Virtualization.com

VMware today announced that VMware Fusion 3 is now available.

With more than 50 new features, VMware Fusion 3 makes it easier than ever to run Windows applications with Mac simplicity.

With the new built-in Migration Assistant for Windows, VMware Fusion 3 is more than two times faster than other “Switch to Mac” solutions. Users can move their entire PCs — including applications, files documents, and settings — to their Macs with a simple Ethernet cable, a FireWire cable, or even wirelessly.

VMware Fusion 3 includes more than 50 new features and enhancements, delivering a better-than-ever Windows on Mac experience. Key highlights include:

• Performance, Finely Tuned. Support for 4-way SMP to maximize performance on the latest iMac and Mac Pro. Lower overhead and up to 2X faster resume time for a suspended virtual machine.
• More Mac-Like Than Ever. Banish the start menu and launch Windows apps from the new “always-on” applications menu, even when VMware Fusion isn’t running. VMware Fusion provides convenient new ways to experience Windows applications like Mac applications.
• Optimized for Snow Leopard. Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion 3 leverages Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s advanced architecture with a new 64-bit core engine and native support for the 64-bit kernel, delivering even better Windows on Mac performance.
• Ultimate Windows 7 Experience. VMware Fusion 3 will be the first to enable the full Windows 7 experience, side-by-side with your Mac, complete with Windows Aero and Flip 3D.
• Best-in-Class 3D Graphics. Support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 will enable users to run their favorite 3D Windows games and applications — all without rebooting.

The release of VMware Fusion 3 has been widely anticipated. With more than 10,000 private beta users who have helped shape the features in the product, the VMware Fusion community is eager to upgrade to VMware Fusion 3.

VMware Fusion 3 is now available at the VMware online store and at authorized United States retailers for a suggested retail price of $79.99 and will be available at authorized worldwide retail locations beginning November 4. Upgrades from previous versions of VMware Fusion to VMware Fusion 3 are now available for $39.99 right here.

CA today announced 12 new and updated Enterprise IT Management products that will help enterprises and service providers gain increased business value from virtualized environments. CA’s solutions allow organizations to realize greater cost savings, efficiency and flexibility from virtualized computing environments through comprehensive capabilities for IT management, governance, automation and security.

Enterprises are increasingly relying on virtualization, with 31 percent of operating system instances virtualized in 2008 and growing to 54 percent in 2010, according to an independent survey of hardware decision makers in North America and Europe, conducted Forrester Research. By simplifying and automating the management of virtualized and physical environments, CA helps customers to reduce business risks and deploy virtualization more rapidly and confidently in their heterogeneous production environments. Unlike many other providers, CA has specifically architected its technology for virtualization, including solutions for infrastructure management, service management, application performance management, business-driven automation and security management.

New and enhanced products announced today for enterprises and service providers include the following solutions for Infrastructure Management and Business-Driven Automation:

• CA Spectrum Service Assurance is designed to offer a single pane of glass to display the impact of the physical and virtual IT infrastructure on the services it supports. This CA innovation improves IT service quality and predictability by pinpointing the root cause of quality problems and risks to quality. It can also help lower IT costs by reducing trouble-shooting and speeding mean-time-to-repair. The product is designed to provide superior visualization of infrastructure in the context of IT services; a fast, flexible and accurate way to build end-to-end service models; automated analytics to help fix quality problems and proactively reduce risk; clear service reports for making good management decisions and for communicating better with business stakeholders; and integration with the most powerful, scalable domain managers to retrieve infrastructure, application performance and root cause information.
• CA Spectrum Automation Manager r11.7 is designed to help customers streamline their IT processes through centralized application configuration management and dynamic resource provisioning across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. This new version includes rapid physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) server provisioning to help simplify the adoption and expansion of virtualization deployments and enable quicker server recovery. It will also features extended support across VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen, IBM LPAR, Sun Solaris and other platforms for centralized management of heterogeneous environments—helping to improve cost efficiency, agility, service quality, and mitigating IT and business risk.
• CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 is designed to proactively monitor the performance of data and voice networks, physical and virtual systems, databases, and client/server applications across physical and virtual environments. This new version is designed to discover VMware and other virtual environments, collect important metrics needed to maintain optimum performance, be alerted when performance approaches thresholds, and view performance of the virtual infrastructure and report on the collected performance metrics to validate expected service levels. The solution is also planned to feature enhanced environmental and energy monitoring as a valuable complement to CA’s virtualization management capabilities.
• CA Insight Database Performance Manager r11.3 is designed to proactively monitor performance (providing both real-time and historical views) across DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows; Oracle; SQL Server and Sybase databases, whether they reside in physical, virtual or cloud environments. The product is designed to share this information with the other CA domain managers to provide end-to-end visibility into database health across IT. New capabilities in this version include continuous monitoring of databases in VMware environments—even across hot migrations performed using VMware VMotion—without user interaction, as well as enhanced support for VMware performance through proactive monitoring of the VMware vCenter Server repository. Other planned features include integration with CA Spectrum Service Assurance; a new enterprise view for “at-a-glance” problem assessment; improved root-cause analysis of SQL performance and a unified browser-based interface for distributed and mainframe databases.

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Trend Micro is introducing an advanced server security strategy that encompasses protection for the cloud, as well as products and solutions that help corporations address the challenging data protection, security and compliance needs of today’s datacenters that stretch across physical, virtualized and cloud-computing environments.

Trend Micro Deep Security, the flagship product for advanced server security at Trend Micro, introduces a new paradigm for server security where the entire server is protected, including the operating system, network and applications layers for superior and comprehensive security, regardless of computing environment, virtualization platform or storage location.

It emphasizes:

• Preventing data breaches and disruptions by providing a layer of defense at the server itself, whether physical, virtual or cloud.
• Lowering the cost of security management for virtual and cloud computing environments.
• Helping to make possible compliance over a wide range of regulations and standards, including PCI, SAS 70, FISMA, HIPAA, and more.
• Addressing immediate security concerns plaguing enterprises in physical and virtual worlds such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks perpetrated by sophisticated, for-profit hackers.

Trend Micro Deep Security provides advanced protection for servers right from the operating system to resident applications with a modular architecture that includes: A deep packet inspection engine with intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS), Web application protection and network-level application control; firewall, integrity monitoring and log inspection modules. This protection is available for both physical and virtual systems using server-based software agents and, coming soon with Deep Security 7.0, using virtual security appliances specifically designed for VMware VI3 and vSphere 4 environments. Trend Micro Deep Security 7.0, the latest version, is the world’s first security software that coordinates VMsafe API-based security applied at the hypervisor with additional protection on virtual machines to protect VMware environments. This version also includes new features designed to improve management and simplify compliance for a lower total cost of ownership such as: Event tagging to enable better workflow of security incident handling, the ability to create a “reference system” or known good state to reduce false positive alerts resulting from normal system updates such as patching. Other enhancements include integrity monitoring, log inspection, and SIEM integration capabilities.

Trend Micro Deep Security combines with Trend Micro ServerProtect and Core Protection for Virtual Machines, the company’s anti-malware products designed for physical servers and VMware virtual servers respectively. This unique blend delivers layered and comprehensive server security now vital to business continuity. Trend Micro Deep Security, with advanced anti-malware protection, further adds to Trend Micro’s ability to broadly deliver layered and comprehensive server security now vital to business continuity.

Trend Micro Deep Security 7 will be available in November 2009 with two pricing models designed to deliver maximum value to organizations. Deep Security is available for traditional physical servers on a per server basis starting at $885 per server. A virtual server license is also available for VMware environments with unlimited agents per host machine starting at $2100 per socket.

Trend Micro advanced server security solutions are part of Trend Micro Enterprise Security – a tightly integrated offering of content security products, services and solutions which is powered by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network. Trend Micro Enterprise Security delivers maximum protection from emerging threats while greatly reducing the cost and complexity of security management.

Liquidware Labs today announced the availability of version 4.5 of its’ flagship product, Stratusphere, and the award of its’ fourth patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

LWL is seeing a huge upsurge in the deployments of virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and hosted virtual desktops (HVD) based on its assessment and service level assurance solution Stratusphere.

The latest 4.5 version includes significant feature enhancements to enable businesses to thoroughly understand what they have, what they’re using, and what they need to move to VDI; including:

• Support for VMware View 4, Citrix XenDesktop 4, Microsoft Windows® 7
• Integration of ProfileUnity in the Stratusphere Hub – LWL’s profile management and user configuration solution
• New and powerful assessment and diagnostic dashboards
• Query driven analytic reports, trend analysis and capacity planning
• Correlation of user, desktop OS and VMware ESX Server performance metrics
• Plug-in to allow dynamic query from within Excel (or any other 3rd party tool that supports ODBC)
• Publically available evaluation download

The latest patent awarded to LWL from the US Patent Office (number 7,591,001 issued September 15th) covers LWL’s innovation that embeds the health status of a Connector ID™ key enabled machine into each packet. This health status is established by comparing the existing configuration, usage or performance of the Connector ID enabled machines (either physical or virtual) to previously defined IT policies. Stratusphere can provide real-time audits of the health status of these machines using the network, along with controlling how machines connect to the network or to specific servers and applications based on their health status.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Ron Oglesby has transitioned from being the Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services at Dell to “Unemployed Basement Finisher” but don’t let that fool you.

Virtualization.info has learned that Oglesby has been recruited by Unidesk and will serve as the company’s new Chief Solution Architect, although this is still unconfirmed at this point.

Unidesk is a US-based desktop virtualization startup founded in December 2007, financed by Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture with a $8.1M Series A Round.