (but it’s not available in any language besides English).

Lifecycle Manager 1.1 includes a new build of the vCenter Orchestrator 4.0.1 (build 4502) that customers must install to use it.

Labels: Lifecycle Management, Releases, VMware

Last week the startup Liquidware Labs updated its flagship product Stratosphere to version 4.5.3.

This minor update (version 4.5 came out in October 2009) just introduces a much welcome one-click assessment that produces a useful PowerPoint slidedeck.

To be honest the slides could be prettier but they are customizable, so users may want to apply their own themes before presenting to a wide audience.
The information inside the slide deck anyway is valuable, especially a graph showing how many physical machines and how many users are good candidates for client consolidation (aka VDI).

Labels: LiquidWare Labs, Releases, VDI

Just before the beginning of VMworld 2009, VMware announced the upcoming availability of Go, a free web console to manage ESXi 4.0 (ESX hosts are not supported).

Yesterday the company finally released it.

Go allows to initialize and patch ESXi hosts, create and operate virtual machines, check the VMs patching level connecting to the Shavlik Technologies service (VMware OEMs the Shavlik technology for its Update Manager - VUM).

Go is a hosted application that resides on VMware servers.
To properly operate anyway, it needs that a number of components are installed on one corporate desktop, which basically acts like a proxy.
Specifically, Go needs the Microsoft .NET framework and PowerShell, the VMware vSphere Power CLI, the Remote Console and a copy of Converter Stand-Alone.
All this software can be installed on  any Windows desktop (XP SP3, Vista SP2 or 7).

The ESXi configuration that is defined online with the web GUI and executed locally with the components above, isn’t available for offline usage.
There’s no way to use Go without an Internet connection, and this means that customers may be unable to use it if VMware or their ISP have a problem.
VMware grants that it performs backups of customers’ configurations on regular basis but there may be no way for them to export such configurations (this last statement must be verified anyway).

Go is free but customers have to grant to VMware the privilege to analyze the way they use the console, which will give the company a good insight about how the SMB segment uses its virtualization platform.

Labels: Releases, VMware

Offered for free with the Essential Plus and higher editions (except Standard) of vSphere 4.0, there’s an interesting product which VMware didn’t promote at all so far: Data Recovery.

Data Recovery is a disk & file backup/restore product that comes as a virtual appliance (powered by a 64bit CentOS 5.2 Linux distribution) and protects guest OSes in ESX and ESXi.

Definitively a welcome addition to the vSphere suite, which puts the company in direct competition with long term partners like Quest/Vizioncore and Veeam (and this may be a good reason for VMware to stay under the radar with it for a while).

In late November 2009 the company updated it to version 1.1 (build 207380) primarily to introduce support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 guest OSes.

VDR 1.1 also introduces a new File Level Restore (FLR) client for Windows guests which finally allows to restore single files:

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Releases, VMware

In December 2007 the founder of Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May 2009), Alex Vasilevsky, left his company to form a new venture with Dan McCall, former board advisor at Reflex Security (now Reflex Systems).

The new startup, fueled by Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners funds, came out the stealth mode in September 2008 and released the first semi-public beta of his flagship product, NxTop, in July 2009.

NxTop is one of the first client hypervisors to hit the market and one of the few that doesn’t require Intel vPro as mandatory hardware feature (both VMware and Citrix client hypervisors seems to need it to work).
Based on Xen, NxTop is sold as a new and more efficient platform to manage the PC lifecycle, so it’s not in direct competition with the upcoming VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) and the Citrix XenClient, which are meant to offer offline VDI capabilities.

Fast forward to mid-December 2009: Virtual Computer releases NxTop 1.2.
With this releases the company claims that guest OSes score a performance of 90% of physical platforms, and of 98% of native networks (both measured with “standard PC benchmarks that simulate corporate workloads”).
NxTop 1.2 also introduces full support for multi-core processors and a 3-seconds suspend/resume.

Too bad there’s no way to try this client hypervisor for general purpose virtualization on desktop (it would be less practical than using a typical hosted virtualization solution, but an enjoyable way to try it).

Labels: Releases, Virtual Computer

Just a couple of weeks ago Red Hat made bold move by releasing its remote desktop protocol SPICE, acquired from Qumranet in September 2008, as open source.

The company now offers the SPICE drivers for KVM virtual machines.

The package (for Windows XP only at the moment) creates a virtual GPU called Red HAt QXL and a Virtual Desktop Interface Port.

Administrators are also required to install a SPICE agent inside each Windows guest.
At that point the SPICE client, which is part of the open source release, will be able to connect to the virtual machine.

Thanks to Linux-KVM for the news.

Labels: KVM, Qumranet, Red Hat, Releases

While Paul and Peter Ghostine are now busy working on a stealth-mode cloud computing startup, their former employer Quest releases vWorkspaces 7.0 just before the end of the year.

The new release introduces a number of interesting features, including:

• Inclusion of Flash redirection (for 32bit Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8) in the Experience Optimized Protocol (EOP) [demo]
• Bandwidth and compression control for USB devices (Virtual USB Hub)
• Integration with VMware Linked Clones [demo]
• Customization of Sysprep procedure
• Support for reprovisiong VMware virtual machines at logoff
• Support for 32/64bit Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 [demo]

vWorkspaces 7.0 also includes the experimental capability to redirect Internet Explorer to the client.

Labels: Provision Networks, Quest, Releases, VDI

Just before the Christmas break, Citrix has released the first updated for its XenServer 5.5, which introduces a number of improvements and addresses a critical issue with the LVHD snapshots:

When LVHD snapshots are deleted, disk space is reclaimed by freeing unused snapshot data. This is provided automatically by XenServer while VMs continue to run. However, there is a known limitation in the 5.5 implementation of this feature: when all snapshots are deleted for a given VM'sdisks, some disk space allocated to these snapshots may remain. To address this limitation, Update 1 includes an 'Off-line Coalesce' tool that can reclaim all disk space previously allocated to deleted snapshots while the VM is temporarily set offline.

Labels: Citrix, Releases, Xen

Just before the Christmas break, Citrix released a minor update for its orchestration framework Workflow Studio.

The new version 2.0.1. doesn’t introduce any change in the product but extends the existing activity libraries and delivers a couple of new ones.
Here’s the extended/new libraries about virtualization:

• [NEW] Citrix XenDesktop Activity Library
  • Activities that create, delete, and retrieve desktop definitions and manage desktop groups.
• [EXTENDED] Citrix XenServer Activity Library 
  • Automate the process of taking snapshots, backing up VMs, and backing up VM metadata for site migration and disaster recovery scenarios.
  • Automate the installation and update of tools on guest VMs.
• [EXTENDED] Citrix XenApp Activity Library
  Now includes activities that support automated application streaming packaging and application management.

On top of that Citrix also made available a new library to automate the Xen-based virtual machines that live in the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform:

• Bundle Instance - bundles an instance within Amazon EC2 (using S3)
• Create Security Group - creates a new security group
• Delete Security Group - deletes a security group
• Get AMIs - returns a list of all the registered AMIs
• Get Instances - returns a list of all the instances currently running
• Launch Instance - launches a new instance (or instances) of the specified AMI
• Terminate Instance - terminates one or more instances

Labels: Citrix, Platform Orchestration, Releases

Last week Parallels released an update for its desktop virtualization product.

The new build (9308) comes just one month after the official launch of Desktop 5.0. It introduces a number of fixes and a few new capabilities:

• Experimental support for Fedora 12 Xorg 1.7
• Experimental Support for Mandriva 2010
• Support for kernel options with Mac OS X Server guest OSes

Labels: Parallels, Releases

Yesterday Veeam released version 4.1 of its disaster recovery solution Backup & Replication.

The major new feature is that the product can now replicate the paid/licensed version of VMware ESXi leveraging the VMware vStorage APIs (so far it could only backup it).
The replication of free version of ESXi is not available, according to what VMware required in June.

Backup & Replication 4.1 also introduces SNMP notifications (reporting the status per-job and per-VM) and a brand new, stand-alone utility, available for Windows and Linux, called Extract that customers can store on tapes with saved data, to accelerate the restore process.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Releases, Veeam

Since the release in May, Cisco updated its virtual switch for VMware virtual infrastructure, the Nexus 1000V, a couple of times.

The second update arrived last week, introducing a number of key features. Most of them are security-oriented and very welcome.

The most prominent anyway is a JAVA-based GUI installer for the Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM).
The GUI allows to perform several actions like create the VMware port groups, VLANs, enable the SSH service, register the Nexus plug-in inside vCenter Server and restart the VSM.
Cisco published  a video to show it in action:

Nexus 1000V 1.2 also includes:

• Layer 3 control
  a VSM can be Layer 3 accessible and control hosts that reside in a separate Layer 2 network
• Virtual Service Domain (VSD)
  Virtual service domains (VSDs) allow you to classify and separate traffic for network services.
  Interfaces within a VSD are shielded by a service VM (SVM) that provides a specialized service like a firewall, deep packet inspection (application aware networking), or monitoring.
• iSCSI Multipath
  The iSCSI multipath feature sets up multiple routes between a server and its storage devices for maintaining a constant connection and balancing the traffic load.
• DHCP Snooping
  DHCP snooping acts like a firewall between untrusted hosts and trusted DHCP server.
• Dynamic ARP Inspection
  Dynamic ARP Inspection (DAI) validates ARP requests and response.
• MAC Pinning
  If one or more upstream switches do not support port channels, you can use MAC pinning to assign each Ethernet port member to a particular port channel subgroup.
• Static Pinning
  You can use vPC-HM to configure a port channel subgroup so that traffic is forwarded only through its member ports by assigning (or pinning) one of the following to the subgroup: vEthernet interface, the Control VLAN e Packet VLAN.

Labels: Cisco, Releases, virtual networking

Today VMware released version 1.2 (build 41671) of its application performance analyzer AppSpeed, announced in January and released for the first time in July.

AppSpeed, acquired from B-Hive in May 2008, is a performance analyzer tool that sniffs the network traffic and learn how the applications inside virtual machines usually perform, so it can help to understand the reason of performance issues.

Version 1.2 introduces some interesting features:

• A single user interface can now manage different AppSpeed instances
• The UI can now edit the mapped application topology
• Administrators can exclude servers that don’t need to be monitored
• Users authenticate against the vCenter user database
• The product includes a new latency-focused analysis which offers two views: a view that compares a single application or transaction latency between servers, and a view that compares transaction or server latency with their latency baselines, pointing to latency anomalies

Labels: Performance Monitoring, Releases, VMware

HP always offered a basic capacity planning tool to its customers that want to use ProLiant servers for virtualization.
In November 2005 it released one for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. In March 2007 it released one for VMware VI 3.0.

Yesterday the company released also one for Microsoft Hyper-V R2. This one is not a web tool like the previous versions, but a 50MB Windows application that customers can download and use without restrictions.

To collect data from physical servers, the Sizer tool interacts with the Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit (both 3.x and 4.x are supported) or the Windows Performance Monitor, but it can also import information from other tools.
Once data is available, this tool produces a detailed Bill of Materials (BoM) that includes servers and storage equipment, with pricing specified for the customer’s country.

It also includes an update engine which automatically downloads new inventory parts and refreshes prices.
A check of this engine shows that the capacity planning engine is marked as version 4.0:

Labels: Capacity Planning, HP, Microsoft, Releases

A few Microsoft customers know that the company is offering a patch management solution for offline virtual machines since July 2008.
The tool is called Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (OVMST) and uses PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).

Despite the importance of this product, which is released for free, so far Microsoft spent minimal effort in developing and promoting it.
Version 2.0 was released exactly one year ago. And today OVMST only reaches version 2.1, introducing support for the R2 wave of products.
This includes Hyper-V R2 (released in July for partners, in October for public), SCVMM 2008 R2 (released in August), SCCM 2007 SP2, WSUS 3.0 SP2, and Windows 7/2008 R2 guest OSes.

It’s very concerning to see that Microsoft doesn’t recognize the security of virtual data centers as a top priority.
The company should do much better that this to build confidence in its upcoming Azure-based private cloud offering.

Labels: Microsoft, Releases

Last week VMware announced the availability of Fusion 3.0.1 (build 215242). 
While it seems just a minor update, it introduces a couple of key improvements.

First of all, the Windows virtual machines gain now from 20% to 80% better performance on Mac OS X 10.6 (codename Snow Leopard) for 3D and video tasks.
It seems that part of the slowdown experienced with Fusion 3.0 on Mac OS X depends on the VMware Tools which are now improved.

Additionally, Fusion 3.0.1 introduces a brand new 64bit networking stack, which was not available when VMware launched the Fusion 3.0 64bit engine.

Finally, the new product supports Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (codename Karmic Koala) as guest OS and Parallels Desktop 5.0 virtual machines for importing.

Labels: Releases, VMware

On November 23 VMware released the first updated for its vSphere 4.0 platform. The patch is especially important if the customers are implementing or evaluating VDI because it introduces support for View 4.0, and for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 guest OSes.

Update 1 also introduced a Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool to recognize configuration issues and minimize the downtime during the upgrade.
Unfortunately it seems that the patch itself causes downtime and VMware had to re-release it the portion for ESX today:

We’ve released a new version of ESX 4.0 Update 1 that resolves the issue with the ESX 4.0 Update 1 install failing, timing out and resulting in the host entering an usable state.

The new version is called ESX 4.0 Update 1A.

Update: It seems that the Update 1 causes some serious issues to ESXi 4.0 too, at the point that VMware recommends to not install the patch on vCenter.
The Update 1A above doesn’t seem to fix the problem, so customers have to wait at the moment.

Labels: Releases, VMware

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

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

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

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

Labels: IBM, Releases, VDI, Virtual Bridges

Sun releases today refreshes its hosted desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox, introducing a major new feature.

Believe or not VirtualBox 3.1 is now capable to perform a virtual machine live migration, called Teleportation, between remote hosts over a standard TCP/IP network link.

Of course, because the virtualization layer sits above the host operating system, VirtualBox has limited compatibility issues with different CPU families, and no problems with different operating systems.

To work, Teleportation requires that both copies of VirtualBox have two identical VMs with same virtual hardware. These two VMs must access the same shared storage (NFS/CIFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel).
Despite what the press release claims, the user manual highlights that teleporting a VM between an AMD and an Intel CPU may fail, despite VirtualBox is able to simulate the each other differences to a degree.

VirtualBox 3.1 introduces has other interesting capabilities:

• the (Experimental) support for a virtual EFI (which means that the product could run a copy of Mac OS X over time)
• the support for 2D acceleration on Windows guest OSes accessign the host graphic card
• the support for paravirtualized network adapters (developed around the virtIO standard, and released and maintained as part of the KVM project - virtIO drivers are available for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Linux kernels 2.6.25 or later)

Last but not least, there’s an ongoing parallel project around VirtualBox: an AJAX web interface featuring a Flash-based RDP client.

Sun started developing it in August, it’s documenting progresses on a blog, and the early code is available here with a MIT license.

The most interesting thing appeared on the blog so far, is the information that the company is counting more than 16 million users for this product (the today’s press announcement mentions over 20 million downloads instead).

Labels: Oracle, Releases, Sun

At the beginning of the week the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore released vFoglight 6.0, further consolidating its presence in the performance monitoring segment.
It seems that the company is investing a lot of resources in this product, which becomes increasingly important and on pair with the flagship vRanger.

The new release includes the following features:

• Several graphical improvements (a new dashboard, a task-based UI, new wizards, etc.)
• Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008 as backend database
• Support for Apple Safari as web client
• Support for Microsoft Excel to export the reports

Labels: Performance Monitoring, Quest, Releases, Vizioncore

At the beginning of the week, the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore released a major update for its vReplicator (formerly esxReplicator).

Version 3.0 introduces the following new features:

• Active Block Mapping (ABM) technology
  ABM filters deleted data blocks so that only active blocks are
  scanned and streamed to the target. White space detection eliminates the need to
  compress, stream, and write zero blocks during the replication process.
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology
  CBT tracks the disk block changes made by the source VM. vReplicator 3.0 can take advantage of CBT, once enabled on the source host, to record the blocks that have changed since the last
  replication pass and transfer them to the target host without scanning the VMDK.
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 virtual machines with thin disks
  When replicating a VM containing thin discs from an ESX 4 host to an ESX 4 host,
  vReplicator 3.0 will create a replica VM with thin discs. In addition, when configuring
  jobs for VMs with thin disks, vReplicator will only show targets that support thin disks.
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Storage vMotion
  It ensures that previously scheduled replication jobs continue to run successfully after one or more of the source disks are SVMotioned.
  In addition, the disks on the SVMotion target datastores are replicated instead of the ones originally configured in the replication jobs.

Vizioncore also changed its licensing model, moving from a per-VM model to a per-CPU one. Now each physical CPU socket on an ESX Server host requires one CPU license.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Quest, Releases, Vizioncore

During the weekend VMware released the first Update pack for its vSphere platform.

Update 1 (build 208156) is extremely important as it introduces support for the just released View 4.0.
It also introduces support for:

• up to 160 virtual machines per host (only in HA clusters with 8 hosts or less)
• Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (both 32/64bit) as guest OSes (and as platform for the vSphere Client)
• IBM DB2 as backend database for vCenter Server 4.0

The Update 1 also introduces a new Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool, which can be executed on the ESX hosts to find out issues that may prevent the upgrade.

Labels: Releases, VMware

The startup Hyper9 (in a previous life InovaWave) released last week the second version of its flagship product.

The company can’t stop to rename it: from VI Search and Analytics (before launch) to just Hyper9 to Virtualization Optimization Suite (VOS) to, now, Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO).

Along with the name, also the product focus seems to be changing. 
Version 1.0 was launched in March as the definitive on-premises search engine for virtual infrastructures, showing many similarities with the well respected Splunk.
Version 2.0, launched last week, is extending in many areas, from performance tracking to capacity planning to configuration management:

The product has some real potential. It must be seen how well the company will leverage the search engine to compete with more mature products in the segments above.

Labels: Hyper9, Releases

Last week VMware finally released the much awaited View 4.0, which supports vSphere 4.0 and introduces the software-only version of the Teradici remote desktop protocol PCoIP.

VMware is offering two versions of View 4: Enterprise (which includes vSphere and View Manager 4.0), priced at $150 per concurrent user, and Premier (which also includes View Composer and ThinApp), priced at $250 per concurrent user.

Of course the key aspect of this release is how well PCoIP performs on LAN and WAN scenarios.
Unfortunately the product will be available for download on November 19, so for now it’s impossible to make a performance analysis and comparison with Microsoft RDP 7, Citrix ICA/HDX and the other tens of  alternatives that are flooding the VDI market.

The major problem with PCoIP is if its performance is so great to justify the adoption of a new proprietary remote desktop protocol at its 1.0 release (the protocol is more mature than that but so far relied on hardware components).
Many customers may want to be careful here, mostly considering that VMware and Teradici just have a co-development agreement, which is not even exclusive.
What happens if Teradici is acquired by a VMware competitor or if the company suffers major issues?
And most of all, what happens if one year from now VMware consider this protocol unpractical and too expensive to optimize and decides to replace it, for instance, with the just ratified Net2Display standard? 

Anyway a lot has been already said.

Brian Madden already published a brief FAQ list, which includes a couple of interesting details:

• The PCoIP client only supports Windows at the moment. Linux and Mac OS versions are expected next year
• View 4.0 will fully support Microsoft Windows 7 as guest OS in early 2010

Chad Sakac already published a blueprint to design a View 4.0 architecture with the recently announced VMware/Cisco/EMC hardware called VBlock.
The solution (a VBlock 1) fits over 2,048 virtual desktops and costs $750 per seat all inclusive:

The paper includes some performance analysis. It doesn’t clarify if the numbers are obtained when using the RDP or the PCoIP protocol (assuming this will make any difference) but it’s really worth a check.

Update: With some delay VMware finally released the bits of View 4.0 (build 210939).
To install it you first need to update vSphere 4.0 with Update 1 (build 208156), released Nov. 19, 2009.

Labels: Releases, VDI, VMware