Year: 2012

Microsoft has released a paper titled: Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2012. The paper which contains 150 pages is very comprehensive and contains performance recommendations for Server Hardware and the Networking and Storage Subsystems. Also performance tuning recommendations for several Microsoft and non-Microsoft workloads like Active Directory and SAP are given.

Nowadays performance tuning is based on more requirements than just plain performance, it’s more related to finding a efficient mix between energy consumption, network latency and throughput.

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vOPS Server Explorer (formerly VKernel vScope Explorer) is a suite composed of three free utilities: vScope Explorer, SearchMyVM Explorer and the brand new Environment Explorer.

The new entry, Environment Explorer would allow administrators to detect any efficiency problems, identifies VMs performance issues in configuration such as memory limits and any bottleneck.

The tool gives an insight of the environment and can help administrators to check if there is any issue or if they are running out of capacity.

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Last week Symantec announced the Beta Version of Symantec Workspace Virtualization and Workspace Streaming 7.5.

Symantec Workspace Virtualization and Workspace Streaming are applications created to improve management and control over endpoints and VDI, based on Microsoft Windows, allowing to help the companies entering the growing trend of BYOD (bring your own device).

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Lenovo, the largest PC company in China and the world’s second-largest PC vendor, has signed an agreement with EMC to promote the sale of equipment storage and server devices for corporate networks.

According to this agreement, Lenovo’s machines will be manufactured by EMC, a leader in delivering in the storage market with  cloud computing , the agreement will initially focused in China and will allow EMC to expand its presence in that important growing market, while Lenovo gets extended its product range beyond the computers and expand its presence worldwide.

The reseller agreement focuses on the storage area network. Lenovo will provide cash and will hold a majority interest in this joint venture, that will help them sell storage equipment companies in the SME environment. While EMC will provide assets and resources of Iomega, one of its company, and will own the remaining shares.

Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC said that the agreement with Lenovo is a great opportunity for EMC to expand its presence in China, a very important market, and extend it to other parts of the world over time.

Tucci also mentioned that this new alliance won’t interfere with their relationship with Cisco.

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On July 31, VKernel Corporation, announced the release of vOPS Server Enterprise 6.6.2, in its new feature set is included a new self-learning analytics that allows virtual administrators to deploy dynamic thresholding.

VKernel Corporation, founded in 2007, acquired by Quest in November 2011, offers performance and capacity management products for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualized infrastructures, and virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments.

The new self-learning analytics allows to determine precisely the normality or abnormality of resource usage patterns,in VM CPU, memory, storage and disk I/O utilization. Therefore adding Dynamic thresholding gives the opportunity to analyse consumption of resources and to remove performances issues that could happen in a virtual environment.

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Yesterday, August 1st, Veeam released the results about its growth for Q2 2012.

Veeam, founded in 2006, is a VMware Technology Alliance Partner and member of the VMware Ready Management program, providing software for managing VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

Among the spotlights of what happened during the second quarter, Veeam gained more than 6.000 new customers, for a total of over 43.000, the company had 12.000 customers two years ago, in Q2 2010.

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Today Microsoft released to manufacturing a new version of its Server Operating System Windows Server 2012 together with a new release of its client Operating System Windows 8. Windows Server 2012 will become generally available on September 4 while Windows 8 will be generally available on October 26 this year, but sooner for MSDN and Technet subscribers as described here.

Both Windows Server 2012 as Windows 8 contain version 3.0 of the Hyper-V type-1 hypervisor for which the expected features were already covered by virtualization.info in September last year. For a quick overview of which features the Hyper-V hypervisor contains we suggest you look at the Hyper-V component architecture poster, which Microsoft released in June this year.

It is expected that Microsoft will release an update to its System Center 2012 management suite which is now in CTP 2 soon in order to support installation on top and management of the new Windows Server 2012 OS and its features.

On Monday Oracle announced its plan to buy privately held Xsigo, a company based in California and specialized in virtual networking.

The company, founded eight years ago, backed by Kleiner Perkins, Caufield Byers, Greylock Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, has BritishTelecom, eBay, Softbank  and Verizon Communications Inc. among its customers.

Oracle did not disclose the terms of the agreement.

This news is strictly related to the acquisition of Nicira Inc., announced last week by VMware, for $1.26 billions to expand its portfolio and establish a leadership position in virtual networks.

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On May 29th, the Fedora Project announced the release of Fedora 17, the latest version of Red Hat sponsored free open source operating system distribution that includes Open vSwitch.

Open vSwitch can be used to manage virtual networks across a virtual infrastructure and it is a key component for Fedora’s virtual network management capabilities.

With Open vSwitch, Fedora’s users could create, manage and monitor virtual networks using the software network switch, as is explained in this tutorial.

Open vSwitch provides kernel support for comparable packet forwarding performance and allows scaling across a large number of servers while managing through a central controller.

Open vSwitch kernel module is compatible with the linux bridge module for KVM virtual machines, and uses libvirt to manage the VMs.

The kernel datapath is already distributed with Linux, and packages are available for Ubuntu, Debian, and now Fedora.

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In June we covered an interesting experimental feature included in the VMware Workstation Technology Preview: WSX Server.

Today, the lead developer Christian Hammond, announced through his twitter account a new release of WSX July Tech Preview, with many technical improvements, some of them specially addressed to iPad users, bug fixes and known problems.

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