Year: 2011

In March last year, virtualization.info reported about Virsto, a company providing virtual storage optimization software for Microsoft Hyper-V called Virsto One. Now Virsto has renamed Virsto One to Virsto VSI and introduces another product Virsto VDI which is targeted for use with Virtual Desktop environments running either Microsoft VDI or Citrix XenDesktop.

Both products share the same Virsto Virtual Storage Engine (VSE), which compromises 90% of the products code. It provides a solution to improve efficiency and performance of Hyper-V virtual machines, by hijacking and optimizing their interaction with the underlying storage. It is a lightweight solution that installs inside the Hyper-V parent partition and places a filter driver between VMs virtual hard drives (VHDs) and physical volumes .

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In order to remotely manage Hyper-V on Windows 7, you need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT), provided by Microsoft. RSAT enables IT administrator to manage roles and features remotely from a Enterprise, Professional or Ultimate edition Windows 7 or Windows 7 with SP1 workstation.

Now Microsoft has updated the RSAT to support the new features introduced in Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, which was released in February this year.

With the release of vCenter Operations in February, VMware took its chances in a market and operational segment which, until then, had been filled by its own partners. In the wake of such move, virtualization.info got in touch with some of the most relevant affected vendors to collect their feedback.

We asked the vendors if they planned to integrate with or build on top of vCenter Operations, what their opinion was on VMware’s general strategy toward partners considering this move and how they saw their own value proposition compared to the VMware offering. The result, we think, is quite interesting…

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In February this year, virtualization.info reported about VMware which exposed some of the upcoming features of vSphere 5 during its Partner Exchange. Last week even more details appeared online, these details leaked on a Turkish Web Forum, but were removed later. The post itself can still be retrieved from Google Cache though.

Besides, Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) for Storage, Host-based replication for Site Recovery Manager, and Network I/O control for Virtual Machines, vSphere 5 will feature:

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Liquidware Labs has released version 4.8 of their VDI assessment tool Stratusphere. This version is the follow-up of version 4.6 which was released in May last year. Stratusphere is capable of rating physical desktop candidates for VDI environments or identify poor user experience in an existing VDI environment. It supports the VMware and Citrix hypervisors.

This release focuses on a tenfold increase in scalability per database hub, application IOPS reports, and expanded application virtualization reporting.

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VMware has released a new version of the vSphere hardening guide tailored to version 4.1 of vSphere which was released in July last year. The hardening guide which contains 113 pages provides guidance on how to securely deploy VMware vSphere 4.1 in a production environment and focuses on the initial configuration of the virtualization infrastructure layer.

Recommendations are given for Enterprise, DMZ and Specialized Security Limited Functionality (SSLF) environments.

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German consulting firm Mightycare has released yet another tool, called MCS-Thinview. The tool is a VMware ThinApp Explorer for compiled ThinApp Packages, and can help to see problems in ThinApp packages.

The tool enables you to can see inside the ThinApp Package, Register, Unregister, Install or Uninstall ThinApp Packages on your Computer and:

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Citrix has released version 2.3.1. of its physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion tool: XenConvert. XenConvert is capable of converting a physical server or desktop running Windows to a XenServer VM or provisioning services vDisk. It can also convert an offline VM or disk in the VHD, OVF, VMDK and XVA format, to a XenServer VM.

Version 2.3.1. is the follow up of version 2.3 which was released in January this year and resolves an issue in environments where DHCP is unavailable on the management network.

A couple of weeks ago CiRBA released version 6.1 of its capacity planning tool for virtual infrastructures; Data Center Intelligence. This version is the follow-up of version 6.0 which was released in November last year. The tool supports Xen, IBM pSeries and zSeries and Oracle/Sun Zones and LDOMs.

Changes in this release include:

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VMware has updated its virtualization platform Workstation and Player and platform wrapper product ACE to build 385536. Besides fixing security issues and known problems this version adds support for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Ubuntu 10.10 guest and host operating systems.

Some of the issues resolved in this version:

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