Almost one month ago, immediately after the VMware Partner Exchange conference, TechTarget published a scoop about some new features that may appear in the upcoming version of vSphere, expected later this year. The list includes: Transparent Memory Compression This will avoid swap when RAM is overcommited by compressing a set of target pages to a special region . VMware measured the latency of this technique as a hundred times better than the latency of swapping on rotating disks.

The imminent launch of Intel octal-core CPUs (codename Nehalem-EX) and servers with up to 48 cores (powered by AMD codename Magny-cours CPUs) will dramatically increase the virtualisation hosts density but will highlight how the network layer is becoming one of the weakest point of high-capacity virtual infrastructures. Anandtech just published a very interesting article on this topic, testing the performance of a couple of copper cable 10GBase-CX4 network interface cards against the popular quad-port gigabit NICs we use today in most virtualisation hosts. The benchmark measured dual-port Intel PRO/1000 PT Server adapter (82571EB) against a Supermicro AOC-STG-I2 dual-port 10Gbit/s Intel 82598EB and a Neterion Xframe-E 10Gbit/s. Both NICs were tested with VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and CentOS 5.4 guest OSes with appropriate drivers. While NICs tested by Anandtech are not the lastest available on the market, the research still is a valuable reading for most virtualisation administrators.

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The well-know virtualisation professional (and blogger) Eric Sloof just released a tool called vmClient . vmClient is a minimal management console that appears as an empty window frame. It features a menu bar where the virtual machines hosted by any VMware vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi host are listed. Each virtual machine in the list can be powered on/off, suspended and restarted.

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Archipel is a new open source virtual infrastructure management system based on the libvirt libraries and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly Jabber). Still in early stage, the tool supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ and VirtualBox and it’s currently able to operate single virtual machines and VM groups, displaying performance statistics about them. The interesting twist is that, thanks to the XMPP engine, this console provides instant notification about VMs status to any chat client that supports the (almost) standard protocol. This means that virtual infrastructure administrators can query virtual machine status through their IM program of choice (like Google Talk or Gmail Chat for example). To do so, each virtual infrastructure entity, including hosts and virtual machines, appear as an IM contacts,

Microsoft just published the beta version of a new Infrastructure Planning and Design guide. Titled Dynamic Data Center , this 43-pages blueprint on what Microsoft defines “a combination of automation, control, and resource management technology with a well-defined topology of virtualisation, servers, storage, and networking hardware”. The guide is divided in five main parts: Determine the Dynamic Data Center Scope This part helps to define the scope and determine the workloads that will be included in the Dynamic Data Center project. It’s divided in three steps: Determine the proposed initial workloads for the Dynamic Data Center.

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At the beginning of January virtualisation.info published a long overview about the VMware’s approach to cloud computing , covering the vCloud APIs, the vCloud Express implementation and the five partners that are currently offering it. One of them, BlueLock, just sent an email to its customers announcing that its vCloud Express offering will (tentatively) move from beta to general availability (GA) on March 25. As far as we know none of the other providers is out of beta yet (this article will be updated if necessary). So, while it’s entirely possible that BlueLock wants to be the first to announce vCloud Express GA, it’s much more likely that all the early adopters will make GA announcements in the same timeframe. And this may mean that VMware is about to release some additional information or bits about its cloud computing platform

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With an unexpected move, at the end of last week Parallels announced support for the upcoming Google operating system, Chrome OS , in its Desktop 5 for Mac. While it’s entirely expected that consumers use desktop virtualisation platforms to test new operating systems, it’s pretty uncommon to see a vendor that officially supports a beta product that is not widely deployed like Windows. Considering the long beta cycles that Google products have (sometimes years), the effort to support multiple beta builds will be remarkable for Parallels. The first stable release for Chrome OS is not expected to arrive before the second half of 2010.

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Neocleus is a US startup that entered the virtualisation market in May 2008 without much fanfare

Last week Reuters and other news outlets reported that the VMware’s board approved a plan to buy back $400M in Class A shares. The operation will happen over the months, through the end of 2011. EMC said it has no intention to modify its ownership of the subsidiary, keeping it at around 80%. In another note , the VMware’s CFO, Mark Peek , sold 15,000 shares at an average price of $46.72 a share in mid-February.

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Phoenix Technologies today announced the appointment of Robert Andersen as Interim Chief Financial Officer, effective March 5, 2010. Mr. Andersen replaces Mr. Richard Arnold, who resigned from Phoenix to pursue other opportunities. [[ This is a content summary only

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