Virtualization.com
News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
Just in case you haven’t heard, Microsoft flip-flopped its earlier decision not to allow users to run Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium as guest operating systems on a virtual machine. Mac users, and virtualization software vendors such as Parallels can rejoice over the news, which has been extensively covered all over the web , with the best commentary coming from:
CNET News , ZDNet blogs, Ars Technica and The Register .
Joe Foran is speculating a future acquisition of application virtualization provider PortableApps on the Server Virtualization Blog .
“There are, of course, differences, but the overall business models are very similar. PA is an open-source outfit, which makes them a bit more transparent than Thinstall, which has a mix of OSS and proprietary products. Since PA is purely open source, and relies a lot on the community to deliver portable-ized apps, their list of of programs is smaller and limited to open source and other freely-licensed software. Still, with the recent focus on OSS in the enterprise, one can’t help but see the value of a PortableApps version of OpenOffice sitting on a Citrix Server for thin-client and virtual desktop users to access.”
The virtualization space is continuously heating up, and no doubt we will see more acquisitions of these types of technology providers in 2008, but will PortableApps really be the next one? Time will tell.
Roger Klorese , Product Marketing Manager for Citrix XenServer , wrote a blog post revealing a major upcoming new feature in XenServer: pool-wide Patch Management.
“XenServer has had a relatively small number of patches, and in the case of security advisories, we’ve been consistently able to announce the fix for an issue very quickly, or in one case, even before the vulnerability was publicized.
But it’s true that virtual platforms can add complexity to patch management. While other Citrix technologies — Provisioning Server, for instance — can reduce the impact of patching significantly, the maintenance of the virtualization server platform itself is an major concern.
We don’t talk about future features very often, but here’s one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer — which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now — that is worth crowing about.”
In conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, there will be a possibility for you to:
* Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
* Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
* Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
* Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
* Apply the patches
* Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically
No word on timing for the public beta.
Hat tip to Tarry Singh .