Just one day before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix managed to distract the audience with a major announcement: the acquisition of VMLogix for an undisclosed sum. VMLogix entered the virtual lab automation (VLA) market in October 2006 , in competition with a really short number of companies. In February 2009 the company signed a deal with Citrix to OEM its flagship product in the Essentials management package, which is available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. As Citrix has to enrich its virtual infrastructure to better compete against VMware, this acquisition was largely expected. The acquisition is expected to complete during the Q3 2010. The VMLogix technology will be fully integrated in the next version of XenServer (6.0?) as well as in the just announced OpenCloud platform. With VMware owning Akimbi ( June 2006 ), Quest owning Surgient ( July 2010 ) and StackSafe out of business ( March 2009 ?), there are no more virtual lab automation startups out there, except Skytap and the just born CloudShare. But both companies only offers a hosted business model, and this restricts the range of potential bidders. According to this, in the attempt to become more desirable acquisition targets, both Skytap and CloudShare may want to offer soon a version of its platform for on-premises deployment. Labels: Acquisitions , Citrix , Virtual Lab Automation , VMLogix

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The announcement of vSphere 4.1 is officially set for next week, July 13, virtualization.info has learned. We cannot confirm yet if the product will be actually shipped that day or just announced. virtualization.info already published the list of features that will be shipped with this new major release, as well as a VMware report about the performance improvements of many components . An additional interesting detail is how VMware has enriched the offering for the SMBs.

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release of System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010 and System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010. The new version of SCE is based on the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 engine, and so it supports physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations, virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migrations of VMware virtual machines, Live Migration, PRO workload optimization technology, and a number of additional things: Additionally, the maximum number of Windows Server devices that SCE can manage has been raised from 30 to 50.

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New month, new rebuttals in virtualisation-land. Evidently, virtualisation players still consider the marketing skirmish very helpful to increase sales ( virtualisation.info has a slightly different opinion ) so this March we have VMware leading three major campaigns against competitors. Two of them are defensive, one is not: VMware View PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop ICA Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs vSphere PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop ICA At the beginning of February Citrix sponsored a competitive analysis performed by Miercom. The 7-pages report compares protocol performance of Citrix XenDesktop 4 (with ICA/HDX) and VMware View 4 (with PCoIP) and these are the conclusions: In a comparison of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations, Citrix XenDesktop 4 provided better overall performance when compared to VMware View 4 XenDesktop 4 used 64% less bandwidth than View 4 with PCoIP for typical tasks Flash video was delivered with an average of 65% less CPU usage, 89% less bandwidth, and excellent Quality of Experience by XenDesktop 4 compared to View 4 Overall, XenDesktop 4 uses system resources more efficiently and is capable of scaling more effectively VMware answered last week , informing that they were not contacted by Miercom and that they have no insight about how test were conducted. Of course VMware offered its point of view on each point, At this point customers just have to decide which company has the nicest logo and which guy has the brightest smile to believe to one set of claims over the other.