Year: 2012

Besides releasing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) version 3.1 last week, Red Hat also announced the beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 6.4. This version will be the follow up of version 6.3 which was released in June this year.

Version 6.4 will provide out-of-the-box support for the Hyper-V paravirtualized drivers allowing RHEL to run as a guest on the Microsoft Hyper-V platform. Microsoft already provided these drivers, but now they will be included in the distribution by Red Hat.

Version 6.4 will provide new functionality for Installation, Kernel, Device Drivers, Networking, Authentication and Interoperability, Security, Entitlement, Virtualization, Clustering, Storage, Compiler and Tools and will also contain General Updates as described in the release notes.

Solarwinds has released version 5.1 of its virtualization management product Virtualization Manager. This version is the follow-up of version 5.0 which was released in April this year. Virtualization Manager is the product which Solarwinds acquired when it acquired a company called Hyper9 in January 2011.

Virtualization Manager delivers integrated VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V capacity planning, performance monitoring, VM sprawl control, configuration management, and chargeback automation.

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Red Hat has released version 3.1 of its Enterprise Virtualization product. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) is Red Hats virtualization platform based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. Version 3.1 is the follow-up of version 3.0 which was released in January 2012.

Version 3.1 adds the following new features (among others):

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HP has released a paper titled: HP VirtualSystem VS2 for Microsoft. The paper which contains 23 pages details HPs reference architecture for the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track. The Cloud Fast Track was developed and executed in partnership with six OEMs: Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi/HDS, HP, IBM and NEC and announced in November 2010. It provides reference architectures for private Hyper-V powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

The VS2 Reference Architecture provides a foundation for building a high-performance Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platform that has been optimized to consolidate and provision hundreds to thousands of workloads while providing extremely high availability at all levels – from the underlying network and storage fabrics up to the virtual machine (VM) layer.

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Virsto, the Californian company founded 2007, provider of storage hypervisor software for virtual machines announced yesterday December 4 the release the new version of Virsto for vSphere 2.0

The  virtual storage solution now integrates support for both Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View, improved high availability (HA) capabilities and workflow optimisations.

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PHD Virtual has released version 6.1 of its product Backup. This version is the follow-up of version 6.0 which was released in august this year. PHD Virtual Backup is a Virtual Appliance which is capable of backing up both VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer environments. The product integrates into the console of XenCenter or the vSphere client to offer a single pane of glass.

Version 6.1 provides the following new functionality:

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Dell has released a paper titled: "Deploying a Hypervisor using the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter in a Dell Active System Manager Environment" The paper which contains 14 pages details configuration of a Dell PowerEdge M1000e chassis with a Management Template in Active System Manager, and then deploying a hypervisor to one or more of its blade servers using the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. The paper assumes you have Dell Active System Manager and the Dell Management Plug-in already in place in your environment.

Active System Manager can configure blade servers for many different kinds of operating system deployments. An administrator creates a Deployment Template that includes system variables for a specific set of custom-defined configurations to meet the needs of a deployment environment, and then applies that template to a server.

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Dell has released a paper titled: Microsoft Server 2012 for Dell Converged Blade Data Center: Reference Architecture. The paper which contains 25 pages details a reference architecture validated by Dell Engineering for using Windows Server 2012 with Dell PowerEdge Blade Server, Force 10 Switches and EqualLogic Storage.

The architecture defined in this document includes Dell PowerEdgeTM M420 blade servers, Dell EqualLogic Storage, Dell Force10 network switches, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition with Hyper-V Role enabled, and two Dell PowerEdge R620 servers that manage the solution by hosting Dell management tools.

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Dell already a while ago released a paper titled: "Dell DVS Reference Architecture for Windows Server 2012 v1.1". The paper which contains 49 pages describes the Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DVS) reference architecture consisting of DELL servers running Windows Server 2012 and DELL networking, – storage, -software and DELL endpoints.

The paper describes the detailed design and its constraints, the hardware requirements, the risks, issues, assumptions and concessions, a breakdown into key elements and a scaling and component selection guidance. For workload testing Login VSI was used as a testing suite, and Stratusphere UX from Liquidware Labs was used to monitor end-user experience.

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VMware has updated its VMFS Technical Overview paper for vSphere 5.1. The Paper titled VMware vSphere VMFS Technical Overview and Best Practices contains 17 pages and details how the VMware File System (VMFS) works. VMFS increases resource utilization by providing multiple virtual machines with shared access to a consolidated pool of clustered storage.

VMFS provides the basis for other VMware services like virtual machine snapshots, VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning, VMware vSphere vMotion, VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (vSphere DRS), VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), VMware vSphere Storage DRS and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion.

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