Secure Network is an Italian consulting firm focuses on network and application security assessment.
One of its partners, Claudio Criscione, is a long time columnist here at virtualization.info.

Secure Network is working on the first security assessment toolkit for virtual infrastructures, VASTO, and Criscione announced today the public beta at the Troopers conference.

VASTO comes as a set of components for Metasploit, one of the most popular frameworks for penetration testing in the security industry.
The framework consists of tools, libraries, modules, and user interfaces. The basic function of the framework is a module launcher, allowing the user to configure an exploit module and launch it at a target system. If the exploit succeeds, the payload is executed on the target and the user is provided with a shell to interact with the payload. Hundreds of exploits and dozens of payload options are available.

What Secure Network released today is a number of open source modules that perform a number of different attacks: from hijacking a connection to the virtual infrastructures web-based management consoles (against VMware VI/vSphere, Server 1.x, Converter and even Citrix XenCenter) to password bruteforcing (against VMware and Xen platforms), up to a path traversal attack (against VMware ESX, ESXi and Server web interfaces).
The toolkit even includes an attack against VMware Studio.

The first round of beta version of the modules can be downloaded here. Secure Network promises more to come.

In December 2009 Microsoft acquired the run-book automation firm Opalis Software.
At that time the company anticipated that Opalis technology would be integrated in the System Center product family and that it would become the automation layer for Hyper-V and Azure virtualization.

Today Microsoft offers additional details about when the integration with happen: integrations packs for UNIX, Red Hat RHEL and Novell SLES Linux will be released in Q2 2010, while integration packs for Service Manager 2010, Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2, Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 will appear in Q3 2010.

A tighter integration anyway can’t be expected before 2011 when Microsoft plans to release the next major version of Opalis.

The automation platform has been included in the Microsoft Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) and Datacenter (SMSD) licenses which will cost more starting July 1. 

Now that VMware owns a technology that is far away from its primary business, the Spring Java framework and a couple of application servers, one of its primary challenges is building awareness among its customers.

To do so, the company is offering complimentary and perpetual licenses (2 CPUs) of its Tomcat application server called tc Server to any customer buying other VMware products, including vSphere and View.

VMware is not offering the existing editions of tc Server but a new one that integrates with the Spring framework and supports Spring applications.

It’s pure speculation, but customers would rather prefer to have for free the third piece of the SpringSource acquisition: the Hyperic monitoring suite.
Interestingly enough, not only VMware is not offering any special deal for Hyperic, but it even removed Hyperic components from tc Server. While previous versions of the application server in fact included some of them to provide insight about the application performance, the new Spring Edition doesn’t.

This means that either VMware is confident in its capability to sell Hyperic tools without incentives or the monitoring suite is not robust enough for VMware standards.

While Hyper9 continues to build features on top of its search engine for virtual infrastructures, it also keeps R&D resources busy on parallel projects.

The last one, released a few days ago, is SimDK, an open source tool able to simulate the vSphere behavior.
Users can connect to the SimDK service with VMware clients, like the PowerCLI or the standard vSphere Client.
It’s primarily aimed at developers that want to do QA and testing, verify APIs compatibility or perform load and scalability testing, but it can be used to test, for example, 3rd party scripting tools like the Quest/Vizioncore Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI).

SimDK can even emulate the vSphere APIs against a different hypervisor (like Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V).
What happen here is that the tool acts as a proxy, translating the commands issued through the VMware APIs in something that other virtualization platforms  can understand.

Here’s a video of the product in action:

A new US startup entered the virtualization market in mid-February: Virsto.

Founded in 2007 and sustained by a $8.5M investment led by August Capital and Canaan Partners, the company is managed by Mark Davis, former CEO of Creekpath Systems (acquired by Opsware, which was then acquired by HP). Davis also served as Vice President of Marketing at Monosphere, acquired by Quest.

Davis is leading an interesting team of managers and advisors, which includes the co-founder and CTO Alex Miroshnichenko (former CTO at Acronis), the co-founder and Vice President of Engineering Serge Pashenkov (former Senior Director of Software Development at PowerFile and Veritas - acquired by Symantec), the Vice President of Sales Rafael Santini (former VP of Worldwide OEM Sales at XenSource - acquired by Citrix), and the advisors Frank Artale (current Vice President of Business Development at Citrix), James Phillips (co-founder and former CEO of Akimbi – acquired by VMware) and Shaw Chuang (former R&D Executive at VMware).

This team developed a solution to improve efficiency and performance of Hyper-V virtual machines, by hijacking and optimizing their interaction with the underlying storage.

Virsto One in fact is a lightweight solution (10Mb) that installs inside the Hyper-V parent partition and places a filter driver between VMs virtual hard drives (VHDs) and physical volumes (no matter where they are and what storage protocol is used to reach them).

To hijack VMs I/O stream, Virsto creates fake VHD files (this is done through a snap-in for the Hyper-V console) that administrators must map to virtual machines in place of standard Microsoft VHDs.
Nor the virtual machine neither its guest operating system recognize the difference: the Virsto VHD containers have the same properties of standard VHDs.
What happens behind the scene is that all the data a VM saves inside a fake VHD is actually redirected to the Virsto filter driver, which optimizes it before sending it to the physical storage volume.

The optimization Virsto is talking about here consists in three things:

• unlimited snapshots with zero performance impact
  Virsto claims the capability to generate thousands of thousands of snapshot (and thus of VM clones), in deeply nested structures, without the degradation seen in VMware environments.
• I/O flow control for up to 5x performance
  Virsto believes that a key issue impacting the virtual machine performance when accessing storage is the randomness of data stream. When multiple VMs concurrently try to access the same physical volume, the hypervisor has to randomize the guest OSes I/O flows and this may reduce throughput up to 80%.
  The Virsto filter driver intercepts and controls all guest OSes data streams by journaling their I/Os and then sequentially writing them to the physical volume.
• integration with Live Migration and Windows VSS
  Virsto One supports Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) and live migration, and it comes with a Volume Shadow Service (VSS) provider to integrate with 3rd party backup solutions.

In some way this could be considered an approach similar to the one VMware took with its Consolidate Backup (VCB) proxy.
The difference is that while VMware is discontinuing VCB, Virsto is so confident about the approach that it claims storage costs can be cut by more than 50%, achieving 3x-5x server consolidation ratios than with VMware.

Virsto One is licensed per server, with pricing starting at $1,250 (for up to 2 sockets) and reaching $5,000 for unlimited sockets.

The decision to support Hyper-V rather than ESX at its first release is quite interesting and definitively different from what the large majority of virtualization startup do at launch.
This choice may depend on technical issues to hijack the access to VMware VMFS volumes, but it’s clear that Virsto is trying to leverage the opportunity to be the first player in a market where there are no competitors.
Of course the big risk for the company is that Hyper-V will never be adopted by the kind of customers that have the storage problems Virsto is trying to solve.

At the beginning of 2010 the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) published the first revision of the OVF standard, released for the first time in February 2009.

OVF 1.1 includes some clarification and new components:

• Capability for file system-based images to increase flexibility at deployment time
• A property attribute to hide password values at the user interface
• Joliet extensions for ISO transport image

DMTF has also submitted OVF to the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) "Fast-Track" process to develop it as an American National Standard at American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Once it is approved as an ANSI standard, OVF will be submitted to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for consideration as an international standardization.

The list of contributors to this revision is quite interesting as it includes includes representatives from Citrix (still listed as XenSource), Dell, IBM, Microsoft NEC, Sun (soon to appear as Oracle), Symantec and of course VMware:

• Simon Crosby, XenSource
• Ron Doyle, IBM
• Mike Gering, IBM
• Michael Gionfriddo, Sun Microsystems
• Steffen Grarup, VMware (Co-Editor)
• Steve Hand, Symantec
• Mark Hapner, Sun Microsystems
• Daniel Hiltgen, VMware
• Michael Johanssen, IBM
• Lawrence J. Lamers, VMware (Chair)
• John Leung, Intel Corporation
• Fumio Machida, NEC Corporation
• Andreas Maier, IBM
• Ewan Mellor, XenSource
• John Parchem, Microsoft
• Shishir Pardikar, XenSource
• Stephen J. Schmidt, IBM
• René W. Schmidt, VMware (Co-Editor)
• Andrew Warfield, XenSource
• Mark D. Weitzel, IBM
• John Wilson, Dell

Thanks to Ruben Spruijt for the news.

VMware just launched a new online facility called Labs.

It seems a sort of R&D website that exposes company’s engineers pet projects before they turn into real products, similarly to what other companies like Microsoft and Google do.

At the moment Labs hosts ten projects, all released as Technology Previews, under open source licenses, without any support and without any indication about future inclusion in the VMware product portfolio.

Some of them, like the previously covered VMware Guest Console, are extremely interesting:

• Apache Pivot
  Like most modern development platforms, Pivot provides a comprehensive set of foundation classes that together comprise a "framework". These classes form the building blocks upon which more complex and sophisticated applications can be built.
• Dynamo RIO
  DynamoRIO exports an interface for building dynamic tools for a wide variety of uses: program analysis and understanding, profiling, instrumentation, optimization, translation, etc. Unlike many dynamic tool systems, DynamoRIO is not limited to insertion of callouts/trampolines and allows arbitrary modifications to application instructions via a powerful IA-32/AMD64 instruction manipulation library. DynamoRIO provides efficient, transparent, and comprehensive manipulation of unmodified applications running on stock operating systems (Windows or Linux) and commodity IA-32 and AMD64…
• esxplot
  Esxplot is a GUI based tool that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program loads files of this data and presents it as a hierarchical tree where the values are selectable in the left panel of the tool, graphs of the selected metrics are plotted in the right panel.
  Esxplot allows you to "browse" the contents of these somewhat unwieldy files. You can plot up to 16 metrics on the same canvas and export the graphs to a gif, jpg, png or bmp file format. Subsets of the data can be worked with by using the regex query box which will produce a subtree that can be browsed or exported as a csv file which can, in turn, be loaded into esxplot, PERFMON or Excel…
• Onyx
  Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.
• SVGA Sonar
  VGA Sonar is a demo application for SVGADevTap. SVGADevTap is a user-level library that communicates with the VMware SVGA guest driver to provide low-latency notifications of changes to the screen. Sonar was designed to use the devtap API to visualize application drawing patterns by rendering a scaled-down view of the desktop replacing pixel data with color-coded rectangles. As applications update the screen, Sonar presents it's scaled version of the screen using colors to denote different types of rendering commands and whether this rendering caused a visible change to the screen…
• vApprun
  …vApprun, these features becomes available to both Workstation and Fusion users. The vApprun tool implements the same vApp/OVF feature set as the vSphere 4 release. Thus, Workstation/Fusion can be used as a development environment for advanced OVF packages, and it can be used to evaluate and test OVF packages on your desktops and laptops…
• vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA)
  VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) - vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices.
• VMware Guest Console (VGC)
  A new management console able to independently monitor and manipulate files and processes inside any guest operating system. See virtualization.info coverage.
• VI Java
  vSphere Java API is a set of Java libraries that sits on top of existing vSphere SDK Web Services interfaces. It provides full managed object model and run-time type checking, resulting dramatic productivity boost.
• Virtual USB Analyzer
  The Virtual USB Analyzer is a free and open source tool for visualizing logs of USB packets, from hardware or software USB sniffer tools. As far as we know, it's the world's first tool to provide a graphical visualization along with raw hex dumps and high-level protocol analysis.

Thanks to NTPRO.NL for the news.

Almost one month ago, immediately after the VMware Partner Exchange conference, TechTarget published a scoop about some new features that may appear in the upcoming version of vSphere, expected later this year.

The list includes:

• Transparent Memory Compression
  This will avoid swap when RAM is overcommited by compressing a set of target pages to a special region. VMware measured the latency of this technique as a hundred times better than the latency of swapping on rotating disks. 
• IO-Resource Manager (IO-RM)
  This will allow the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to assign shares based on disk performance. The more shares a virtual machine will have, the higher priority it will get in accessing a shared VMFS volume.
• Eight concurrent live migrations
  Next version of VMotion will raise the default limit of concurrent live migrations from two to eight.

The imminent launch of Intel octal-core CPUs (codename Nehalem-EX) and servers with up to 48 cores (powered by AMD codename Magny-cours CPUs) will dramatically increase the virtualization hosts density but will highlight how the network layer is becoming one of the weakest point of high-capacity virtual infrastructures.

Anandtech just published a very interesting article on this topic, testing the performance of a couple of copper cable 10GBase-CX4 network interface cards against the popular quad-port gigabit NICs we use today in most virtualization hosts.

The benchmark measured dual-port Intel PRO/1000 PT Server adapter (82571EB) against a Supermicro AOC-STG-I2 dual-port 10Gbit/s Intel 82598EB and a Neterion Xframe-E 10Gbit/s.
Both NICs were tested with VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and CentOS 5.4 guest OSes with appropriate drivers.

While NICs tested by Anandtech are not the lastest available on the market, the research still is a valuable reading for most virtualization administrators.

The well-know virtualization professional (and blogger) Eric Sloof just released a tool called vmClient.

vmClient is a minimal management console that appears as an empty window frame.
It features a menu bar where the virtual machines hosted by any VMware vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi host are listed.
Each virtual machine in the list can be powered on/off, suspended and restarted. When the user tries to connect to them, the empty vmClient frame gets populated by the VMware MKS console (VNC) session with the guest operating system.

Archipel is a new open source virtual infrastructure management system based on the libvirt libraries and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly Jabber).

Still in early stage, the tool supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ and VirtualBox and it’s currently able to operate single virtual machines and VM groups, displaying performance statistics about them.

The interesting twist is that, thanks to the XMPP engine, this console provides instant notification about VMs status to any chat client that supports the (almost) standard protocol.
This means that virtual infrastructure administrators can query virtual machine status through their IM program of choice (like Google Talk or Gmail Chat for example).

To do so, each virtual infrastructure entity, including hosts and virtual machines, appear as an IM contacts,  with its list of “friends”. 
Every management task can be executed through chat messages, and geographically distant virtual infrastructures can communicate through remote XMPP servers.

Microsoft just published the beta version of a new Infrastructure Planning and Design guide.
Titled Dynamic Data Center, this 43-pages blueprint on what Microsoft defines “a combination of automation, control, and resource management software with a well-defined topology of virtualization, servers, storage, and networking hardware”.

The guide is divided in five main parts:

• Determine the Dynamic Data Center Scope
  This part helps to define the scope and determine the workloads that will be included in the Dynamic Data Center project. It’s divided in three steps:
• Determine the proposed initial workloads for the Dynamic Data Center.
• Select the workload fault-tolerance approach (including Load Balancing, VM-Level and Host-Level Clustering, as well as Application-Level Fault Tolerance).
• Determine the initial size of the Dynamic Data Center.
  
• Design the Virtualization Hosts
  This part helps to design hosts that meet the capacity, performance, placement, and fault-tolerance requirements of the organization. It’s divided in three steps:
• Group the workloads
• Design the host’s Hardware configurations
• Determine host connectivity requirements
• Design the Software Infrastructure
  This part helps to design the software infrastructure in a way it can provide directory and authentication services, virtual machine management, configuration management, software distribution/inventory/patch management, event monitoring and collection, remote desktop services and hardware management.
• Design the Dynamic Data Center Storage
  This part helps to design the storage infrastructure in a way it meets requirements of capacity, performance delivery, fault tolerance and manageability. It’s divided in four steps:
• Design the storage system
• Design the host storage connections
• Design the storage switches
• Select the backup approach
• Design the Network Infrastructure
  This part helps to design the network infrastructure to accommodate the requirements accumulated throughout previous steps. It’s divided in three steps:
• Design network switches
• Design the hardware load balancers
• Design the firewalls

What the guide doesn’t cover instead is:

• Utility service providers or hosting companies offering cloud computing, cloud computing platforms, cloud platform services, or cloud infrastructure services.
• Windows Live™ network of Internet services or other consumer-oriented, cloud services.
• Microsoft Online Services or other third-party software-as-a-service organizations delivering Microsoft infrastructure technologies.
• VM guest planning is a complex topic, and although it informs the scoping in this guide, it is considered a related but separate exercise from planning the Dynamic Data Center infrastructure.

Now, while this document is a good starting point to plan and design what Microsoft calls a dynamic data center, it’s nowhere near the level of completeness that a customer need to design his infrastructure from scratch. And yet, it’s a great way to envision how massive is the investment that any company has to dedicate to data center design.

After reading this document, any customer would recognize some value in the emerging unified/fabric computing trend that companies like Egenera and Cisco are leading.

While Intel prepares to launch its first octal-core CPU (codename Nehalem-EX) , which will potentially trigger a price increase in vSphere licensing, VMware publishes a new benchmark on current Xeon 5500 servers.

This time the company focuses on high throughput web performance, running the SPECweb2005 benchmark against a HP ProLiant DL380 G6 machine equipped with two quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 CPUs @ 2.933GHz and 96GB memory.

The system above, powered by vSphere 4.0, run four virtual machines with 4 vCPUs and 21GB vRAM each, hosting a copy of paravirtualized 64bit Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 plus Rock Webserver and Rock JSP server.

Such system, thanks to paravirtualization drivers, the VMware NetQueue technology, the Intel VMDirectPath technology (part of VT-d) and the Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit AF network interface cards, recorded a benchmark score of 62,296, equal to 85% of native performance.

The four VMs were able to serve  from 60,000 to 100,000 simultaneous users:

At the beginning of January virtualization.info published a long overview about the VMware’s approach to cloud computing, covering the vCloud APIs, the vCloud Express implementation and the five partners that are currently offering it.

One of them, BlueLock, just sent an email to its customers announcing that its vCloud Express offering will (tentatively) move from beta to general availability (GA) on March 25.

As far as we know none of the other providers is out of beta yet (this article will be updated if necessary).
So, while it’s entirely possible that BlueLock wants to be the first to announce vCloud Express GA, it’s much more likely that all the early adopters will make GA announcements in the same timeframe.
And this may mean that VMware is about to release some additional information or bits about its cloud computing platform. Like for example a version 1.0 of the APIs, or the public version of project Redwood, the software that will allow customers to migrate their virtual machines from their private virtual infrastructure to public clouds like the BlueLock one.

With an unexpected move, at the end of last week Parallels announced support for the upcoming Google operating system, Chrome OS, in its Desktop 5 for Mac.

While it’s entirely expected that consumers use desktop virtualization platforms to test new operating systems, it’s pretty uncommon to see a vendor that officially supports a beta product that is not widely deployed like Windows.

Considering the long beta cycles that Google products have (sometimes years), the effort to support multiple beta builds will be remarkable for Parallels.

The first stable release for Chrome OS is not expected to arrive before the second half of 2010.

Neocleus is a US startup that entered the virtualization market in May 2008 without much fanfare  (see virtualization.info coverage).
At that time, their Xen-based client hypervisor, Trusted Edge, was pitched as a secure endpoint platform that could be enriched by 3rd parties applications.

Two years after that, Neocleus still doesn’t get any significant traction despite many customers are well aware of (and very interested on) the client hypervisor concept because of its potential to deliver VDI in offline mode.
One reason for this lack of interest is that so far the startup made extremely complex to exactly understand the details of its product and to access it (the whole “drop us an email” argument doesn’t work well for a technology that is completely new and that faces severe skepticism about performance and hardware support).

So at the beginning of last week Neocleus announced a shift in its go-to-market strategy, with the release of NeoSphere, a version of Trusted Edge, that can be OEM’ed and extended by PC lifecycle management (PCLM), security and help desk vendors.
The first customer is the management vendor BigFix, according to Brian Madden.

Interestingly, every reference about Trusted Edge disappeared from the corporate website except a mention inside the original press announcement.

Last week Reuters and other news outlets reported that the VMware’s board approved a plan to buy back $400M in Class A shares.

The operation will happen over the months, through the end of 2011.

EMC said it has no intention to modify its ownership of the subsidiary, keeping it at around 80%.

In another note, the VMware’s CFO, Mark Peek, sold 15,000 shares at an average price of $46.72 a share in mid-February.

New month, new rebuttals in virtualization-land.
Evidently, virtualization players still consider the marketing skirmish very helpful to increase sales (virtualization.info has a slightly different opinion) so this March we have VMware leading three major campaigns against competitors.

Two of them are defensive, one is not:

• VMware View PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop HDX
• Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales
• Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

PCoIP vs Citrix XenDesktop HDX

At the beginning of February Citrix sponsored a competitive analysis performed by Miercom.
The 7-pages report compares protocol performance of Citrix XenDesktop 4 (with ICA/HDX) and VMware View 4 (with PCoIP) and these are the conclusions:

In a comparison of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations, Citrix XenDesktop 4 provided better overall performance when compared to VMware View 4

XenDesktop 4 used 64% less bandwidth than View 4 with PCoIP for typical tasks

Flash video was delivered with an average of 65% less CPU usage, 89% less bandwidth, and excellent Quality of Experience by XenDesktop 4 compared to View 4

Overall, XenDesktop 4 uses system resources more efficiently and is capable of scaling more effectively

VMware answered last week, informing that they were not contacted by Miercom and that they have no insight about how test were conducted.
Of course VMware offered its point of view on each point,

At this point customers just have to decide which company has the nicest logo and which guy has the brightest smile to believe to one set of claims over the other. 
Luckily, Brian Madden jumps in and provide an impartial, long, detailed analysis that definitively is worth a read.

Volume of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V sales

At the beginning of March, a blog independently run by VMware employees published interesting speculations about the sales volume of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V.

The article, written by Michael Hong, Senior Product Marketing Engineer, suggest that Citrix so far sold a very, very low number of Essentials for Hyper-V, because he apparently was the first one to recognize a major bug in the Workflow Studio setup.

Workflow Studio is part of the Essentials suite and the issue Hong encountered prevents its installation, but the Citrix support didn’t solve the issue and closed Hong’s support ticket without reasons.

Hong also notes that Citrix doesn’t have more than a bunch of posts on the its support forum about Essentials for Hyper-V.

For sure readers can’t wait to hear what Citrix has to answer on this…

Cost of managing Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

This is an old classic.
At the beginning of March VMware decided to cover a cost comparison table that Microsoft recently published.

The table compares several vSphere editions against a System Center bundle called System Center Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD), showing how the Microsoft way is significantly less expensive than VMware offering (at least half the price):

Of course there are a number of issues in the comparison that VMware pointed out.

In some cases VMware is completely right in highlighting how Microsoft doesn’t detail enough the difference between implementations of the same feature (vSMP support for example).
In other cases VMware wants Microsoft to drop comparison between some features because they are too different (VMware DRS vs Microsoft PRO for example) but here’s the a lot of room to debate.

While totally misleading, the sense of those marks is more like “We have this feature. The customer can use it in some way”.
Is it possible to pretend that a simple comparison table like this one (or the ones that VMware produces) offers an insightful qualitative analysis of implementation cost for each listed feature?
The customers that are looking for such in-depth side-by-side analysis aren’t going to research more on their own? Are they supposed to make their purchase decision just looking at this chart?

This is way the whole “my product is better than yours” marketing effort is a complete waste of time.

Exactly one year ago, PHD Virtual Technologies (formerly PHD Technologies) lost its CEO Sridhar Murthy.

In the last twelve months the company was led by its Executive Chairman Joe Julian, former Senior Vice President of Americas Sales and Global Accounts at Veritas Software.

PHD Virtual Technologies yesterday announced that the former CEO of Shunra Software, Thomas Charlton, joined the company as new Chairman and CEO, thus replacing both Murthy and Julian.

This is the third CEO the company has since its launch in March 2006.

The most interesting thing is that the press release explicitly says that Charlton was chosen by Insight Venture, the VC firm that invests in both Shunra and PHD Virtual.

A few minutes ago a couple of videos of a new VMware product called Guest Console (VGC) surfaced.

Guest Console, currently in Technology Preview phase, is a new management console able to independently monitor and manipulate files and processes inside any guest operating system.

It can connect to any guest OS, it doesn’t matter if the VM is hosted on ESX, Server and Workstation.
Once connected to the host, VGC provides a task manager, a file system explorer, a snapshot manager and a virtual machine manager that work with Windows and Linux guests.

With these tools an administrator can perform simple tasks like ending a running process or start a new program, as well as more complex things like copying the same file to multiple guest OSes at the same time.
In similar fashion, it can manipulate snapshots of multiple virtual machines at the same time or store the information coming from multiple guest OSes for inventory purposes.

Here’s the videos:

Thanks to Eric Sloof for the news.