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.

vOperations Suite 4.5 adds the following new features:

· Added Automation features

o Auto deletion of abandoned VM images

o Auto-merging of unused snapshots

o Automated remediation for performance issues

o Auto-calculation of future resource requirements

o Automatic generations of alerts of abnormal metrics and trends

· Automation processes can now be more specifically controlled

· Support for VMware vSphere 5 storage DRS and storage clusters, new HA methods and inclusion of data from the VASA storage interface

· Reporting enhancements, like new reports, customize data tables, reporting widgets, dashboards

· Virtualization Cost Index now calculates the base cost for operating a VM

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.

PCoIP firmware release 3.5.0 provides the following new features:

• USB 2.0 support with VMware View Sessions
• Support for combining PCoIP clients with VMware view and Imprivata OneSign Virtual Desktop Access.

• 802.1X Network Authentication, using EAP-TLS certificate-based authentication

• IPv6 Support
• Help Desk mode, allowing administrators to enable a login screen link which allows users to log into a particular VM of the administrators choice
• Support for up to 25 View Connection Server addresses
• Support for fast Ethernet over optical fibre (100BASE-FX)

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.

After that the document recommends to disable some of the Services available on Windows Server 2008 R2, as they significantly increase the memory footprint of the OS. It also provides some recommendations on tuning SMB on Windows File Servers.

The second part focuses on general settings for users, preferably set using GPO or GPP. And then focuses on XenApp specific settings for users.

In November Microsoft released a public beta of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) version 6.5. Today Microsoft announced its release, which is the follow-up of version 6.0 which was released in July this year.

Version 6.5 provides the following new features:

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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:

• PCI-e 3.0 and USB 3.0 support

• Ability to set upper limits for CPU consumption providing better overall control of CPU allocation

• Introduction of Control Groups (cgroups), which are used to create and manage slices of computing resources for specific processes. cgroups can be used as part of SLA management.

• Inclusion of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 beta, announced in August this year, which will leverage the RHEL enhancements

• KVM, Virtual CPU timeslice sharing for multiprocessor guests

• KVM, reduced network related CPU utilization on the host
• Enhanced network drivers in KVM which process UDP traffic faster
• Ability to monitor and audit the entire boot sequence including the boot process before a guest is actually booted
• Linux Container virtualization technology, in Technology Preview status providing application level containers.

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:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and 6.1 (up to 4 vCPU)
• CentOS 6.0 (up to 4 vCPU)

Users of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 en Red Hat Enterpise Linux 5 should still use version 2.1. of the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V.

Version 3.2 provides the following new features:

• Integrated mouse support, no longer a seperate package to get integrated mouse support
• Updated network drivers which work with Hyper-V provided with the Windows 8 Developer Preview
• Issue fixed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager compatiblity.

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.

Some of the new functionality provided by Login Virtual Session Indexer version 3.5:

• Zero Footprint Launcher, no longer a need to install Login VSI
• Pre/Post actions

• Command Line Usage Console, enabling fully automated test cycles

• Possiblity to pause a test

• Encryption of logfiles
• Improvements to workload Mash up mechanism
• RemoteFX Host Performance Counter Support, giving insight into GPU bottlenecks, issues on the RemoteFX protocol level, and insight into the performance on both VM and Hypervisor level

• Analyzer enhancements, like scatter chart, compare wizard, zoom and pan and command line usage analyzer.

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:

• Smart Full Screen, providing full screen mode
• Automatic Virtual Machine power on
• Improved animations

• Fast screen resizing and improved startup time
• Improved Mac OS X Lion guest OS support

• Improved graphics performance

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.

Besides providing integration with Horizon Application Manager version 4.7 also fixes some known issues as described in the ThinApp 4.7 Release Notes, covering what’s new, what’s fixed and known issues.

VKernel, provider of performance and capacity management products, has announced its acquisition by Quest Software. VKernel will operate as a independent subsidiary of Quest.

VKernel entered the virtualization market in October 2007, releasing VKernel 1.0 a product capable of providing chargeback functionality integrated with VMware VirtualCenter. VKernel further evolved its products resulting in the release of the vOperations Suite providing Performance Analisys, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and Chargeback which is currently at version 4 and which now supports Microsoft Hyper-V environments besides VMware environments as well.

Lanamark has released a new version of its Capacity Planning platform Suite, this version is the follow up of version 2010 which was released in March last year.

Suite 2012 introduces two new modules:

• Lanamark Central using Multipoint Data Access which enables IT Solution Providers to stream encrypted IT asset data into their public or private cloud for analysis

• Lanamark IQ, which provides Asset Intelligence normalizing and enriching raw hardware and software asset data with actionable business information.

Data collection is extended to IBM AIX, HP-UX and Oracle Solaris besides the already existing support for Microsoft Windows, Linux, NetWare, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

The Suite is now composed of the following components:

• Lanamark Explorer providing agent-less instrumentation for discovery of applications, users and machines.

• Lanamark Central for on-site data analysis or multi-client and multi-site data aggregation in a public or private cloud managed by the IT solution provider.

• Lanamark IQ with Asset Intelligence for normalization of raw data and enrichment of hardware and software assets with contextual information such as age, warranty and power consumption.

• Lanamark Studio for unified IT asset analysis, segmentation, dependency mapping and reporting automation with plug-ins for Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010.

• Lanamark Portal for web-based IT service management and collaboration.

The Lanamark Suite is offered in two editions, the Express Edition which is free of charge, and the Services Edition which is using a pay-per-use desktop,server of VM credits or via an annual subscription.

In November last year, started releasing Solaris 11 Express, the development version eventually leading to the release of Oracle Solaris 11 which was released last week. Solaris is one of the assets which Oracle acquired from Sun in April 2009.

Solaris features so called container virtualization called Solaris Zones, which stands for virtualization on the OS level creating multiple isolated containers on a single server making sure applications do not conflict. Besides that Oracle also supports running Solaris on top of Oracle VM Server for x86 or SPARC based systems, the products providing hardware virtualization.

New features related to virtualization in this release:

• Support for Oracle Solaris 10 Zones, supporting running Solaris 10 environments within a Solaris 11 zone
• Zone P2V and V2V pre-flight checker providing information and identify any issues in advance

• Support for NFS in a non-global zone

• Exclusive-IP Zones by default, allowing assignment of a separate IP stack per zone

• Automatic VNIC Creation for Zones

• Administering of network flows to achieve bandwidth and priority control from within non global zones

• Delegated administration using Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

• Zone Boot Environments, which means that Boot Environments are also integrated with Oracle Solaris Zones. When a new boot environment is created, by cloning an existing one, the base boot environments zones are also cloned into this new boot environment. Also nested boot environments can be managed.

• Zone Dataset Layout improvements

• Immutable Zones, providing support for read-only file systems for non global zones using Mandatory Write Access Control (MWAC)
• Zoneadm can now shutdown zones cleanly

• Zonestat which can monitor system resources consumed by Oracle Solaris Zones

• Libzonestat library for use by 3rd party application developers

More changes to Solaris 11 can be found in the What’s new in Oracle Solaris 11 document

Pano Logic has announced the release of version 5 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform Pano System. This version is the follow-up of version 4.5 which was released in April this year.

Version 5 now provides monitoring of the Pano Zero Client device by introducing Pano Maestro, providing a single pane of glass for monitoring these devices. It integrates with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, vCenter Server or XenDesktop Studio.

Maestro can monitor multiple so called Pano Controller Groups, where each group can contain up to 6 Controllers, Maestro also provides access to the functionality of Controller using a standard SOAP based webservice API. For controlling access to Maestro it is possible to use Active Directory.

Version 5 also introduces a new modular architecture, which is called Pano Controller, a virtual appliance working with the desktop brokers VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop of Pano’s own Virtual Desktop Broker and the hypervisors from VMware, Citrix or Microsoft. Controller connects users, desktop virtual machines and both Pano Zero Clients and the Pano Remote Keys.

Pano Logic claims that Version 5 will reduce bandwith utilization with 30-40% providing better computing experience and 25% better video framerate quality.

Support was also added for VMware vSphere 5 and View 5.

Oracle has released version 4.1.6 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version is considered a maintenance release which can be installed on top of any version 4.1.x, fixing some display and networking issues.

Some of the fixes in version 4.1.6 include:

• Fixed rare Windows 7 guest hangs, either at boot time or when reconfiguring the network card in unusual setups
• Fixed the problem with duplicate packets when bridged to a wireless interface on Mac OS X hosts.
• More WDDM fixes for Vista and Windows 7 guests
• Directory, file mode and mask options for shared folders on Solaris

Even though ESXi 5 is already released, VMware stil releases updates for ESXi 4, in this case Update 2. This version is the follow up of Update 1 released in February this year.

Update 2 adds the following new features:

• Support for AMD Opteron 6200 Series and 4200 Series processors

• Support for Ubuntu 11.10

The update also delivers a number of bug fixes, which can be found in the resolved issues.

Thanks to Jason Boche for providing the news.

Microsoft has released the release candidate for System Center 2012 Orchestrator, the follow up version of System Center Opalis, which was acquired by Microsoft in December 2009 and integrated into its System Center portfolio. For this release Microsoft decided to integrate the Opalis code into the Microsoft codebase, and to drop support for running the Opalis DB on Oracle, the console will now be based on IIS and Silverlight.

System Center Orchestrator (SCO) is Run Book Automation (RBA) software, which can be used to define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows. The workflows are defined in the SCO workflow designer, and so called Integration Packs are provided to interact with Microsoft and non-Microsoft products, which run on so called Action Servers.

The Release Candidate is provided with Integration Packs for:

• System Center 2007 Operations Manager
• System Center 2010 Service Manager
• System Center 2008 Virtual Machine Manager
• System Center 2010 Data Protection Manager
• System Center 2007 Configuration Manager
• VMware vSphere
• IBM Tivoli/Netcool/Omnibus

The release candidate provides the following new features:

• Installation experience improvements, including:
  • Improved prerequisite checks
  • Implementation of Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), error reporting and interface with Microsoft Update
  • Allow user to log on as a service and select different service accounts for each service
  • Design Improvements( Error handling, port # for DB, increased logging, enabling log on as a service automatically)
  • UI Consistency between other System Center components
  • Time bomb(easy conversion from EVAL to licensed SKU)
• Encryption of DB connection and Encryption/decryption of passwords
• Globalization which is now Unicode capable and can convert SSH to Unicode
• Web service Versioning
• Console improvements including browse events,view events and UI updates
• Bug fixes across all product features

Also released the Orchestrator Integration Toolkit, containing wizard-based utilities for creating new activities and integration packs for System Center Orchestrator 2012.

• Rebranding, security enhancements, new generic activity icons
• Wizards can upgrade 6.3 activities and IPs to be compatible with Orchestrator
• Fixes issues with upgrading IPs multiple times
• Fixes issues with DLL / dependent file conflicts among different IPs

Citrix has announced the release of version 2.1. of its client hypervisor XenClient. This version will be the follow-up of version 2.0 which was released  in August this year.

Version 2.1 provides the following new features:

• Delta Image Update which allows the Synchronizer to only deliver changes between image versions
• Fast System Updates done by transferring updates in the background and applied during the next startup
• Automatic Image Lockdown, purging user changes outside data and profile at next boot
• Windows Image Rollback, allowing rollback to a prior version of the image
• Installation of IT approved applications via Citrix Receiver for Windows
• 3D graphics stability
• Virtualized USB support
• Enhanced handling for multi partitioned Windows Images
• Support for connecting Synchronizer to AD systems with non-standard OU structures.
• Localized XenClient, introducing support for German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Simplified Chinese languages
• Multi monitor and GPU support

Citrix also announced support for running XenClient XT on mobile systems. XT which was released in May this year, a version of XenClient support advanced levels of security and isolation. The product is expected to be generally available by the end of the year.

VKernel has released a new tool called vScope Explorer. vScope Explorer is

a free tool for VMware admins which visualizes the performance and capacity health for all VMs, hosts and datastores in an environment.

The tool installs as a virtual appliance and is delivered in OVF format.

vScope Explorer provides the following functionality:

• Visualize Performance, Capacity & Efficiency Across an Environment
• Identify VM Performance Issues Across an Environment
• Spot Host Performance Problems Across an Environment
• Find Host Capacity Issues Across an Environment
• Identify VM Resource Efficiency Issues Across an Environment
• Spot Inefficient Datastores Across an Environment
• Project environment health onto a data center NOC screen
• See All VMs, Hosts and Datastores Across Many vCenters and Data Centers