Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Oracle has released version 4.1.8 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version which can be considered a maintenance release can be installed on top of any VM VirtualBox 4.1.x installation and is the follow up of version 4.1.6. which was released in November this year.
This version fixes a couple of issues which are described in the changelog.
VKernel, recently acquired by Quest Software has released version 4.5. of its vOperations Suite (vOps). vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and Chargeback functionality for VMware and Hyper-V environments.
This version lacks the support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), which the company announced in August and promised to deliver in Q4 this year.
Teradici is the developer of the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) remote desktop protocol, which is leveraged in software (by VMware view) and provided with Teradici hardware solutions which are OEM’ed by several vendors. Teradici announced the release of firmware version 3.5.0. for its PCoIP zero client devices and version 1.7 of it’s Management Console which it announced in April last year, providing USB peripheral, login and security enhancements.
Citrix has released a whitepaper titled:"Windows 2008 R2 Optimization Guide For Desktop Virtualization with XenApp 6 / 6.5", the paper which contains 23 pages outlines optimization for XenApp 6 and 6.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2.
The paper starts with recommended GPO’s which can be applied to Windows Server 2008 R2, secondly it provides some recommendations on to be modified registry keys, which preferably can be set using Group Policy Preferences (GPP). It will then provide some registry keys to modify for images deployed using standard disk mode vDisk images using Citrix Provisioning Services.
Open source vendor Red Hat has released version 6.2 of its Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This version is the follow-up of version 6.1 which was released in May this year.
Version 6.2 consolidates all patches, enhancements and security updates released after version 6.1. Some of the new features provided are:
Microsoft has released version 3.2 of the Linux Integration Services for its hypervisor Hyper-V. This version is the follow-up of version 3.1 which was released in July this year.
The Linux Integration Services enable synthetic driver support for Virtual Machines running one of the supported Linux Distributions, currently the 32 and 64 bit versions of:
Since its first official release beginning 2009, the Virtual Session Indexer(VSI) has gained popularity as an independent benchmarking tool. One of the projects using the VSI tool is Project Virtual Reality Check, which entered phase 4 last June. Now Login Consultants has made available the Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) version 3.5. VSI is a benchmarking platform to measure remote desktop performance in a Terminal Server farm or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment.
The tool is developed by Login Consultants and is provided for free as an Express Edition, there is also a Pro edition which is supported by Login Consultants consulting services.
VMware has released version 4.1 of its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion. This release is considered an minor upgrade for version 4.0 which was released in September this year.
This version now supports running Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard as guest OS additional to running the already supported OS X Lion, OS X Lion Server, Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server and Mac OS X Leopard Server.
New features and improvements:
Update: VMware stated in a blogposting that the support for running Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard will be removed in a future update for Fusion, mainly because they are not complian to the licensing terms stated by Apple.
In September VMware released a new major version of its virtualization platform Workstation 8.0 and in October it released Player 4.0. Now VMware released an update for its virtualization platform Workstation and Player. Workstation gets updated to version 8.0.1 and Player to version 4.0.1.
Workstation 8.0.1. and Player 4.0.1. now support Ubuntu 11.10 as a guest OS and provide improvements in creating and using shared VMs and remote VMs and graphics performance. Disk and Memory management issues have been addressed and this version provides some compatibility enhancements.
VMware has released version 4.7 of of its application virtualization solution ThinApp. This version includes the ability to use ThinApp packages in combination with its Software as a Service (SaaS) application catalog product Horizon Application Manager, a feature announced in September this year. This version is the follow-up of version 4.6.2. which was released in August this year.
More information on how to enable ThinApp integration with Horizon Application Manager can be found in a blogposting on the VMware Blogs website, and is described in the ThinApp Horizon Integration Guide.