Mobile devices get virtualisation app

At its annual conference in San Francisco, VMware announced plans to bring virtualisation to smartphones, which will allow users to run applications including those that are designed for different platforms, reports Builder AU.

And over at the Red Hat Summit in Chicago, the leading open source company revealed a greater focus on cloud technology. Red Hat has released a new Java platform, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 and RHEL 5.4, which also contains cloud computing capabilities alongside its virtualisation component.

Microsoft issued an advisory after a security vulnerability was discovered in its Internet Information Services. The software giant also released the new and improved version of its Hyper-V this week, and revealed that phones with Windows Mobile 6.5 installed will be released on 6 October.

IBM has announced a public desktop cloud through which it will deliver virtualised desktops to thousands of end-users per customer site at a time, according to InformationWeek.

IBM will virtualise the desktops via the products of either VMware or Citrix Systems to match a customer's current environment.

Both VMware and Citrix produce virtual desktop infrastructure products; they supply end-user access control to desktop provisioning servers and management consoles for thousands of concurrent users. With the help of partner Desktone, IBM is offering such services from its one-year-old Web services cloud.

HP and Cisco have compromised on proposed competing standards for managing communications in virtualised data centres, states Computer Weekly.

The IEEE 802.1 group, the Ethernet technical standard committee, will vote on the proposals this month. The compromise means that instead of having either distributed or centralised management of network communications in a data centre, both forms will be supported.

Paul Congdon, vice-chairman of the committee and CTO of HP's ProCurve network technology unit, said the compromise extends the standard to include Cisco's view of how to include legacy systems to be incorporated in virtualised data centres.