Earlier this week Symantec announced two new products for VMware virtual infrastructures dubbed ApplicationHA and VirtualStore. ApplicationHA, powered by Veritas Cluster Server technology, monitors applications and virtual machines health. It can restart both: applications by direct intervention, and VMs by coordinating with vCenter Server. Plus, the product can be fully operated from the vCenter Client and supports VMware HA and DRS. VirtualStore instead is powered by Veritas Storage Foundation and is a virtual NAS that has a couple of specific capabilities for VDI environments. The first one, called FileSnap, allows to rapidly clone and provision thousands of virtual machines in minutes through vCenter. The second is a page caching system that Symantec claims able to eliminate the performance bottlenecks when multiple users concurrently power their virtual desktops. ApplicationHA will be available in September, at $350 per VM. VirtualStore instead will be released in November with a per-server pricing model. Labels: Disaster Recovery , Releases , Symantec

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In May Microsoft finally unveiled an upcoming, revamped version of its patch management solution for virtual infrastructures: Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST) 3.0 VMST is not a patching tool per se, but rather a connector that allows seamless integration between Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Hyper-V. The first beta introduced much wanted features like the ability to patch offline VMs and templates in the SCVMM library, or the support for Live Migration. The second beta, appeared less than a month after , just fixed an issue with the template VHD update feature. The third beta, which was announced last week, seems just for additional bug fixing. Labels: Microsoft , Patch Management

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As virtualization.info reported earlier today, VMware is about to significantly change the architecture of its virtual infrastructure . Before that transformation, which customers won’t see before 2011 probably, the company will change another key aspect of its offering: the pricing model. Along with the release of vSphere 4.1 in fact VMware announced today a new per-VM licensing that will take effect starting September 1, 2010: VMware vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter Chargeback, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager will be sold in VM packs on a per VM basis starting on September 1, 2010. VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager are already licensed on both a per VM and physical server model. Per VM licensing for VMware vCenter CapacityIQ will take effect in the fourth quarter of 2010. The minimum number of virtual machine licenses in a licensing pack is 25, reports IT News . vCenter will continue to be priced per-Server, but for how long? It’s easy to guess that the per-VM licensing will be extended to the key tier of the virtual infrastructure as soon as the next version of vSphere will be out.

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In March VMware acquired a number of products from its parent company EMC for $200M, all parts of the Ionix infrastructure management portfolio, and all coming from acquisitions of small technology firms happened between 2006 and 2009. Now VMware is rebranding the products and adding them to its already wide product portfolio: Server Configuration Manager ( acquired from Configuresoft in June 2009 ) is now vCenter Configuration Manager

The server version of App-V (formerly SoftGrid), now officially dubbed Server App-V, was previewed for the first time ever in May 2009 at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) but Microsoft actually announced plan to deliver this product in January 2008. In the last year Microsoft barely mentioned it again, showing an additional demo at MMS 2010. Unfortunately, the just ended TechEd 2010 conference didn’t bring better news (see virtualization.info coverage). Quite the opposite, the event sanctioned a far distant release, probably scheduled for Q2 2011, in sync with the launch of the next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). To be fair Microsoft didn’t explicitly said that Server App-V will arrive by that timeframe, but at this point there’s no hint about an earlier release.

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Without much noise, VMware yesterday released Update 2 for its vSphere 4.0 virtual infrastructure platform, which includes ESX/ESXi hosts (build 261974) as well as the vCenter Server (build 258672). The Update for ESX/ESXi primarily introduces additional hardware support: Fault Tolerance (FT) support for Intel Xeon 3400, Xeon 5600 and i3/i5 CPUs IOMMU support for AMD Opteron 6100 and 4100 CPUs ESX/ESXi 4.0 U2 also introduces support for Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating system. The Update 2 for vCenter only introduces environment customization for additional guest operating systems: Windows XP Professional SP2 (x64) serviced by Windows Server 2003 SP2 SLES 10 SP3 and 11 (x32/x64 bit) RHEL 4.8, 5.4 and 5.5 Server Platform (x32/x64 bit) Debian 5.0, 5.0 R1 and 5.0 R2 (x32/x64 bit) The lack of new features doesn’t surprise at all: at this point it’s a well-known thing that all the upcoming capabilities detailed by virtualization.info in the past few weeks will be part of vSphere 4.1 (or more likely 4.5) to be released at VMworld 2010 in early September.

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Vizioncore, soon to become the Quest Software Server Virtualization Management Group , released last week vEchoShell 1.2.6 (formerly Virtualization Ecoshell). vEcoShell is an extension for the Microsoft PowerShell IDE called PowerGUI that Quest offers for free since a long time.

Digital Networks has released a new version of its server virtualization platform, Openvirt 2.0. Openvirt provides commercial quality virtualization that is completely free of license fees and a web based control panel that makes for easy management. Full virtualization of unmodified operating systems includes support for Linux, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD virtual machines. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Oracle just released a minor update for the VDI connection broker inherited from Sun . Version 3.0, formerly called Sun xVM VDI, came out more than one year ago . At that time Sun introduced support for VirtualBox side by side with the existing support for VMware ESX. A odd choice considering that VirtualBox is a hosted virtualization platform (aka type-2 virtual machine monitor or VMM) and is not supposed to perform as well a bare-metal hypervisor (aka type-1 VMM) as ESX.

Wil van Antwerpen recently collected and published a number of evidences that may prove VMware has no plans to continue the development of VMware Server, once called GSX Server. One is that the security advice VMSA-2010-0007 includes the following warning: End of General Support for VMware Server 2.0 is 2011-06-30, users should plan to upgrade to the newest release of either ESXi or VMware Player. The last version of Server released has been 2.0.2, out more than one year ago , but the 2.0 major update came out in October 2008. During this time frame, apparently, VMware didn’t fix a number of issues (like VMSA-2009-0016 and VMSA-2010-0005 ) despite the customers support agreements in place. The history of Server has been rather complex since the early days. The company first released it as an expensive little brother of ESX. Then it released for free, progressively reducing the R&D investment on it. Finally, regardless of some significant features to win the SMB market , VMware completely cut the marketing budget for it to the point that it’ really surprising customers are still talking about the free platform. Early signs of a lack of commitment can be tracked back to November 2007, when VMware released the first beta of Server 2.0 without introducing any significant new feature. As van Antwerpen said, this will give the opportunity to Oracle to push even more its free alternative VirtualBox, which is adding remarkable new features at an impressive pace . If confirmed, this will second product VMware discontinues since its launch. The other one is Stage Manager .

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