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Release: Lanamark Suite 2009

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Lanamark today announced general availability of Lanamark Suite 2009. The new version includes support for monitoring Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX, supplements server information with power consumption, form factor, age and warranty metrics, and simplifies capacity planning with significant user experience and reporting automation enhancements.

Lanamark Suite 2009 now includes monitoring of Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX free of charge for all assessments commencing prior to March 31, 2009. Standard licensing per desktop or server workload per assessment still applies.

Citrix And VCs Invest Another $15 Million In Virtual Computer

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Virtual Computer today announced it has secured $15 million in series B funding, in a round was co-led by series A investors Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners with additional investment coming from Citrix Systems.

The latest round of financing positions Virtual Computer to significantly accelerate its global sales and marketing efforts and further advance development of the company’s NxTop product offering.

NxTop, Virtual Computer’s next-generation PC management platform, makes it as easy to manage thousands of PCs as it is to manage one, dramatically reducing PC management costs while improving PC reliability and security. NxTop isolates the PC’s critical components — hardware, operating system, applications, and user data — allowing each to be managed independently in a highly-scalable fashion without a persistent network connection.

“This is a blockbuster funding round for any company, especially in this economic environment,” said Dan McCall, president and CEO of Virtual Computer. “Not only did our current investors show their continued support for the company, but we were able to add a proven leader in the virtualization market as a strategic investor. We are looking forward to working with Citrix to help make Xen a market standard for PC lifecycle management.”

Citrix Systems And Intel Partner For Development Of Xen Client Hypervisor Technology

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Citrix Systems and Intel are working on developing technology to make desktop-as-a-service computing possible. The two companies said yesterday that they are collaborating to jointly deliver a hypervisor that will sit on end-user devices which will allow customers to have access to their virtual desktop PCs from any device without the need to boot up the device.

Under an agreement with Intel, Citrix plans to produce a new class of virtualization solutions that optimize the delivery of applications and desktops to millions of Intel Core2 and Centrino 2 processor-based devices, considerably reducing the cost of desktop management.

The new Xen-based client hypervisor resulting from the collaboration between Citrix and Intel will be optimized for bare metal virtualization and suited for delivery as an embedded, small footprint component of an enterprise laptop or desktop PC, and can also be installed on existing client systems that already have an operating system installed.

More perspective on the collaboration can be found on eWeek.

DataCore Introduces SAN Software Starter Packages For SMBs

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DataCore Software has announced an expanded line of new SAN software starter packages priced for small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs).

The high cost and complexity of traditional SAN storage required to support virtual servers and desktops puts it out of the reach for many small and mid-size businesses. DataCore’s new packages firmly reset the industry’s starting price point for business continuity solutions that provide true auto failover/failback high-availability and fault tolerance. These new packages provide a new level of automated storage protection to ensure business uptime, while also significantly lowering the cost and complexity barriers of SAN storage for Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Parallels, VMware and other server and desktop virtualization environments.

The new software packages, with entry prices starting at under $2,000 per server, include thin provisioning, data migration technology, storage performance caching software, snapshots for fast disk backups, remote site disaster recovery replication and DataCore’s High Availability (HA) data protection. In virtual server and desktop environments, DataCore’s HA is unmatched in automation (true failover/failback recovery), manufacturer independence (storage and server brands), network connectivity (iSCSI or FC, or both) and proven fault tolerance (deployed in thousands of systems worldwide).

DataCore’s new packages fill the gap between low-end, Windows system replication solutions that provide limited single system data protection (e.g. Double-Take Software) for VMs at a cost of thousands and higher-end, enterprise-class storage arrays and SAN that provide necessary protection but are complex and often cost $100,000 or more. With these packages, DataCore has created a new class of SAN solutions that deliver the highest-end data protection capabilities at a SMB price point.

The Xen of Oracle, or was it the Oracle of Xen ?

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The Xen Blog has the news that Oracle joined the Xen Advisory Board.

“Having Oracle join the Xen Advisory Board is a significant milestone for the Xen.org community and Xen hypervisor,” said Ian Pratt, founder of the xen project and Chairman of Xen.org. “With Oracle’s industry leadership and enterprise market experience, the Xen.org community is further strengthened, ensuring a continued leadership position as the open source hypervisor of choice.”

“As a leading contributor to the Open Source community, Oracle is pleased to join the Xen Advisory Board,” said Wim Coekaerts, vice president Linux Engineering, Oracle. “With development projects such as enhancing Oracle Cluster File System 2 with features useful for virtualization, memory management changes with the hcache and hswap projects and integrating the Linux data integrity project into Xen, Oracle continues to focus on enhancing Xen with enterprise-class features.”

Together with Wim “Seklos” Coekaerts , comes Dan “I’ll replace you with a small shell script” Magenheimer, formerly of HP and the leader of the Itanium Xen port as an Oracle Observer, and Kurt Hackel, who leads the Oracle VM dev team.

Throughout 2008, Oracle has already significantly increased its contribution to the Xen.org community, including a focus on the new Xen debugger, a new implementation effort on the Xen API, timer testing, new memory caching algorithms, and updates to support Oracle software running on the Xen hypervisor. These contributions from Oracle are valuable to the Xen customer base as they provide enhancements to the Xen hypervisor’s capabilities in the enterprise and cloud computing space. These features are also important to the development community as the new Xen debugger delivers greater insight into the hypervisor’s state during development testing, allowing for faster bug identification and fixes.

Simon Crosby comments on Oracle earlier involvement “Whereas Oracle Unbreakable Linux is a derivative of Unfakable Enterprise Linux” (in other words, RHEL) the Xen in Oracle VM comes directly from the upstream Xen.org code base, and not via an intermediate distro. This means that Oracle VM tracks the xen.org upstream code base more closely than OEL can track kernel.org. Oracle has already offered a valuable set of set of patches and contributions to the project, and will host the next Xen Developer Summit.”

Simon also isn’t that keen on the way Oracle has been supporting applications within VM’s in the past but hopes that with Oracle joining the Xen Project Advisory board they will learn about the business of partnering from the community and the ISV ecosystem.

AppDNA Releases Beta Of AppTitude Virtualization Manager for Citrix XenApp

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AppDNA released a beta of AppTitude Virtualization Manager for Citrix XenApp and is working with the company on application compatibility testing for its XenApp product line. AppTitude for Citrix XenApp is designed to make it easier for partners and customers to deliver applications via XenApp – either hosted on the server or streamed directly to the user’s device.

AppDNA’s AppTitude 3.0 is an application compatibility testing solution that can help organizations to determine the optimal method of application delivery. AppTitude 3.0 provides business benefits that were never before possible, including vastly reducing the time, costs and risks associated with deployment of operating system migrations, software upgrades and virtualization.

With its ability to test for a number of new server-related functions, AppTitude 3.0 provides a single view of essential information on every application across the enterprise regarding suitability for virtualization, including XenApp and Microsoft Windows Terminal Services. AppTitude 3.0 also flags applications with potential interoperability and overlap issues.

The new AppTitude 3.0 release includes the AppTitude Virtualization Manager for Citrix XenApp, which allows organizations to rapidly move to XenApp by automatically identifying potential application compatibility issues and recommending actions to fix them. AppTitude 3.0 can test for application compatibility with XenApp versions 3.0 through 5. Included in the product are two types of analysis: static and run-time. AppTitude 3.0 also supports overlap analysis showing whether or not a particular application can be installed on a given server by checking for shared resources, such as file and registry keys. With these new capabilities the product is a highly-effective tool for Citrix XenApp server farm planning and management.