Year: 2012

Yesterday VKernel announced the release of vOPS Server Standard 5.1 which includes integration capabilities between its vOPS Server product line and Microsoft System Center 2012 that can now monitor multi-hypervisor environments and raise alerts for performance and capacity issues in virtual machines.

This solution joins the previously announced integrations from Veeam and InMon.

The integration between VKernel vOPS Server Product Line and the new System Center 2012 will help to expand the monitoring cover for those customer who use System Center for both their physical and virtual environments adding the support for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).

Read more

VMware published a free e-learning course, that we noticed yesterday thanks to Ntpro.nl, focused on vCenter Operations Manager.

The course, 2.5 hours long, covers vCenter Operations Manager’s installation and configuration and gives a brief overview on its principal features.

Read more

According to Windows Server Blog and Windows Team Blog, yesterday at Microsoft’ annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Tornoto, Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2012 will be released to manufacturing in the first week of August then the product will be generally available to customer worldwide in September.

Same fate for Windows 8 that will be released in RTM (Release to Manufacturing) and made available for enterprise customers with Software Assurance benefits, the first week of August.

Windows 8 general availability is still planned for the end of October.

Last week VMware ThinApp Blog published a post announcing a minor release of ThinApp: 4.7.2.

According to the original post this release includes:

Read more

In these days Microsoft published an overview on Windows 2012’s Editions and Licensing.

From an editions perspective we find two “main” editions, Standard and Datacenter, differentiated only by virtualization rights: two virtual instances for Standard and unlimited for Datacenter.

The VMs are entitled to run on up to two processors for both editions.

All the features available in the Datacenter edition are also available in the Standard edition, including high availability features like failover clustering, that make the choice between Windows Server 2012′ editions based only on companies’ virtualization strategy.

Windows 2012 Essential and Foundation don’t have any virtualization right.

Read more

Last week VMware announced that it has been positioned at the top of Leaders Quadrant of 2012 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure.

Nothing surprising, unlike the fact that Citrix is still mentioned in the leader board with a product, like XenServer, that apparently is just used as a backend for VDI.

Oracle’s placement, with its Oracle VM, was covered in a previous post.

On 1st of July Raspberry Pi Thin Client project, published a video showing VMWare View Client 5.0 working on their 35$, credit card-sized, thin client.

PCoIP protocol seem not working at the moment but RDP, SSL security and RSA auth are functioning.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnu1I4RR74w[/youtube]

On 1st of July VMware Labs released Guest Reclaim a tool intended for virtualized guests with NTFS filesystems (supported OSes are XP onwards up to Windows 7 for clients and servers until Windows 2008).

Basically Guest Reclaim reclaims dead space from volumes hosted on a thin provisioned SCSI disk.

Features

• Reclaim space from Simple FAT/NTFS volumes
• Works on WindowsXP to Windows7
• Can reclaim space from flat partitions and flat disks
• Can work in virtual as well as physical machines

Today Dell and Quest announced the achievement of a definitive agreement for Dell to acquire Quest after several months of “bidding war“, according to Bloomberg.

Under the terms of the agreement, Dell will pay $28.00 per share against the bid of $25.75 made from Insight Venture Partners, that raises Dell’s total offering at $2.4 billion.

In Dell’s new vision Quest’s assets, like its access management software, performance monitoring solutions, Windows Server and database management solutions became important elements.

Dell recently announced the formation of its Software Group to build upon its existing software expertise. The Dell Software Group will add to Dell’s enterprise solutions capability, accelerate strategic growth and further differentiate the company from competitors by increasing its solutions portfolio with Dell-owned intellectual property.

Read more

On June 29 Citrix announced, through its official blog, the general availability of Citrix’s Hosted Server VDI technology.

This solution, intended for Service Providers, allows to deliver dedicated Cloud VDI desktops using shared hardware/storage and leveraging Microsoft SPLA licenses.

The solution is based on Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Desktop Experience Pack (instead of Windows 7) and XenDesktop FMA with an appropriate new Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA).

Read more