Virtualizing the Sphere's Edge…

Yesterday, finally, Red Hat announced the availability of its new virtualization offering, which includes a platform based on KVM and an enterprise virtualization manager.
The company already released Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 in mid September, which features KVM in the same way (despite technical differences in the architecture) Microsoft Windows Server 2008 features Hyper-V.
The problem is [...]

Richard Garsthagen, the popular VMware Senior Evangelist behind the organization of VMworld Europe, released a new free tool called vAudit.
This tool allows to track a VMware View 3.x environment is being used by the users, auditing their activity on the virtual desktops (logon and logon failures, working hours, logoff and disconnection) and showing it on [...]

Despite vSphere 4.0 is finally out VMware didn’t stop to release major updates for the previous platform.
The new Update 5 (build 174841), available today for vCenter Server 2.5 only, introduces support for up to 80 virtual machines per host in a HA cluster.
Reaching the new limit requires some modification on the virtual infrastructure that are [...]

Today VMware releases the first minor update for its disk and file backup/restore product Data Recovery, included in bundle with vSphere 4.0 Plus, Advanced and Essential Plus licenses.
The new build (176771) doesn’t introduce any new feature but fixes a number of bugs and improves the performance.

Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and AppSpeed 1.0.
The need for chargeback capabilities is growing at a fast pace as the virtualization technologies mature and multiple departments of the [...]

Today VMware releases the fourth generation of its virtual lab automation tool Lab Manager.
The new 4.0 version (build 1140) introduces the following features:

Support for multiple workspaces (isolation of resources in multiple workspaces in the same organization, sharing of configurations across different workspaces)
Host spanning across network fencing (network-fenced virtual labs can see the same host)
Resource usage [...]

Today VMware releases some of the new vCenter applications announced in January.
The first ones, Data Recovery and vShield Zones, came out with vSphere 4.0 last month.
Today is time for vCenter Chargeback 1.0 and vCenter AppSpeed 1.0.
AppSpeed 1.0 (build 36919) is powered by the technology that VMware acquired in May 2008 from B-hive.
It is able to [...]

While opening the beta program of the next Fusion major release, VMware also keeps updating the current product which now reaches version 2.0.5 (build 173382).
Fusion 2.0.5 is mainly for bug fixes but it also extends the support to the following host and guest operating systems:

Host OSes
Mac OS X 10.6 codename Snow Leopard (32bit only, experimental)
Guest [...]

At the end of the last week VMware published a new minor update for its application virtualization technology ThinApp, acquired from Thinstall at the beginning of 2008.
The new build (3313 if you follow the Thinstall numbering, 169725 if you follow the VMware one) is introducing a very minor change in a configuration file and a [...]

As mentioned in our coverage of the vSphere 4.0 release, the only product of the VMware portfolio that currently supports the new platform is Converter.
VMware upgraded it to version 4.0.1 (build 161434) last month exactly for this purpose.
In details the new product provides support for:

vSphere 4.0 as source and destination targets:

Support for configuring target disks [...]