Year: 2010

Duncan Epping, working as a vCloud Architect at VMware and Frank Denneman who is Consulting Architect at VMware have published a book titled: VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive (Volume 1).

VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive zooms in on two key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a “how to” guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a VMware HA and DRS cluster, but even more important explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA and DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA and DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools and resource allocation settings. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures.

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Unidesk has released version 1.2 of its CachePoint solution. This version is the follow-up of version 1.0 which was released in July this year, which is short after the company entered the VDI market in April this year. CachePoint decouples the operating system from the applications, and the applications from the user data and personalization without introducing an additional abstraction layer and file system/registry redirection like application virtualization solutions do.

CachePoint injects a file system driver inside a VDI gold master image that transparently segments in the Windows C: drive into multiple, isolated containers. Administrators can deploy one or more applications inside each container, and then containers can be assigned to multiple virtual desktops or multiple users.

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After releasing the Release Candidate in November this year, Trilead has now released version 3.0.018 of its VMware VM backup product VM Explorer. This product is the follow up of version 2.0 which was released in March this year. VM Explorer Backups can be stored on ESX, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD based storage platforms or directly to a SAN. VM Explorer is offered in two editions, the free edition, supporting VMware ESX 3.x and higher with a maximum of 5 devices and a pro edition, which additionally supports vCenter 4 and unlimited devices.

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Oracle has released a white paper titled: Accelerating Deployment of Virtualized Infrastructures with the Oracle VM Blade Cluster Reference Configurations. The paper which contains 13 pages provides a reference architecture helping customers reduce the time needed for deployment and testing by providing a complete and fully tested virtualized stack.

The paper contains the following sections:

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Beth Pariseau posted an interesting article on the SearchServerVirtualization.com website giving more information about the expected VMware Aware Storage APIs (VASA). The VASA will be provided by VMware with support from several storage partners, and will provide improved visibility into the physical storage infrastructure through vCenter and CapacityIQ.

VASA will be a standardized API that all storage vendors can write to that will actually push data into the vCenter database, so that analytics products can do additional analysis on the data.

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The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) has released a report titled: Lab Validation Report, Citrix XenServer, Complete, Cost-effective Data Center and Server Virtualization. The report which contains 20 pages documents hands-­‐on testing of Citrix XenServer 5.6 with a focus on manageability, consolidation, and cost effectiveness. The following features were tested: Initial deployment, managebility, XenConvert, OVG Appliance Import, Dynamic Memory Control, Workload Balancing, XenServer HA and StorageLink with Site Recovery.

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The VMware performance team has published an article about VMware Load-Based Teaming (LBT) Performance. LBT is a dynamic and traffic-load-aware teaming policy introduced in vSphere 4.1. that can ensure that physical NIC capacity in a NIC team is optimized. While traditional load balancing options base their routing on virtual switch port ID, IP hash or source MAC hash, LBT bases its load balancing on current network traffic, making sure traffic is effectively distributed among the physical uplinks. LBT also takes into consideration the disparity of the physical NIC capacity, for example a mixture of 1GBe and 10GBe physical NICs in a NIC team.

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virtualization.info today got confirmation from a reliable source that Patrick Lin, who was Vice President of Product Management has left VMware to join Jive Software, a company which makes enterprise social media software.

Lin joined VMware in 2004, where he became director of product management, working his way up to Vice President of Product Management since January 2009.

VMware has published a paper titled: VMware High Availability (HA): Deployment Best Practices. The paper which contains 10 pages describes the best practices and guidance for deploying VMware High Availability in vSphere 4.1. The paper also includes some discussions about proper network and storage design, and recommendations on settings for host isolation response and admission control.

The paper contains the following sections:

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As part of its free holiday gift for the virtualization community, Veeam announced that VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals(VCP) and VMware Certified Instructors(VCI) will be able to download a free two-socket license of Veeam products for their home lab.

The offer includes the use of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 with vPower, and the Veeam ONE solution which consists of Veeam Monitor, Veeam Reporter and Veeam Business View.

The Not-for-resale (NFR) software license keys are available for non-production use at http://www.veeam.com/go/free-nfr-license.