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Microsoft Officially Introduces App-V 4.5, Changes Licensing For Application Virtualization Technology Usage

September 3, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

App-V 4.5, formerly SoftGrid Application Virtualization, has hit “RTM” (Release To Manufacturing) status, which means that it will be available as part of the forthcoming MDOP 2008 R2 release in the next several weeks.

From TechNet:

“App-V 4.5 is a big step forward towards making application virtualization a universally deployed desktop technology. Besides changing the name and making it the first Microsoft-branded release, we’ve included new capabilities that will help IT support large-scale virtualization implementations across many sites and provides multiple delivery options, including over-the-internet application delivery. Newly added support for eleven languages makes this a truly global release. Dynamic Suite Composition (DSC) provides administrator-controlled virtual application communication and interaction, and compliance with Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing and Secure by Default initiatives – two of our most important IT security programs – was also introduced in this release. A more detailed list of technical specifics is available on the App-V blog.

While App-V 4.5 is powerful by itself, great management unleashes its true potential. As I’ve said before, management is the killer app for virtualization, and it’s also the keystone of an Optimized Desktop infrastructure. With Microsoft management tools, you’re able to see a holistic view of your entire physical and virtual infrastructure which enables you to effectively manage resources and proactively prevent problems. This is why the release of System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) 2007 R2 and the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack for App-V 4.5 servers, and the App-V Group Policy Administrative template are so important. With these tools in hand, customers can natively integrate App-V 4.5 distribution and streaming technology into their Configuration Manager infrastructure, eliminating the need for separate tools to deploy, manage and track licenses for App-V 4.5 applications, and giving their IT departments the ability to more effectively control IT resources from a single location. Ask any IT administrator, and he or she will tell you that that’s an enormous time-saver and stress-reducer. For more technical details of how System Center and App-V work together to give IT admins easier control over their environment, visit the System Center Team Blog.

App-V 4.5 will also feature a new Service Providers License Agreement (SPLA), officially called Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Hosting for Desktops, which will enable service providers to use App-V 4.5 to deliver third-party ISV developed applications to customers via the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. SaaS powered by App-V is a key enabler to closing the “digital divide” that exists between large enterprises with robust IT capabilities, and small businesses with limited resources. By outsourcing IT functions via service providers, small businesses are able to focus less on maintaining an IT infrastructure and more on growing their core businesses, which in turn allows them to compete more effectively in the marketplace. It’s an important opportunity for businesses to optimize their desktops, even if they lack the resources to build them out in-house.

New Licensing Changes Address Tomorrow’s Challenges

The Optimized Desktop isn’t just about addressing today’s challenges. To help give IT departments the flexibility to make their Optimized Desktop infrastructure ready for the next generation of users, we’re expanding the Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) license beyond VDI to provide additional flexibility for emerging use cases in the Enterprise. This proactive licensing change, which will take effect January 1st, 2009, will enable several nascent user scenarios:

· Employee owned machines: Traditionally, computers are purchased as company assets and distributed to employees based on job function. Some companies are trialing permitting users to buy the PC of their choice with a company stipend. The changes enable early-adopter companies to let users purchase with the PC of their choice, but still perform business tasks in a secure, standard Windows Vista desktop image running in a virtual machine. IT departments can enable this scenario via VECD for $110 per PC/year.

· Contract Workers: Companies can use VECD to deploy a standard, sandboxed, Windows Vista virtual machine for use on contractor machines for $110 per PC/yr. By enabling all workers, even contractors, to work with a standard image, companies can improve productivity and reduce IT headaches by enforcing application, security, and document standards.

· Desktop-based employees who occasionally from home: VECD also enables desktop-based workers to take a local copy of their Windows Vista virtual machine to any VECD covered Windows machine at work or to take it home. VECD permits this scenario for $23 per PC /year.

Microsoft + Partners = More flexible solutions for customers
Finally, it’s important to note that the Optimized Desktop concept isn’t just a Microsoft initiative. Rather, it’s something that our vast partner community is working towards as well. They know, as do we, that by working together, we’re able to provide the most flexible, complete desktop experience possible. That’s why I am proud that Citrix, one of Microsoft’s longest standing partners, will release a new version of Citrix® XenDesktop™ desktop virtualization solution that will integrate with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) for quick provisioning and intelligent placement of virtual machines, and enable Windows Vista desktops to run on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. This integration is another example of how Microsoft and Citrix partnering to provide server hosted desktops and providing users with deployment choice as part of an Optimized Desktop strategy.

You’re probably thinking to yourself “Wow! That’s a lot of news!”, and you’d be right! But if you step back just a bit, you’ll see the real picture come into focus. This isn’t a series of isolated announcements; it’s a unified set of important advancements that drive the value – and the promise – of an Optimized Desktop as part of our broader virtualization strategy from the desktop to the datacenter. With today’s announcements, and the announcements that you’ll see from us in the coming weeks, Microsoft is moving forward and delivering on its promise to provide customers with a suite of virtualization, management and licensing options that truly optimize their computing experience by delivering scenarios that strike the right balance of end-user flexibility and productivity and IT Pro management and control.”

Microsoft

Microsoft TechNet

[Source: All About Microsoft]

VMware ESX First Hypervisor to Receive Microsoft SVVP Validation

September 3, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced it has qualified its VMware ESX hypervisor under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), shortly after they officially joined. VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 (ESX 3.5u2) is the first hypervisor to be listed under the program, providing VMware customers who run Windows Server and Microsoft applications with access to cooperative support from Microsoft and VMware.

Update: also see the post from Microsoft’s Virtualization Team blog.

Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program enables VMware and other software providers to test and validate their virtualization software to run Windows Server 2008 and previous versions of Windows Server. Under this program, Microsoft offers cooperative technical support to customers running Windows Server on validated, non-Microsoft server virtualization software, such as VMware ESX 3.5 update 2. Customers with support policies in place, and running Windows Server-based applications on VMware ESX 3.5u2, can receive cooperative technical support from Microsoft.

VMware also offers an extra layer of protection for customers, outside of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, who work directly with VMware for support. The additional protection is a part of the VMware Premier Support contract with Microsoft that enables VMware to escalate application issues rapidly and work directly with Microsoft engineers to expedite resolution.

Today’s move is expected to be particularly compelling for VMware’s tens of thousands of small and medium-size business (SMB) customers. Many of these customers turned to virtualization for the dramatic cost savings that virtualization can provide by reducing hardware requirements and power consumption.

VMware

Video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Virtualization Director at HP (Part 1/4)

September 2, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

In this first part of our lengthy video interview (4 parts) with Nick Van Der Zweep, Director for Virtualization at HP, we get introduced to how HP defines virtualization as flowing computing resources around and how this drops your costs and increases agility from desktop virtualization to data center virtualization and storage.

The interview was recorded at the HP headquarters in Cupertino, where Nick is often asked by financial analysts: ‘Is virtualization bad for your business?”. His clear answer is “NO”, as it unlocks the potential for businesses to do more and enables HP to sell a lot more robust configurations with a larger amount of condensed CPUs, much more memory, more I/O capability, etc.

Nick also shines a light on the future of virtualization, which will have (mostly free) hypervisors as a commodity. What really unlocks virtualization however is the management software and related automation capabilities. This is why HP bought and integrated a company like Opsware.

Apart from its top-range Integrity platform, with the HP-UX operating system, (deeply virtualized since 1999), HP is absolutely not entering the X86-market with a proprietary hypervisor. With products like Inside Dynamics, HP reaches into third party hypervisor software and manipulates those virtualization layers agnostically for multiple vendors. Nick is very happy with the excellent responsiveness from the X86 virtualization leaders and claims HP is the number one partner for VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

Read the full transcript below.

0:12 Nick Van Der Zweep, welcome on Virtualization.com. You are the director for virtualizationat HP. We are at your Cupertino headquartersand you’ve got the longest job title I’ve come across in a while. I think that illustrates how disruptive this virtualization technology is to the industry. Could you tell us something more about that?

Van Der Zweep: So virtualization for HP is all about pooling and sharing of resources so that the supply of resources can meet the demand from a business demand. The idea is to move away from silos of resources, servers, networking, software, and storage, that is dedicated on an application by application basis, more to a pooled set of resources that can flow and ebb and flow to the application on demand. You want to be able to do that automatically so that automatically when one application needs more resources, they automatically flow to it, although that’s scary for a large amount of IT organizations out there to have automatic reallocation of resources. So at a minimum, you want to have the ability to just type in a command to reroute resources very, very quickly, instantaneously even, from one place to another. So virtualization to us is everything from desktop virtualization, to data center virtualization, storage, etc. But ultimately, it’s all about flowing those resources around, dropping your costs, increasing your agility.

1:43 What types of virtualization does HP support?

Van Der Zweep: Well, we’re investing heavily in all aspects of virtualization. Like I said, desktop to data center, desktop virtualization, thin clients, storage virtualization, that started years ago and it’s back into a renaissance again with some of the capabilities that are out there. Server raid virtualization absolutely top of mind, to folks as well, the software, software virtualization, management software around it. So, all the technology aspects for sure and then services because this is new to a large amount of companies. So services, plan for it, plan consolidation, data center transformations, implement the technologies, help people through cultural changes as they move to a shared environment as well. Because that’s another probably one of the biggest sticky factor as well is you’ve got to move to a mode where you’re sharing with your co-workers, your infrastructure instead of having dedicated and that’s a bit of a wall sometimes.

02:51 I’m interested to know if virtualization was expected to lower hardware sales because people are finally going to be better utilizing their hardware. But it turns out that it’s actually quite good for hardware sales and HP is one of the ones that has benefited of this movement. Which elements does one need to get better performing hardware to do virtualization the right way?

Van Der Zweep: Yeah, classic question that we hear all the time. Usually the question is not from technical people, but from the financial analysts and goes “is this bad for your business”? But it absolutely is good and this even goes back to ’98 when I was doing the consolidation program. People would ask, is this bad for you business? It isn’t. It’s good, because it unlocks the potential for businesses to do more and because they are frustrated because they have a hundred projects to do but they can only afford a certain amount of infrastructure and a certain amount of projects so this really allows them to do a lot more. And then from a net-net to HP we see a lot more robust configurations going out the door, so a larger amount of CPUs within it, much, much more memory within the systems, more I/O capability so there are very much richer systems that they can run many applications on top.

4:11 It’s more condensed, more cores.

Van Der Zweep: More cores and more memory. Memory is a big one; more I/O is a big one. And then because virtualization causes a lot of sprawl as well—virtualization sprawl. While you might have had a hundred servers before you install virtualization, you go to twenty servers but, pretty quickly, you’ve got 200 images of OSes running, so you need better management software to manage that ecosystem, where as you might have done it manually before. You’ve got to put in management software, virtualization management and then automation comes into play. Hence, things like our investment in automation, in buying companies like Opsware as well.

4:56 Where do you think virtualization is headed?

Van Der Zweep: You know that’s an interesting one. I think it’s going to move fast. It’s been moving fast. I don’t think it’s going to slow down. To a large extent the hypervisors are going to commoditize. People are seeing a lot of that moving on.

5:13 Prices are dropping or even free.

Van Der Zweep: Prices are dropping, free open source, a lot of activity in that space. Management software virtualization or management software automation is what really unlocks virtualization. Those core hypervisors give some basic functionality but that software really unlocks the power to deliver, reduce cost, better agility, and high availability—those types of things. That is where the value is showing up. So we’re going to see a lot more of that.To be honest I don’t think there’s anybody in the industry that can really predict what it’s going to look like in five or six years because this thing is moving so fast that if anybody says, “I can tell you exactly where virtualization is going,” I just walk away, because it’s going to change dramatically again over the next number of years as well.

6:10 HP hasn’t built its own hypervisor. You chose to offer your clients the choice between VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V. You ship them with the hardware?

Van Der Zweep: It’s actually a combination. We do have our own hypervisor for our Integrity platform, so on that platform we have an HP-UX operating system, the partitioning, hypervisor, management software, and we deeply virtualized back since 1999-2000. In the X86 space, we absolutely are not entering the market with the hypervisor. VMware is out there and Microsoft is out there with virtual server but Hyper-V is if it’s not today it’s soon to be generally available.Citrix, acquiring XenSource and the other Xen open source environments and Linux with KVM. There is plenty of work going on in the hypervisor space. We are trying to enable on top of that, add management to be on top that. Our products like HP Insight Dynamics-VSE reach into and manipulate and use VMware’s software and manipulate that virtualization layer.

7:23: How happy are you with the support of these partners? VMware and Xen service or technology partners?

Van Der Zweep: So they’re very responsive us and we’ve got a very good relationship with them. We’re the number one partner of VMware in the industry, the number one partner of Microsoft in the industry, and the number one partner of Citrix in the industry. So they tend to jump when we give them a call saying, “Hey we’re looking at integrated hypervisors or building management software around it.” They know they get a huge addressable market by working very, very close with us. So they’ve been very responsive.

Top VMware Executive Richard Sarwal Returns To Oracle

September 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Richard Sarwal has left his position as executive VP of research and development at VMware to return to database software giant Oracle. VMware hired Sarwal from Oracle less than a year ago, and declined to give details of why Sarwal decided to go back to Oracle.

Stephen Herrod, CTO at VMware, will assume Sarwal’s day-to-day duties temporarily. Sarwal is currently still listed in the management structure as outlined on the company website.

[Source: San Francisco Business Times]

Novell Introduces ZENworks Application Virtualization

September 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Novell today announced the availability of Novell ZENworks Application Virtualization, an easy-to-use tool that eliminates application compatibility problems on Windows desktops. This addition to the ZENworks product line creates virtual applications in a single, isolated file and allows them to be deployed and run securely, reducing the problems associated with deploying new operating system (OS) platforms like Vista, decreasing expensive service desk calls and increasing user productivity.

With ZENworks Application Virtualization, the only application virtualization solution on the market that includes pre-configured templates for popular business software, customers can now virtualize and deploy applications in as little as 20 minutes.
Compatible with Windows Vista and Windows XP, ZENworks Application Virtualization reduces the cost and time required for software testing, packaging, deployment, configuration and contingency planning to ensure successful application and operating system upgrades. For example, with ZENworks Application Virtualization customers can continue to run Internet Explorer 6-based applications on Windows Vista, a configuration that previously required the application to be re-tooled to support Internet Explorer 7.

Novell ZENworks Application Virtualization is available for a list price of $39 per user or instance license. For more information about application virtualization from Novell, click here.

[Source: EarthTimes]

HP Releases New Wave of Virtualization Products, Services and Solutions

September 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

After BMC, HP today announced new products, services and solutions designed to simplify the implementation and management of virtualization so that the technology delivers greater business value.

HP’s approach to virtualization is focused on removing the technology inhibitors that reduce virtualization’s impact on the business. It highlights how applications and business services can perform well regardless of where and how they are hosted, networked or managed. It dramatically simplifies management across a combined virtual and physical world, and it addresses the issue of pooling infrastructure resources across an organization.

HP’s new offerings support business needs that span the desktop to the data center. They are focused on lowering operational cost, mitigating the risk of a heterogeneous environment and freeing resources to deliver new business services. These offerings are designed around three specific areas: applications and operations management, overcoming infrastructure barriers, and maximizing client architectures.

HP Operations Agent, HP Performance Agent and HP SiteScope have been enhanced with hypervisor management capabilities, including the ability to collect management data to automate event and availability monitoring and management processes across heterogeneous infrastructures.
HP Network Node Manager i-series has been updated to monitor the performance and availability of networks supporting dynamic, virtualized environments. This allows customers to proactively plan and monitor network capacity.
New HP Asset Manager identifies and manages virtual machine asset inventory and licenses, allowing customers to pay for only the licenses they need.
A new strategic development agreement with Red Hat simplifies the monitoring and management of virtualized environments.
New and enhanced HP Virtualization Support Services achieve a smooth transition to, and ongoing management of, new virtualization technology while reducing the risk of unplanned downtime.

New HP offerings are designed to lower costs, mitigate the risk of downtime and free up resources that can drive additional business services to support growth.

The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade is the world’s first server blade designed specifically to host virtual machines. The BL495c eliminates key virtualization performance bottlenecks of memory, data storage and network connections.
HP StorageWorks 4400 Scalable NAS File Services integrates the HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array, file servers, management software, and Microsoft Windows® or Linux support to virtualize the connection between servers and storage. The solution lowers maintenance costs and mitigates the risk of data loss with advanced replication software.
HP-UX 11i V3 and the HP Virtual Server Environment have been enhanced for mission-critical virtualization with significant performance improvement, automated optimization, improved protection and simplified management capabilities.
HP Virtualization Accelerator Services are new, predefined consulting services for planning, designing and implementing virtualization initiatives. This yields a faster return on investment.

And:

The new HP t5630, t5545, t5540 and t5145 Thin Clients feature scratch-resistant HP DuraFinish and provide expanded multimedia features, enhanced brokering capabilities, greater performance and improved management support.
The HP ProLiant xw460c Blade Workstation with Graphics Expansion Blade supports a full range of graphics capability with the latest NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics. This provides more secure, easily managed data center workstation computing for the financial trading, public sector, mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD), and oil and gas segments.
Enhancements to the HP Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution include new planning, quick-start and implementation services. These services determine specific VDI needs and associated business value, so customers can implement the right solutions. HP also unveiled the new HP VDI with Citrix XenDesktop, which is designed to enable everything from smaller, entry-level implementations to enterprise-wide desktop delivery.
“Citrix Ready” blade PCs and thin clients are now certified for use within Citrix XenDesktop environments. They deliver a dedicated one-to-one remote computing experience at radically improved economics for knowledge workers requiring a broad range of application support and a rich graphics experience.

[Source: ZDnet Blogs]