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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
Closely following the recent release of a number of RC versions for a number of products, VMware has put out several versions with minor updates: VMware Server 1.0.7, Workstation 6.0.5, Player 2.0.5 and ACE 2.0.5.
The updates are expected to solve a number of security vulnerabilities. More information on this can be found here.
Mass High Tech is reporting on a new virtualization startup, currently in stealth mode, who is readying a public launch in the field of ‘laptop virtualization’ (for lack of a better term).
Update – per their blog: they’ve launched.
Westford-based Old Road Computing plans to publicly launch as Virtual Computer Inc., but isn’t revealing many specifics about its virtualization product, nor when it will be released. The company was founded in 2007 by Alex Vasilevsky (ex-CTO and founder of Virtual Iron) and Dan McCall (former Verisign executive and well-known consultant), both 25+ year veterans of the Boston technology community. The company is funded by top tier investors including Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners (formerly IDG Ventures, Boston). To date, it has raised $6 million in a Series A round of financing.
The software would be designed to isolate a laptop’s four major components — hardware, operating system, applications and user data — and create versions on the laptop of those components that operate remotely, without a network connection. The software would operate transparently for the user and it would enable wholesale security updates and other types of upgrades when connected to the network. Isolating the portions of the system enables it to limit access to work-related applications while enabling users to install their own personal preferences on the device.
Virtual Computer (blog) is targeting laptops because that segment is growing faster than stationary desktops, according to the company.
ExaGrid Systems today announced support for Vizioncore’s backup and recovery solution, vRanger Pro (which recently got an upgrade). Both ExaGrid and Vizioncore offer products and solutions that streamline the management of data backup and recovery processes for VMware users.
Vizioncore is a provider of a comprehensive set of solutions that extend and enhance the capabilities of virtualized environments. ExaGrid offers VMware customers using Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro with the industry’s fastest backups and restores, along with high data de-duplication ratios.
Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro solution offers full image level and differential backups of virtual machines to enable faster, more efficient storage and recovery of virtual machines. ExaGrid’s Disk-based Backup systems serve as the backup target for these virtual machine images, using high-performance, post-process data de-duplication to dramatically reduce the disk storage capacity required for backups versus standard disk storage.
VDIworks today announced that the latest release of VDIworks’ Virtual Desktop Platform (VDP), version 1.2, will provide connection brokering and management for the HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS) protocol. This integrated offering will allow customers to leverage VDIworks’ virtual desktop management capabilities and HP’s RGS protocol to enable the highest grade visual experience possible in a virtualized environment.
Egenera today announced an upcoming technology preview of its capacity-on-demand solution developed jointly with VMware. Recently, Egenera had already picked VMware’s virtualization technology to power its BladeFrame Systems.
Set to be unveiled for the first time on the show floor at VMworld, the new joint capacity-on-demand solution will provide VMware VirtualCenter users access to PAN Manager by Egenera processing resources directly through VMware VirtualCenter. With capacity-on-demand, customers benefit from the automatic deployment of ESX hosts onto “bare metal” in response to overutilization that can adversely affect virtual machine performance.
With Egenera’s capacity-on-demand solution, new ESX hosts are automatically registered to VirtualCenter as part of the resource pool, while underutilized ESX hosts can be automatically powered off to reduce energy consumption. In addition, VMware features such as Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) and High Availability (HA) will rebalance virtual machine workloads within the changed environment.
[Source: VMblog]
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, stocks of both NetApp and VMware have been trading at unusual volumes yesterday.
Trading in NetApp spiked to four times the normal level, with investors picking up 38,000 calls that allow them to buy the company’s stock and 5,000 puts that allow them to sell it. NetApp shares closed at $25.55, up 6.1%.
Fueling activity in VMW trading was the recent chatter that Cisco could be interested in acquiring VMware. With calls outnumbering puts by seven to one, traders gravitated to September $45 calls. The contracts are priced at 70 cents and make money if VMware shares jump above $45.70.
They closed at $38.49, up 4.1%.