Year: 2011

In November last year, Novell announced a deal to sell its assets to Attachmate Corporation and another entity CPTN Holdings LLC. In this deal Attachmate acquired the Platespin product portfolio, which Novell acquired in February 2008.

Now Attachmate is taking the next step, by rebranding the Platespin products to NetIQ, which Attachmate acquired in April 2006. While in November last year there was a possible scenario where the Platespin products would be transferred to Microsoft, which clearly could use the Platespin products to further enhance it’s own portfolio, but with this news Attachmate is clearly taking steps to become a virtualization vendor using its brand NetIQ.

Read more

When Hyper-V was released in June 2008 Microsoft initially only supported the SUSE Enterprise Linux distribution by releasing so called Linux Integration Components providing drivers for synthetic devices. In July 2009 when Hyper-V 2.0 was released, Microsoft extended support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today at its annual Teched conference in Atlanta, Microsoft announced that it will now support the CentOS Linux distribution.

After Microsoft released the Linux Integration Components for hyper-V under the GPL v2 license, many efforts have been taken by the community to extend the Integration Services to other distributions, like for example by Yusuf Ozturk which released a Debian package to install the Integration Services, this remains unsupported by Microsoft though.

Veeam just announced that its Backup and Replication product will support Microsoft Hyper-V later this year. With Hyper-V support, customers will be able to manage backup, replication and restores for both VMware and Hyper-V from a single console. The solution will include changed block tracking and built-in deduplication and compression.

For Hyper-V Veeam is going to provide the following features:

Read more

NetApp has released a new whitepaper titled: VMware vSphere 4.1 Storage Performance: Measuring FCoE, FC, iSCSI, and NFS Protocols. The Paper which contains 25 pages covers the relative I/O performance available from SAN and NAS storage protocols with vSphere 4.1 and a NetApp FAS array. The paper results obtained from shared and non-shared datastores, has VAAI enabled and measures the gains provided by the Paravirtual SCSI adapter. The paper covers both large numbers of VMs accessing shared datastores and single VMs generating high levels of concurrent I/O using a nonshared datastore.

The tests were conducted on a 8-node vSphere 4.1 cluster. Each host was powered by a Fujitsu Primergy RX200 with 2 Quad-core Intel Xeon E5507 Nehalem CPUs & 48GBs of memory, Qlogic CNA & HBAs, and Intel NICs. The I/O load was generated by 128 VMs, each running IOMeter. The storage array comprised of a NetApp FAS 6210 running Data Ontap 8.0.1RC2, configured with 190 15k SAS drives, connected to a pair of Cisco Nexus 5020 unified fabric network switches via NetApp’s Unified Connect CNA.

Read more

Yusuf Ozturk, the guy who developed the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V Debian Package just released a new tool called: Unattended Linux VM Configuration Tool for Hyper-V. The tool which is provided as a Windows PowerShell module is able to create Linux Virtual Machines on a Hyper-V host is able to modify VM templates or clean installed Linux VMs, supporting Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat and Suse Linux, with automatic Linux integration components installation. If you create a source Linux VM, you are able to clone it and change the information via Set-LinuxVM command.

The module can be executed on a Hyper-V host directly, no System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) environment is needed, but SCVMM is supported as target.

Read more

Citrix has released Service Pack 2 for its virtualization platform product XenServer 5.6. Service Pack 2 can be installed on top of XenServer 5.6 or XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 which was released in December last year adding functionality such as distributed virtual switching, automated VM protection and recovery and a web management console for delegated administration.

Service Pack 2 contains fixes and adds the following new features since Feature Pack 1:

Read more

VKernel has released version 2.6 of its Chargeback with Hyper-V product adding support for Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV).Chargeback with Hyper-V is capable of measuring actual or allocated resource usage by application or business group.

Chargeback with Hyper-V is provided as a Virtual Appliance which provides similar functionality as the VKernel Chargeback product for VMware environments which VKernel recently combined with their report module and rebranded as vOps Reporting and Chargeback becoming part of their vOperations Suite. Chargeback with Hyper-V collects information directly from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and connects into the SCVMM Self Service Portal.

Read more

VKernel has released version 4.4. of its Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V product adding support for Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V is capable of finding current & future performance bottlenecks in storage, memory, CPU & storage I/O.

Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V is provided as a Virtual Appliance which provides similar functionality as the VKernel Capacity Analyzer product for VMware environments which VKernel recently rebranded as vOps Capacity Manager becoming part of their vOperations Suite. Capacy Analyzer with Hyper-V collects its performance metrics from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Read more

Liquidware Labs announced that it has hired Jason Mattox, ex- CTO and co founder of Vizioncore as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Mattox comes from Quest, where he was appointed Director and Chief Technologist in July 2009 after Vizioncore was acquired by Quest in January 2008.

In December last year, Citrix released version 5 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform XenDesktop. Now Citrix has released Service Pack 1 adding support for XenServer 5.6 Service Pack 2, Microsoft SCVMM R2 Service Pack 1 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Service Pack 1 and VMware vSphere 4.1 Update 1.

Besides fixing issues, Citrix XenDesktop 5 Service Pack 1 adds the following new features:

Read more