Year: 2012

This Week Parallels updated its Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac introducing experimental support for Windows 8 Consumer Preview, released last week at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, including automated download and installation via the Parallels New Virtual Machine Wizard.

This update also adds:

• OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview as both a host and guest
• Remote access and control of Mac and its Windows 8 virtual machine, applications and file via Parallels Mobile using iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

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If you take a look into the Productivity category of Apple’s AppStore you will find an useful app called vPowerCLI5 Reference.

This app is to be used for referencing the 300 and more VMware vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets.

PowerCLI is the vSphere command line tool that lets administrators automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, VM, guest OS, etc.

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Today CiRBA announced release 7.1 of CiRBA Control Console, one of the components of its capacity management tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI), that will be generally available in July. This new release extends the same technology used with VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments to manage virtualized AIX Infrastructures based on IBM PowerVM Platform. CiRBA 7.1 is able to analyze all the PowerVM Platform advanced capabilities like Logical Partitions (LPARs), Virtual I/O Servers (VIOS), shared processor pools, Capacity on Demand and HA failover nodes providing detailed infrastructure healt reports valorized with historical utilization data and comparehensive policies, that determine where and with how many resources, workloads and applications should be placed within the infrastructure.

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Today Veeam Software announced the general availability of Veeam Backup Free Edition, the successor of its free backup tool FastSCPTM, in conjunction with the release of version 6.1 of its disaster recovery solution, Backup & Replication.

Veeam Backup Free Edition, that combines well with Veeam One Free Edition released in April, includes the following features:

• VeeamZIP™: Ad-hoc backup of a running VM for operational, archival or portability purposes. For example, admins can now back up a VM before applying patches, create an archive copy of a VM, or copy a VM to a remote test lab—without powering off the production VM.
• Instant File-Level Recovery: Restore individual guest files directly from an image-level backup.
• File Manager: Easily manage VM and host files.
• Quick Migration for VMware: Migrate a running VM to any host or datastore—even if you don’t use clusters or shared storage.

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Last week Ben Armstrong, Senior Program Manager Lead at Microsoft,  published a post on his MSDN Blog that gathers all the official links related to Hyper-V on the RC version of Windows Server 2012.

Among all the documents, coming from Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform site and the Technet Library, you can find and interesting comparison guide between Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 RC which unveils all the new features with the following classification:

• More Secure Multitenancy
• Flexible Infrastructure
• Scale, Performance, and Density
• High Availability
• Processor and Memory Support
• Network
• Storage
• Manageability

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Yesterday VMTurbo announced that Dennis Hoffman, currently Senior Vice President, Service Provider at EMC Corporation, has joined the company’s Board of Directors.

With more than 20 years of industry experience and a security background, Hoffman was one of the key men in the acquisition of RSA Security and the formation of EMC’s security division.

Service providers are building out cloud infrastructures on vCloud Director, CloudStack and OpenStack platforms and must run these environments at high levels of efficiency to compete with commodity providers like Amazon EC2. At the same time, they have to differentiate themselves with service, service level assurance and management capabilities. VMTurbo is perfectly positioned to assist on both fronts and I look forward to helping advise the company as they accelerate these efforts.

Said Hoffman.

Yesterday the Fedora Project announced the general availability of Fedora 17, the latest version of Red Hat sponsored free open source operating system distribution.

In the rich set of new features worth to mention the update of OpenStack and the addition of project oVirt.

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Last week Quest Software announced the availability of vRanger 5.4 its backup, replication and recovery solution for VMware.

The main feature of this new release is the plug-and-play integration with Data Domain Boost software, EMC’s deduplication software that distributes part of the deduplication process among backup server or application clients enabling it to send only unique data segments to a Data Domain system.

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Last week VKernel announced the release of vOPS Server Standar 5.0 with a particular emphasis on the introduction of new automation features like on-click auto-deployment of capacity reservations, automated risk assessment of VM configuration modifications and automatic rollback capabilities for unauthorized environments changes.

VKernel, sensitive to the automation challenge supported from the other vendors, extended these capabilities in this new release  allowing automatically deployment of Virtual Machines based on capacity reservations. These virtual machine reservation are now able to autonomously trigger virtual machine deployments closing the capacity management process loop.

vOPS Server 5.0 also features a new Change Analyzer module that collects, analyzes and archives all the data needed to automatically assess the risk related to environment changes, the same module grants the possibility to enable a quick roll back of the changes made.

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Today Milan hosted the VMware Forum 2012, during the opening keynote Brian Gammage, VMware’s Chief Market Technologist, tried to collect all the news and declarations we heard in the last few days, like the acquisition of Wanova and Stephen Herrod’s speech at another italian event, and give an univocal reading to the entire plan.

The starting point of the keynote was “we just came out from Mainframe to Client-Server transition, which started with an economical advantage and endend with an incredible overhead just to control the new power given to the users we must be careful with the transition to Cloud-era“.

“Its easy to get confused with VMware’s products line because we are the only company with such a large offering” continued Gammage, probably referring to the supposed gaffe of Stephen Herrods, then presented a slide that resumed VMware’s offering in a SIMPLIFY-MANAGE-CONNECT schema.

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