Last week Flexiant announced release 2.0 of its Cloud Orchestrator software previously called Extility.

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator 2.0 enables service providers to build a multi-level reseller model, the key features of this release include:

• Multi cluster support, across multiple locations and geographies, all managed from a single pane of glass portal.
• Integration with an extended ecosystem of partner organisations to make it easier to develop and deploy highly differentiated services
• Multi hypervisor support for KVM, Xen 3, Xen 4, VMware and Hyper V(beta), again all managed from a single pane of glass portal.
• Multi-level, granular metering and billing to support complex business models that include multiple resellers, multiple enterprises and business units and multiple consumers
• New intuitive and highly configurable user interface to support white labelling but also to give the end user the individualised experience that ensures increased efficiency, productivity and adoption.
• Fine-grained , role based access controls, by user and group, that allow you to empower individuals and to drive efficiency, productivity and higher margins.
• A revised and expanded API to ease the process of integration and extensibility.

Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.

Terms of the transaction were not released.

The move suggest the intentions of EMC to compete with consumer-focused storage offering like DropBox and applications more enterprise-like as VMware’s Project Octopus, neo-released in beta.

The addition of Syncplicity also extends EMC’s strategy of enabling the ‘New User’ in the Post PC era, those who want to access, share, collaborate and participate in business processes on their preferred device.

This quote reminds us the growing trend of BYOD (bring your own device) workplaces where employees of large corporate struggle for shared storage services and the enterprise IT tries to control the security implications of the phenomenon.

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On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.

This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.

All the new key features are devoted to simplify the work for Virtualization Administrators and follows the application-driven approach to virtualization that Oracle has kept so far.

The new features could be summarized as follows:

• Enhanced User Interface: The new Oracle VM 3.1 Manager introduces a new set of wizards for large-scale deployments, tasks and workflows execution in a Web browser interface.
• Enhanced Storage Configuration Capabilities: Focused on the simplification of backup and disaster recovery, now allows access to NFS external storage and the quick copy of iSCSI and Fiberchannel-based storage repository from one cluster to another, including across WANs.
• Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops

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In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the release 5.1 of VMware View.

The post touches 4 main points:

• PCoIP Efficiency: The Team claims to have achieved, through compression protocols refinements and general performances optimization, up to 1.3X reduction in PCoIP overheads.
• Client Optimizations: Even in this case the Team talks about up to 3X improvement in video playback performance, with a particular focus to low-performing processors that can now reach a smooth 720p playback.
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On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.

This new platform promises to deliver a desktop experience  comparable to a local PC, up to 100 VDI users for each single server equipped with a VGX board.

NVIDIA VGX represents a new era in desktop virtualization. It delivers an experience nearly indistinguishable from a full desktop while substantially lowering the cost of a virtualized PC.

said Jeff Brown, general manager of the Professional Solutions Group at NVIDIA.

This product is intended for those kind of users who work with 3D design softwares and simulation tools and is designed to be integrated into enterprise IT departments providing an integration layer for commercial hypervisors (the news only talks about Citrix XenServer) and a level of manageability that allows to configure the graphics capabilities delivered to individual users in the network, based on their demands.

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Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.

The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review period will run through July 5th.

To download the beta materials on Connect follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219165

To join the beta review program follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=171065

The new features introduced in version 7.0 include Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness assessment, VDI readiness assessment and the ability to plan for virtualization assessment of Linux server.

MAP 7.0 supports SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration planning and, along with Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter, simplifies the migration of VMware virtual machine to Hyper-V.

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Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.

vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric applications on VMware cloud infrastructure and SQLFire Enterprise Edition, an in-memory distributed SQL database that will enable application data to meet cloud scale with the needed performances.

vFabric Suite leverages Spring development framework, inherited from SpringSource acquisition in 2009, vFabric application services and a per-VM licensing model to provide a comprehensive infrastructure oriented to the deployment of cloud-ready applications.

Part of this broader shift in application infrastructure was the move to cloud and application deployment on virtual infrastructure. Traditional application servers simply weren’t designed, optimized or licensed for this new world. These legacy systems are too cumbersome, too costly, and definitely not cloud-ready. We saw the need for a new breed of application infrastructure to support this new world of applications.

said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware.

Here follows a quote of the original news:

The VMware vFabric Suite provides a complete set of runtime services to build, run and manage modern applications in distributed, cloud environments.  The new capabilities in vFabric Suite 5.1 will allow customers to:

• Automate application deployment for operational efficiency –To drive greater efficiency and better performance, vFabric Suite will include vFabric Application Director™ and vFabric Application Performance Manager. vFabric Application Director automates the deployment of applications through easy-to-use blueprints with standardized templates, component libraries and workflows. vFabric Application Performance Manager provides comprehensive monitoring of end-user transactions, Java code, middleware servers, and VMware vSphere hosts, enabling customers to proactively manage application performance, find and fix problems quickly, and meet SLAs.
• Maximize data scalability – Many of today’s mobile and web-oriented applications must support highly variable access patterns, putting pressure on any database-only approach to data management. To support this evolution, in-memory databases have emerged as a standard component of the core technology stack developers use today.  VMware vFabric SQLFireis an in-memory distributed SQL database built on the strength of vFabric GemFire®,which is used by many of the most demanding applications in the world. vFabric SQLFire delivers dynamic scalability and high performance for modern, data-intensive applications all accessible through a familiar SQL interface.
  By pooling memory, CPU and network resources across a cluster of machines, vFabric SQLFire eliminates the main performance bottleneck in traditional databases – disk access.  vFabric SQLFire can manage data across geographies, accelerating application performance, minimizing latency and increasing reliability. vFabric SQLFire Professional will be included in the vFabric Suite 5.1.
• Reduce database total cost of ownership –To reduce database costs and increase agility vFabric Suite 5.1 will include vFabric Postgres, a VMware-optimized relational SQL database. vFabric Postgres is fully compatible with open source PostgreSQL, enabling customers to leverage existing standard PostgreSQL tools. vFabric Postgres comes in a virtual appliance and has virtualization optimizations such as elastic database memory to share database memory pools and smart configuration to reduce tuning time after resizing virtual machines.
• Provide enterprise support for popular open source technologies – The VMware vFabric Suite 5.1 will include support for the open source runtime components most frequently used in production deployments of Spring applications, including Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server and RabbitMQ® messaging. This greatly simplifies the adoption path of vFabric technologies for those organizations using these open source components today.
  “From the increasing number of programming languages used to the heterogeneous nature of today’s hybrid infrastructures, application development is changing quickly,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with RedMonk. “Faced with such diversity, enterprises are increasingly turning to lightweight application containers to ease the pains of deployment.”

On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.

One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long seven-part video series, was the need to increase the automation and integration between VMware’s various products, topic about which Herrod reassured those present confirming VMware’s awareness of the problem.

Of this long speech the statement that has inflamed internet is

VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite is really more of a marketing term. Those of you know our products deeply know that they don’t fit this well together as they need to. Some of them have multiple databases, some don’t look the same, some install differently, and what I can’t stand that is Site Recovery Manager doesn’t currently work with vCloud Director. So, what we are basically able to say is that we created and acquired companies that led to a lot of individual products that don’t work well enough together yet.

as reported by Dave Northey on Microsoft’s TechNet blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing to offer costumers the ability to install applications and usb peripherals.

As discussed before for other companies, service providers are unable to cost-effectively offer these virtual desktop capabilities, to multiple costumers, with VDI based on Windows 7 because client operating systems are not covered by Microsoft SPLA program, Hosted Server VDI Tech Preview, targeted at nearly 2.000 Citrix Service Providers, bypass the problem using Windows Server 2008 R2 instead of Windows 7 making the solution fully enabled for multi-tenenacy in the Microsoft program.

Here are the Q&A from the original post:

What makes this “VDI”?

Despite having “desktop” in the name, the real heart of the appeal of VDI isn’t in the client operating system – it’s in the way that one user is isolated from another at a VM level. Of course, that’s different than a hosted shared desktop (XenApp, RDS) which is isolated at a session level. That VM isolation makes it possible to give users the ability to install apps. It also makes it easier to support USB peripherals, dedicate CPU and RAM to individual users, and support apps that aren’t compatible with a multi-user environment. With the new Tech Preview, whether the guest OS is Windows 7 or Windows Server doesn’t materially change those benefits.

Is it a “real” desktop?

At a technical level, the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system is functionally identical to Windows 7 by design. The main differences are the default theme settings, the pre-configured default apps and tools (PowerShell instead of Media Player in the task bar, for example) and the ability to control more services on the server. The interface differences can be addressed by simply using the Desktop Experience Pack, introduced by Citrix at Synergy 2011. With that applied, end users get a familiar, fully featured desktop experience that is indistinguishable from conventional VDI. It’s a real desktop.

What licenses do I need?

You can use the normal SPLA options for Windows Server, and an RDS-SAL for each user. Make no mistake – it’s still going to be more expensive in terms of licenses and infrastructure than a hosted shared desktop. But for advanced customer use cases where they need a private VM environment for a user, this is the most cost-effective and practical option. Keep in mind that you can always combine the various desktop models in your service offering – they are not mutually exclusive. For more details on proper licensing, be sure to contact your Microsoft representative.

Citrix Service Providers can download this Hosted Server VDI Tech Preview at MyCitrix.

On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.

VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza acquisition in May 2011, already eliminates  much of the traditional VDI infrastructure, including shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers, with a simple deployment of the virtual appliance on the hypervisor of choice.

Project Aruba uses vDisks layering technology, obtained with Ringcube acquisition, to manage end-user applications and preferences allowing Virtual Desktops personalization and flexibility.

Project Aruba provides the following key features:
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