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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Desktone Appoints Peter McKay as President and CEO

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Desktone, provider of a platform that enables hosted virtual desktops as a service, today announced that Peter McKay has joined the company as President and Chief Executive Officer.

McKay, who is now a member of Desktone’s board, has more than 25 years of experience in building enterprise software companies, including executive positions with Watchfire, IBM, eCredit, Computer Associates, and Parametric Technologies.

The appointment follows Desktone’s recent closing of a series B round of funding, which is being used to extend the company’s sales and marketing initiatives. Harry Ruda, Desktone’s previous CEO, will become chairman of the Board of Directors and will work alongside McKay to ensure a smooth transition.

McKay’s expertise in growing software companies comes from experience with both venture and IT organizations. Prior to joining Desktone, he was an executive at North Bridge Venture Partners and Insight Ventures. He also advised many venture and private equity-backed firms, including Spotfire, Application Security, and Lagan Software.

As President and CEO of Watchfire, McKay grew revenues from $3 million to $50 million, while securing leading marketshare and directing the company’s acquisition by IBM, where McKay continued on as VP of IBM Rational Software Group.

Prior to Watchfire, McKay was President and CEO of eCredit, increasing annualized revenue from $3 million to $25 million via a global direct and indirect channel strategy, before it was sold to Internet Capital Group. He came to eCredit having held senior executive positions at Parametric Technologies as well as Computer Associates, where he was Senior Vice President of Worldwide Indirect Sales responsible for over $500 million in revenue and a team of 350 people.

McKay holds a BA in Accounting and Finance from Northeastern University.

Parallels Makes Its Way To Australia And New Zealand

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Parallels today announced its official arrival in the Australian and New Zealand market launching its go-to-market strategy for its award-winning virtualization and automation software for business, consumer and cloud/service provider audiences.

With the announcement of its new office comes the appointment of two industry veterans, Neil Morarji as General Manager and Alexei Anisimov as Sales Engineer.

Neil will be responsible for driving Parallels’ strong relationship with its cloud services provider partners and two ANZ distributors, Conexus and Software Only, while Alexei will concentrate on providing strategic sales and technical support for customers and partners in ANZ.

Parallels has had a growing presence in Australia and New Zealand through its service provider partners, distributors and retail partners since 2006 and has gained a formidable reputation among businesses, consumers and service providers looking for virtualization and automation solutions that are among the fastest growing in the market.

A Look At The New Citrix XenDesktop Release

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Citrix Systems earlier this week announced a new release of Citrix XenDesktop that extends the benefits of desktop virtualization to enterprise laptop users with the addition of two new technologies: Citrix XenClient and Citrix XenVault.

Together, these two technologies make it easy for IT to incorporate mobile laptop users into a unified enterprise desktop virtualization strategy with unparalleled security and simplicity – including corporate-owned laptops managed by IT, as well as user-owned devices brought in by contractors or employees in a BYOC (bring your own computer) program.

Desktop virtualization is rapidly growing in popularity as a more secure, flexible way to deliver Windows desktops to business users in any location. With this new release, companies of all sizes can now deploy a single desktop virtualization solution that seamlessly supports both desk-based and laptop users in just about any scenario. With laptop users representing half of the workforce in many companies, today’s announcement represents a major milestone that significantly expands the reach of desktop virtualization to millions of new users.

Most mobile employees today do the majority of their work on company-owned laptops. For these workers, the best solution is a virtual desktop that runs directly on their laptop. This approach gives IT all the central management and security benefits of server hosted virtual desktops (VDI), combined with all the flexibility and ability to be disconnected from the network that come with traditional, locally installed desktops. And because the desktops runs in a local VM at all times, users never have to go through the cumbersome time consuming process “checking-out” their virtual desktop by downloading it from a central server each time they leave the office. These new capabilities are all enabled by the new XenClient technology, a groundbreaking client-side hypervisor developed in close collaboration with Intel, and optimized for the Intel Core vPro technology.

With the addition of the new XenClient and XenVault features, XenDesktop extends its lead as the most comprehensive and flexible desktop virtualization solution on the market.

Key Facts and Highlights (XenClient):

  • Enables Virtual Desktops “To Go” – XenClient is a client-side hypervisor that enables virtual desktops to run directly on client devices. It provides all the security and central management of VDI, while allowing users to seamlessly work online or disconnected without any cumbersome check-in or check-out requirements, just as they would with a traditional locally installed desktop. While XenClient can be run on any supported PC hardware, it is ideally suited to corporate-owned laptops.
  • Control for IT, Flexibility for Users – XenClient makes it easy for IT to deliver a secure, centrally managed corporate desktop environment to laptop users without compromising user experience. They can even set up a second personal virtual desktop on the same laptop, giving users full freedom, without compromising corporate security.
  • Centralized Backup and Recovery – When disconnected from the network, XenClient operates just like a traditional installed desktop. As soon as users connect to the network, it automatically synchronizes any changes with the datacenter, ensuring full centralized backup of all corporate laptops. If a laptop is ever lost or stolen, users can easily restore their full desktop environment exactly like it was to a new laptop, while data on the original laptop can be wiped remotely.
  • Portable and Persistent Desktop Images – By separating the operating system from the underlying hardware, desktop images can now be created, secured, deployed and moved across any supported hardware, greatly reducing the maintenance burden on IT and simplifying disaster recovery for laptop users.
  • Expanded Hardware and Device Support – XenClient now also includes several new capabilities that were not supported in the initial beta release. These include multiple usability and security enhancements, new synchronization features, and expanded support for hardware platforms, wireless adapters and USB-based devices such as webcams, iPads, iPhones, Androids, BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile devices.
  • Optimized for Intel vPro – The XenClient hypervisor was designed jointly with Intel to work seamlessly with the underlying hardware. Intel Core vPro processors are designed to provide the best experience for end-users and IT through use of Intel hardware-assisted virtualization, management and security technologies.

Key Facts and Highlights (XenVault):

  • Protects and Isolates User Data – The new XenVault technology automatically and transparently saves any user data created by corporate apps into an encrypted folder, ensuring that it is protected at all times from unauthorized users.
  • Ideal for Contractors and BYOC – Because XenVault supports both virtual and physical desktops, it is an ideal solution for contractors and employee-owned laptops where users don’t want IT installing software on their personal laptops. When a contract is over, an employee terminates, or the laptop is lost or stolen, corporate data remains secure, and can even be wiped remotely.
  • Supports XenApp and App-V – XenVault automatically encrypts data created by any corporate app that is delivered by Citrix XenApp (or the XenApp feature of XenDesktop) or Microsoft App-V.

The new XenClient and XenVault technologies will both ship in the new XenDesktop 4, Feature Pack 2 release, available at the end of September. XenClient is available at no additional charge for XenDesktop Enterprise and Platinum editions customers with current Subscription Advantage agreements.

XenVault is enabled through a plug-in to the Citrix Receiver software client, which is available at no additional charge to all XenDesktop and XenApp customers. Citrix XenDesktop, including the new XenClient and XenVault technologies, will be demonstrated in the Citrix booth #1219 at VMworld San Francisco, Aug. 30 – Sept. 2.

VKernel Releases New Capacity Management Suite (CMS 2.0)

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VKernel, provider of Capacity Management products for virtualized data centers, has announced the general availability of VKernel Capacity Management Suite 2.0 (CMS 2.0).

VKernel CMS integrates previously separate products from VKernel with additional capabilities to create the most powerful integrated suite for capacity monitoring, planning, optimization and chargeback for enterprise environments.

Tapping into capacity management experience with over 500 customers including Global 2000 organizations, CMS 2.0 contains significant improvements in scalability, analytics, and automation while still providing a simple to download, simple to deploy, fast time to results application suite.

From a pure performance standpoint, CMS now scales to support the federation of multiple vCenters. In addition, by integrating previously separate products onto a single appliance, CMS reduces the load on connected vCenters by over 60%.

But scalability encompasses more than technological performance. As the number of VMs analyzed by an application increases in scale, the application must maintain its original usability despite the added complexity of more data, more users, and more analytical complexity. CMS contains multiple improvements to enable scalable operations as both the number of VMs and users within a company increase.

In addition to scalability improvements, CMS 2.0 contains improvements to the core capacity analytics engine. These improvements include the usage of storage throughput data in capacity calculations, support for thin provisioning, customizable virtual machine models for space availability calculations, selectable memory metrics, and new capacity change history analysis. The addition of these calculations to the capacity analytics engine provides system administrators with:

  • More accurate capacity planning that includes storage throughput
  • Awareness of over commitment caused by thin provisioning usage
  • Capacity planning forecasts based on application specific VM sizes, not a default, one size fits all model
  • Memory usage modeling customized for particular application characteristics
  • The ability to compare specific VM parameters to determine what has changed or will change over a given time period

Finally, CMS 2.0 contains new automation capabilities. As the number of VMs scale into the hundreds, organizations find it increasingly difficult to regularly evaluate and correct resource allocations for virtual machines. CMS has the ability to selectively reclaim unused resources at the push of a button or on a predetermined schedule.

Reclamation rules can be applied to further restrict which resources are automatically reclaimed. Only through this selective automation approach can organizations realistically improve ROI on a large scale. And only through this automation can VM system administrators gain additional time in their day.

In addition to improvements in scalability, analytics, and automation, CMS 2.0 contains a new product offering: VKernel Inventory 1.0. Inventory indexes all VMs in an environment and allows system administrator to sort, filter, and view all information about a VM from a single pane. Installed as part of Capacity Management Suite, Inventory provides value within 20 minutes from download by automatically indexing all VMs in an environment, serving as the historical record of VM configurations, allowing a single point of reference for all information about a VM and providing robust on-the-fly reporting abilities.

VKernel Capacity Management Suite 2.0 is available immediately for purchase or free 30 day trial. Products integrated into the suite include Capacity Analyzer 5.0, Optimization Pack 2.0, Chargeback 2.0, and Inventory 2.0.

Pricing starts at $299 per socket.

HP Debuts ‘Private Cloud Readiness Program’

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HP earlier this week unveiled a Private Cloud Readiness Program consisting of self-assessment tools and a Cloud Boot Camp to be held during the VMworld conference next week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Questions range from rating internal knowledge of cloud concepts and services to existing cloud security capabilities.

The company also announced a team of experts who, as pioneers in cloud computing, are driving future innovations and assisting clients with advanced cloud deployments.

Arista Partners With VMware to Develop Adaptive Network for Public and Private Clouds

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Arista Networks recently introduced an extension of its EOS (Extensible Operating System) software capabilities with Arista VM Tracer.

This new capability uniquely bridges the gap between the physical and virtual networks within a VMware environment through a set of software features that run on the Arista 7000 Family of Cloud Networking Switches. Arista VM Tracer provides networking operators new levels of visibility into the virtualization layer while enabling VMware administrators to have seamless control through the VMware vSphere interface.

Changes in networking and virtualization technologies are increasingly leading to the creation of divergent architectures within IT departments. With the goal of making it operationally simple to converge the management of physical and virtual networks, thus facilitating departmental cooperation, Arista Networks is extending its EOS (Extensible Operating System) software capabilities with Arista VM Tracer.

The use of the VMware vSphere platform to create private clouds and virtual machine farms is becoming mainstream; however, most current network architectures are not responsive to the dynamic segmentation requirements of these new infrastructures. VM Tracer automatically creates, prunes, and opens VLANs (Virtual LANs) across the network infrastructure as new virtual machines are added, moved, or changed. The Arista Cloud Network works in close concert with the VMware vSphere vNetwork virtual networking technology to always keep the network stable, support multi-tenancy, and react in real-time to changes.

VM Tracer provides five key capabilities to the network and virtualization administration teams:

VM Auto Discovery – Find exactly which VMware hosts and VMs are on a given port in the network. Displays the full Physical to Virtual Binding and provides visibility into the network reachability of a given virtual machine and the virtual machine’s state.

VM Adaptive Segmentation – Arista EOS will dynamically create VLANs as they are needed by the virtual machines. If a virtual machine shuts down or is moved, its VLAN(s) can be pruned to preserve bandwidth and CPU cycles for active workloads.

VM Host View – Gives the network administrator visibility into the host with critical information such as: Manufacturer, Processor type, NIC type.

VMware ESX Port Profile – Arista EOS will automatically configure the interface based on the best practice for connecting virtual machines.

VM Tracer Multi-Tenancy – Arista EOS supports connections to up to four separate VMware vCenter administrative domains with VLAN span-of-control per VMware vCenter Server instance. This allows for a single switch to connect to and participate in multiple virtualization domains concurrently. This is ideal for environments with a mix of production and lab services where each is allocated a specific range of VLANs.

VM Tracer is available immediately as a software license within Arista EOS 4.5 and higher, and is priced according to the switching platform on which it is operating.