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Platform Computing Releases VM Orchestrator 4

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Platform Computing has announced the next version of its virtual environment management product for the enterprise data center, Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO) 4. Platform VMO 4 provides faster delivery of virtual computer environments to end users while optimizing resource utilization, availability, and power consumption, to improve an enterprise’s return on investment from its virtualization environment. The solution offers a cost-effective enterprise virtualization management solution for Citrix XenServer, with support for virtualization platforms from other vendors to be delivered in the coming months.

Platform says VMO 4 increases IT productivity and responsiveness to business service levels through a Self-Service portal that supports delegated administration and allows end users to request and control usage of their own VMs without administrator involvement. At the core of VMO’s automated management is the multi-host dynamic resource management engine, which increases resource utilization across the virtual environment to remove bottlenecks and server silos according to flexible configurable policies that map to business priorities.

Platform VMO 4 will be available later this month.

Platform Computing

Ceedo Enterprise Support for Citrix XenApp Announced

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Ceedo today announced the availability of Ceedo Enterprise for Citrix XenApp, a solution that will give customers using XenApp (formerly Citrix Presentation Server) portable and secure access from any PC without the need to install client software and without requiring administrative rights. Compatibility of the XenApp Plugin for hosted applications with Ceedo’s application virtualization technology has been demonstrated through a rigorous testing program established by Citrix.

Ceedo Enterprise, launched a little over 2 months ago, enables organizations to create customized virtual workspaces, comprising of standard Windows applications, and run them without installation or requiring administration rights on any Windows PC. Ceedo workspaces can be placed and run from a webpage, a folder on a PC, a network drive or a portable storage device. The virtual workspaces can also be controlled and managed through a comprehensive remote management system.
In addition to using the XenApp Plugin, users can install their personal client applications to the workspace (such as WinAmp, Skype, FireFox, etc.), which will be available to them alongside XenApp on any PC.
The Ceedo Enterprise for Citrix XenApp is $89 per seat perpetual license. Discounts are available for large volume purchases. An evaluation version of the solution is available for download here.
Ceedo

Monitor Your Citrix XenServer Environment With Hyperic HQ

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Open source Web infrastructure management provider Hyperic today announced Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer management and monitoring software for Citrix XenServer. The new software allows XenServer administrators to quickly and correctly assess IT decisions within their XenServer environment.

“Our customers manage some of the world’s biggest Web environments where every second of downtime can mean losing revenue, users or both. Virtualization software such as Citrix XenServer delivers these organizations the necessary tools to be ultra-responsive to changes in user patterns and application performance,” said Doug MacEachern, CTO for Hyperic HQ. “By adding support for XenServer, we are once again taking the guesswork out of the management side of the equation. In providing management support for all virtualized and non-virtualized systems from one central location, we continue in our mission to make Web-based applications more manageable.”

Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer combines performance metrics, log data, configuration and security events in a single view correlated by time. These events can be used to link errors reported in the XenServer logs with other performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment, generate alerts or trigger automated control actions to remediate the current problem. Additionally, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer allows users to suspend, shutdown, start and reboot directly from the HQ interface and record the action in the event history for future reference.

Currently, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer is available on Hyperic’s community Hyperforge. Hyperic will incorporate this new plugin directly into the core distribution in the upcoming Hyperic HQ 4.0 release, due out later this summer.

Hyperic

VMLogix Also Sells a Lab Manager, Releases Version 3.6

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VMLogix has released VMLogix LabManager 3.6 – not to be confused with VMware Lab Manager 3.0, released on the same day – carrying support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. VMLogix LabManager is hypervisor agnostic and with the introduction of Hyper-V now supports all standard server virtualization platforms.

VMLogix LabManager enables software companies, SMBs and enterprise IT organizations to leverage virtualization to consolidate and automate lab IT infrastructure in order to deliver and maintain software applications more quickly, cost-effectively and reliably. VMLogix LabManager allows development, test and support teams to build, snapshot, share and deploy production-like environments on-demand across Citrix, Microsoft and VMware virtualization platforms.

VMLogix LabManager 3.6 is available starting today and includes the beta version of support for the Microsoft Hyper-V platform. The product will be generally available in September 2008.

VMLogix

Citrix Announces Public Beta of XenServer 4.2

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Yesterday, Citrix released the public beta of the next version of XenServer, which may or may not be called XenServer 4.2 but is still being referred to as ‘Project Orlando’. Judging by the comments on the Citrix forum, the release was indeed scheduled for end of July, with a final version coming in September.

Citrix XenServer 4.2 comes with Xen 3.2, with Xen 3.3 remaining in final testing stage. On to the Xen.org blog, you can already post feature requests for Xen 3.4.

Virtualization.info broke the news about the release and lists the following additional new features:

  • Automated high availability
  • VM grouping, searching and tagging
  • Real-time and persistent performance monitoring
  • Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, XP SP3, Vista SP1 guest OSes
  • Support for Novell SLES 9 SP4 / 10 SP2, Red Hat RHEL 4.7 / 5.2 guest OSes
  • Support for Fibre Channel / iSCSI multipath (configurable through XenCenter)
  • Support for alerts as email

You can enroll for the public beta program here.

Citrix Systems

IntervalZero Acquires Ardence Embedded Software Business From Citrix Systems

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IntervalZero, a new embedded software company led by a group of senior Ardence executives, today announced that it has acquired Ardence’s Embedded software business from Citrix.

The company, which is based in Waltham, MA, is headed by CEO Jeffrey D. Hibbard, an Ardence/Citrix executive with more than 20 years of software engineering, sales, marketing and management experience.

IntervalZero officially completed the acquisition on July 15 and will continue to market and sell the Embedded products under their existing names – RTX, ETS and Select. IntervalZero said worldwide Embedded Distribution/Reseller channels and Embedded Partner affiliations – notably the Partner relationships with Microsoft and Intel – remain in place.

Citrix, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, acquired Ardence’s Enterprise and Embedded software businesses in January 2007. Although Citrix determined that the Ardence Embedded products were not a good fit for its Enterprise product portfolio, Citrix made an equity investment in IntervalZero.

“We believe there are significant opportunities in Embedded technology, but it is not a core business for Citrix. To continue to grow and succeed, the Embedded business needed both the focus and the investment that Jeff and the IntervalZero team are fully committed to delivering. Their approach to the market and their business model are sound, which is why we have maintained a stake in the IntervalZero,” said Lou Shipley, VP and General Manager of Citrix’s Xen Products Group.