Year: 2012

Yesterday VMware announced the acquisition of Wanova Inc. a company whose main product is called Mirage.

Mirage is a centralized management and recovery solution for physical desktop images over the cloud, uses a layering technology to segment OS, applications and user personalizations into isolated containers allowing administrators to manage separately hardware and each layer of software.

Wanova’s technology will be integrated into VMware View finally offering layering functionalities and a deeper user customization, maybe will also introduce a little bit of physical desktop culture into VMware’s offering.

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Yesterday VMware published a paper focused on VMware vMSC (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster), a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List intended for environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a key requirement.

vMSC infrastructures are implemented with the goal of bringing the same benefits of high-availability clusters in local sites, but in a geographically distributed model with two data centers in different locations.

The document, written for a technical audience, describes how vSphere handles specific failure scenarios in environments where the distance between datacenters is limited, often metropolitan or campus environments.

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Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.

Terms of the transaction were not released.

The move suggest the intentions of EMC to compete with consumer-focused storage offering like DropBox and applications more enterprise-like as VMware’s Project Octopus, neo-released in beta.

The addition of Syncplicity also extends EMC’s strategy of enabling the ‘New User’ in the Post PC era, those who want to access, share, collaborate and participate in business processes on their preferred device.

This quote reminds us the growing trend of BYOD (bring your own device) workplaces where employees of large corporate struggle for shared storage services and the enterprise IT tries to control the security implications of the phenomenon.

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On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.

This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.

All the new key features are devoted to simplify the work for Virtualization Administrators and follows the application-driven approach to virtualization that Oracle has kept so far.

The new features could be summarized as follows:

• Enhanced User Interface: The new Oracle VM 3.1 Manager introduces a new set of wizards for large-scale deployments, tasks and workflows execution in a Web browser interface.
• Enhanced Storage Configuration Capabilities: Focused on the simplification of backup and disaster recovery, now allows access to NFS external storage and the quick copy of iSCSI and Fiberchannel-based storage repository from one cluster to another, including across WANs.
• Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops

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In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the release 5.1 of VMware View.

The post touches 4 main points:

• PCoIP Efficiency: The Team claims to have achieved, through compression protocols refinements and general performances optimization, up to 1.3X reduction in PCoIP overheads.
• Client Optimizations: Even in this case the Team talks about up to 3X improvement in video playback performance, with a particular focus to low-performing processors that can now reach a smooth 720p playback.

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On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.

This new platform promises to deliver a desktop experience  comparable to a local PC, up to 100 VDI users for each single server equipped with a VGX board.

NVIDIA VGX represents a new era in desktop virtualization. It delivers an experience nearly indistinguishable from a full desktop while substantially lowering the cost of a virtualized PC.

said Jeff Brown, general manager of the Professional Solutions Group at NVIDIA.

This product is intended for those kind of users who work with 3D design softwares and simulation tools and is designed to be integrated into enterprise IT departments providing an integration layer for commercial hypervisors (the news only talks about Citrix XenServer) and a level of manageability that allows to configure the graphics capabilities delivered to individual users in the network, based on their demands.

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Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.

The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review period will run through July 5th.

To download the beta materials on Connect follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219165

To join the beta review program follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=171065

The new features introduced in version 7.0 include Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness assessment, VDI readiness assessment and the ability to plan for virtualization assessment of Linux server.

MAP 7.0 supports SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration planning and, along with Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter, simplifies the migration of VMware virtual machine to Hyper-V.

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On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.

One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long seven-part video series, was the need to increase the automation and integration between VMware’s various products, topic about which Herrod reassured those present confirming VMware’s awareness of the problem.

Of this long speech the statement that has inflamed internet is

VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite is really more of a marketing term. Those of you know our products deeply know that they don’t fit this well together as they need to. Some of them have multiple databases, some don’t look the same, some install differently, and what I can’t stand that is Site Recovery Manager doesn’t currently work with vCloud Director. So, what we are basically able to say is that we created and acquired companies that led to a lot of individual products that don’t work well enough together yet.

as reported by Dave Northey on Microsoft’s TechNet blog.

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On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment with no storage.

Atlantis claims to lower the cost of virtual desktops below $200 per desktop with its product that performs IO traffic processing and inline duplication of images to run all desktops from local server memory.

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On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.

VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza acquisition in May 2011, already eliminates  much of the traditional VDI infrastructure, including shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers, with a simple deployment of the virtual appliance on the hypervisor of choice.

Project Aruba uses vDisks layering technology, obtained with Ringcube acquisition, to manage end-user applications and preferences allowing Virtual Desktops personalization and flexibility.

Project Aruba provides the following key features:

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