One hour before starting a joint webcast with Citrix about its new virtualisation strategy for desktops, Microsoft briefly announces a number of new initiatives, upcoming technologies and licensing changes. About hosted desktop virtualisation: The Windows XP SP3 virtual machine that can be run on Windows 7 Virtual PC, called XP Mode, will no longer require hardware virtualisation to be executed. This is probably the best way Microsoft found to solve the problems that Sony created to many customers with its shortsighted strategy . The new version will be released today as an hotfix. About bare-metal server virtualisation: Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 will introduce a memory overcommit technique for Hyper-V R2 called Dynamic Memory . The news leaked at the beginning of February. About VDI: The remote desktop acceleration technology acquired by Calista in January 2008, now renamed as RemoteFX , will arrive with Windows Server R2 Service Pack 1 and will be integrated in Remote Desktop Services (RDS) . RemoteFX can be considered an accelerator for RDP over the LAN for Windows 7 SP1 clients only. Beginning July 1, 2010, Windows Client technology Assurance (SA) will include the VECD license for free. Customers that don’t wont to subscribe the SA will be able to buy a new Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license: $100 /device/year instead of $110 of the VECD. Beginning July 1, 2010, Windows Client technology Assurance (SA) and new Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license customers will have the right to access their virtual desktop and Office applications inside it on secondary, non-corporate network devices, such as home PCs and kiosks. Microsoft and Citrix signed a new technology agreement to integrate and extend Microsoft RemoteFX with Citrix HDX. Microsoft and Citrix launched a joint trade-in program dubbed “Rescue for VMware VDI”, offering up to 500 licenses to VMware View customers at no additional cost, and offering to new customers a 70% discount on Microsoft VDI Standard Suite subscription license and a 50% discount on Citrix XenDesktop VDI Edition annual license ( $28 per device for up to 250 devices for one year ). Update: Brian Madden just published a video of RemoteFX in action.

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In perfect sync with the release of Citrix XenApp 6.0, VMware announces ThinApp 4.5, the application virtualisation 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

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Pivot3 announced two new core products and enhancements to its full suite of scalable storage solutions today. Pivot3 also unveiled the HardBank server, a ruggedized version of the MiniBank that is ideal for military, air-constrained and mobile applications that experience harsh environments with extreme dust, vibration and heat. This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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VMware has announced the availability of VMware’s ThinApp 4.5 application virtualisation solution. ThinApp 4.5 enables rapid adoption of Microsoft Windows 7 in the enterprise by providing compatibility for legacy and custom applications across multiple Windows operating system environments. This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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Core Security Technologies, provider of the CORE IMPACT family of comprehensive enterprise security testing solutions, has issued an advisory disclosing a vulnerability that could affect large numbers of organizations and consumers using Microsoft’s Virtual PC virtualization technology and leave them open to potential attack. A Core Security Exploit Writer working with CoreLabs, the research arm… This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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The popular security firm Core Security yesterday disclosed a serious security vulnerability found in all Microsoft hosted virtualisation products, including Virtual Server 2005, Virtual PC 2007 (with and without SP1) and Windows 7 Virtual PC. While Core Security is using the “hypervisor” terminology, this bug doesn’t affect any bare-metal virtualisation platform Microsoft has, including Hyper-V and Hyper-V R2. The vulnerability affects the virtual machine monitor (VMM) memory management. It makes memory pages mapped above the 2GB available with read or read/write access to user-space programs running in a Guest operating system.

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Earlier this week, CA announced its support for Oracle/Sun Solaris Containers (aka Zones) OS virtualization technology in a number of products: Spectrum Infrastructure Manager eHealth Performance Manager Spectrum Service Assurance Spectrum Automation Manager CA calls then its virtualisation management platform but the technologies above primarily support physical servers and over time added support for VMware ESX and now Solaris Containers. Sun announced its OS virtualization technology a the beginning of 2004, releasing Containers as part of Solaris 10 in February 2005. CA decides to support it only five years later, now that Oracle acquired Sun and announced its commitment on Solaris . Other companies may see a new opportunity here and follow CA. Another interesting thing is that CA decided to give priority to Solaris Containers rather than Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer.

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Earlier this week, Citrix published an interesting article about average bandwidth consumption for different XenDesktop 4.0 remote sessions. While the purpose of that post was to promote its Branch Repeater technology, which may or may not be interesting for you, the provided graph is valuable as a reference for VDI planning: The graph comes from a 30-pages paper that describes testing environment and methodology: Performance Assessment and Bandwidth Analysis for Delivering XenDesktop to Branch Offices

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Yesterday Intel launched its new quad-core/hexa-core Xeon 5600 CPU series (codename Westmere). The always amazing AnandTech already published an extensive review , including some very interesting benchmarks, measured on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V with VMmark and vApus Mark I frameworks. First of all, some of the new processors have six cores ,: X5650, X5660, X5670 and X5680, as well as the L5638, L5640 and the E5645. Additionally, the new silicon supports up to 288GB DDR3 RAM @ 1066Mhz. This obviously helps to increase the VMs / core density in virtualisation hosts, assuming there are no additional bottlenecks

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April 21, 2010 I’ll be at the Catalyst 2010 conference in Prague, hosted by Burton Group ( recently acquired by Gartner ), presenting a lecture titled Securing the Internal Cloud . 2010 is considered the year of cloud computing. Vendors like VMware, Citrix, Red Hat and Microsoft are releasing new solutions that turn virtualisation platforms into Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. There are new parts of the equation: side-by-side with the hypervisor and the management layer, there’s automation, billing, self-service provisioning, service catalogs, application SLAs, multi-tenancy and more.

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