2011 – Page 10 – virtualization.info

Microsoft releases first beta of System Center Orchestrator 2012

June 20, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

Microsoft today released the first beta of the successor of System Center Opalis, now called System Center Orchestrator 2012. Opalis Software was acquired by Microsoft in December 2009, and Microsoft decided to integrate the solutions into its System Center portfolio.

System Center Orchestrator (SCO) is Run Book Automation (RBA) software, which can be used to define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows. The workflows are defined in the SCO workflow designer, and so called Integration Packs are provided to interact with Microsoft and non-Microsoft products, which run on so called Action Servers.

Paper: A Guide to Hyper-V Dynamic Memory

June 20, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

Aidan Finn, a Microsoft MVP with he Virtual Machine expertise has released a whitepaper titled: A Guide to Hyper-V Dynamic Memory, Understanding, enabling, and configuring Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Dynamic Memory for virtualised workloads. The paper which contains 40 pages covers Dynamic Memory, a new feature for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, introduced with the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 in February this year. It provides the ability to pool available memory on a physical host and dynamically make that memory available to virtual machines running on the host, based on current workload needs in the virtual machines.

VMware releases 3 new vCenter Orchestrator Plug-ins

June 20, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

VMware has released 3 new Plug-ins for its orchestration tool, vCenter Orchestrator. The plugins are for HTTP-REST, SOAP and vCenter Update Manager (VUM).

The HTTP-REST and SOAP Plug-ins plug-ins allow for integration with cloud provisioning and operations use cases with systems that offer RESTful or traditional SOAP web services.

Release: Xen 4.1.1

June 16, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

Xen.org, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) has released a maintenance update for Xen brining it to version 4.1.1. The update can be installed on top of Xen 4.1 which was released in March this year.

The update provides the following changes:

Paper: Project Virtual Reality Check Phase IV

June 16, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

Sven Huisman, technical consultant at PQR, Jeroen van de Kamp, Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants and Ruben Spruijt, Technology Officer at PQR just announced a new paper titled: Project VRC: Phase IV. The paper which contains 38 pages gives some valuable insight on the impact of using Application Virtualization in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment.

The three biggest and most commonly used application virtualization solutions in the VDI market space are investigated: Citrix Application Streaming, Microsoft App-V and VMware ThinApp. To measure the performance impact of these solutions on VDI, Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) was used.

Quantum acquires Pancetera

June 15, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

Quantum, a company which provides backup, recovery and archive software has acquired Pancetera, the company which provides management and optimization for virtual storage in VMware for an ammound of $12 million.

Pancetera entered the virtualization market in January 2010, and was founded in 2009 by Henrik Rosendahl, former CEO of Thinstall before it was acquired by VMware and a couple of people from Data Domain which was acquired by EMC. In July 2010 the company launched its solution called Unite. In November last year, Pancetera released version 2.0 of Unite, introducing support for change block tracking for vSphere.

Release: Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 4.0

June 14, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

In January this year Solarwinds acquired the IT Management software company Hyper9, making its move into the virtualization market. Hyper9’s product called Virtual Environment Optimization is now rebranded to Solarwinds ~~Virtual Environment Optimization~~ Virtualization Manager and has reached version 4.0 and is a follow-up of version 3.0 which was released by Hyper9 in November last year.

Some of the new features include:

Release: Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.1

June 14, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

Oracle announced last week an update for its VM Server for SPARC, reaching version 2.1. This product, formerly known as Sun Logical Domains, represents the Oracle offer for the Oracle Solaris operating system, running on SPARC processors based servers. Oracle offer includes a x86 solution named Oracle VM Server for x86 (which is now at version 2.2).

This release brings live migration capabilities to the SPARC T-series server family, including SPARC T3, UltraSPARC T2 Plus and UltraSPARC T2 based servers.

Virsto raises $12M funding and acquires EvoStor

June 9, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

Virsto Software, founded in 2007 by a group of virtualization storage experts, has raised 12$M in a funding round led by InterWest Partners which also involved previous investors such as August Capital and Canaan Partners.

The company also announced the acquisition of EvoStor, a company specialized in the VMware storage market.

Release: VKernel vOperations Suite 3.5

June 8, 2011 by virtualization.info Editors

VKernel has released version 3.5 of its vOperations Suite. vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and Chargeback functionality for VMware environments. VKernel used to market the products in the suite separately, but decided to combine them recently. In the future, Vkernel is planning on expanding the suite to support Microsoft Hyper-V in the future, its currently already releasing products tailored for Hyper-V like Vkernel Chargeback with Hyper-V 2.6 which was released in March this year.