Year: 2012

Convirture: new version of ConVirt Enterprise Cloud with VMware Support

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Convirture the company, founded in 2006 that offers an open source management console to manage open source virtualization platforms,  announced today August 28th,  the release of a Beta version of ConVirt Enterprise Cloud.

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud aims to be the single tool used to manage virtual and cloud infrastructures based on the open-source hypervisors KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), Xen, OpenStack and Amazon EC2. The new Beta version of the program would permit the management of VMware-based datacenters as well.
Arsalan Farooq, founder and CEO at Convirture comments in the press release:
As data centers increasingly deploy a mix of technologies, IT managers are looking for a ‘single pane of glass’ to manage all of them, which is what this version of ConVirt Enterprise Cloud offers, from our perspective, the hypervisor and cloud wars are meaningless. Whether it’s VMware, KVM, Xen and any of the clouds, organizations just want the best tool for the job. With ConVirt, we can provide users with a management layer that also brings in Xen, KVM and all cloud platforms. It will deliver the everyday needs for their ongoing, day-to-day management of virtual environments.

Release: VMware vCloud Suite 5.1

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Yesterday, onstage at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, VMware announced its first comprehensive solution to deliver a software-defined datacenter: VMware vCloud Suite 5.1.

The goal of a software-defined datacenter is to abstract all hardware resources, pool them into aggregate capacity to facilitate automation of applications and services deployment.

Today at VMworld®, VMware and its partners are taking a bold step toward simplifying IT, offering customers everything they need to build, operate and manage their cloud environments. The VMware vCloud® Suite delivers the software-defined datacenter – the architecture for implementing cloud computing.

said Paul Maritz, VMware CEO.

VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 aggregates all the components customers need to build, operate and manage a modern, cloud integrated, infrastructure:

  • VMware vSphere® 5.1: with more than 100 enhancements and new features constitutes the foundation of the suite
  • VMware vCloud Director® 5.1: orchestrates the provisioning of abstracted resources such storage, networking, security and availability pooling them as software-defined datacenter services
  • VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.1: VMware’s software defined networking and security solution, enables the dynamic creation of virtual networks and services decoupled and independent from the physical network hardware
  • vCenter Site Recovery Manager™ 5.1: simplifies disaster recovery planning and ensures predictable recovery through automated testing and plan execution, can also support datacenter migrations and disaster avoidance, integrates with VMware vSphere Replication and replication technologies from VMware’s partners

As previously announced VMware abandons vRAM licensing and vCloud Suite will be licensed per processor.

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Release: Virsto for vSphere 1.5

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Virsto, the Californian company that provides storage hypervisor software for virtual machines announced today at VMware the release of storage hypervisor for vSphere 1.5

Virsto developed an integrated solution that aims to manage performance and utilization of storage for virtualized datacenters, the purpuse of this upgrade is to optimize VM storage for Software-Defined datacenters increasing storage IOPS without buying new hardware.
VM-level storage management and seamless integration with VMware vCenter and View Manager
Virsto’s storage hypervisor provides provisioning, management and utilization of storage for the Software-Defined Datacenter

Paper: What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1

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This paper is particularly appropriate for this week, enriched with the VMworld 2012 in San Francisco.

The document summarizes the new features and enhancements introduced with release 5.1 of vSphere:

Compute

• Larger virtual machines: up to 64 vCPUs and 1TB vRAM

• New virtual machine format: with CPU performance counters and virtual shared graphics acceleration

Storage

• Flexible, space-efficient storage for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

Network

• vSphere Distributed Switch: with Network Health Check, Configuration Backup and Restore, Roll Back and Recovery and Link Aggregation Control Protocol support

• Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) support

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Release: Unidesk Corporation Unidesk 2.0

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Unidesk Corporation launched at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco the new Unidesk 2.0, offering to the attendees live demos of their virtual desktop management software.

Unidesk offers the all in one desktop layering solution,  its integrated third party VDI management solution for VMware View allows IT managers to create customized desktops. Since last may Unidesk Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DVS) is available as part of Dell’s porfolio.

Unidesk now includes VMware vSphere® Hypervisor integrations, user layer snapshots and restore point automation for desktop recovery and backup, among the new capabilities also the integration of Storage tiers for cost/performance optimization and Installation wizards.

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Release: PHD Virtual Backup 6.0

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Today PHD Virtual Technologies announced the release of PHD Virtual Backup 6.0, the latest version of its Virtual Backup product for VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer.

The product is delivered as a Virtual Appliance which integrates into the console of XenCenter or vSphere client offering a single pane of glass.
Release 6.0 includes, besides the support for cloud gateway devices as a storage target, the following features:

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Pure Storage announces integration of ZeroSnap and VMware vCenter Web Client Plugin into FlashArray

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Pure Storage is introducing ZeroSnap and a vCenter web client plugin for its product for Server and desktop virtualization: FlashArray.

The new release of the product woud be directed to fulfil a set of networked storage needs for companies who want to leverage flash memory for their performance-critical application.

The new addition of ZeroSnap in Pure Storage FlashArray would permit to take a thousand of indipendent snapshots per minute with minimal overhead, it would not require planning and have full read/write capabilities.

VMware vCenter Web Client Plugin would allow IT adminitrators to manage FlashArray in a easier way, the plugin automates and simplifies storage administration tasks like datastore creation and provides visibility into capacity utilization and performance

Release: Embotics V-Commander for delivering ITaaS

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Embotics, the canadian company of virtualization and cloud management founded 2006, announced yesterday august 22, the new release of  its V-Commander, version 4.6, for delivering IT as a service (ITaaS) for both private and public clouds.

Embotics Corporation aims to provide a simplified solutions and their cloud management platform V-Commander allows end users to optimize and automate their data centers, the focus of the software is to transform the management of virtual machines individually to managing the whole range of IT services, IT administrators would be able to control both virtual and non-virtual IT assets.

The main addition is the going from an Infrasturcture as a service (IaaS) to an IT as a service (ITaaS) which would extend to a wider rage of clients that are not completely tech-savy, as the service would be more user friendly.

Embotics will have a demonstration of new V-Commander with a preview of Microsoft Hyper-V support at the VMWorld.

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Release: VMware Fusion 5.0

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Today VMware released version 5.0 of its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion.

This release is obviously designed to integrate with the last Apple OS, Mountain Lion, introducing the support for AirPlay Mirroring and Notification Center.

The press release claims more than 70 new features, more relevant are the support for OS X Mountain Lion in a virtual machine and the optimization for the brand new Microsoft Windows 8.

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