Year: 2012

Symantec Corp. has announced Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware vSphere, the product optimizes storage I/O performances and availability providing path management and failure protection.

VMware edition also integrates with VMware vCenter Server to provide administrative and monitoring capabilities within the VMware environment.

Key Features

• Provides storage path failure protection and fast failover.
• Spreads I/O across multiple storage paths for maximum performance.
• Enhanced I/O load-balancing algorithms
• Real-time path performance metrics

Key Benefits

• Deep visibility from VMware environment reduces configuration errors and enables better decisions.
• Visibility into storage array attributes, enabling workload assignment to the right tier and type of storage
• Detailed path performance metrics available within VMware vCenter
• Datacenter I/O visualization provides insight into I/O demands of individual guests
• Broad compatibility list enables choice of storage vendors without compromising on manageability

Symantec has also announced, in the press release, an agreement with NetApp, Inc. to resell Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware to take advantage of the sales channel offered by a comprehensive NetApp storage solution.

Today McAfee announced a new agentless deployment option for McAfee Management for Optimized Virtual Environments (MOVE) AV solution which is designed to integrate with VMware vShield Endpoint.

“McAfee MOVE AV provides McKesson with comprehensive and consistent malicious code protection for our virtual environment,” said Patrick Enyart, senior director, McKesson Information Security, Security Operations. “As we continue to adopt emerging technologies, particularly cloud computing solutions, implementing McAfee MOVE AV provides us with additional security in our virtual environment. The solution makes sizing and deployment simpler and ensures that every system is deployed with the same level of protection.”

McAfee wants to achieve the goal of providing comprehensive protection without affecting the performance of virtualized environments with particular attention to VDI and server infrastructures managed via VMware technologies.

McAfee MOVE AV deployment options are centrally managed and reported by McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO).

For more information we recommend reading the press release.

Microsoft today announced the release of a public beta of version 5 of it’s Application Virtualization product App-V. It also announced today the release of the public beta of a new user environment management product called User Experience Virtualization (UE-V). Both products will be part of a new version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), available for Software Assurance users.

With this last product Microsoft decided to fill a gap which up till now was filled by Microsoft partners like Citrix, Appsense, Immidio, Liquidware Labs, Quest, Res Software and others. For these partners it will be harder to provide additional value now that Microsoft will provide this solution with MDOP.

Up intil now Microsoft’s solution for user environment management was called User Profile Virtualization, which was actually a combination of Roaming Profiles and Folder redirection. This solution isn’t very suitable though in environments where users access traditional desktops, terminal servers, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and other devices using the same account.

With UE-V Microsoft states:

Regardless if it is a rich desktop or a hosted VDI desktop, a traditional application or a virtual application, UE-V enables a personal, consistent Windows experience across devices, matching each person’s unique work style for increased productivity anytime, anywhere. UE-V integrates with our Microsoft Desktop Virtualization products and can be deployed with System Center Configuration Manager, as well as third party management tools.

While the roaming profiles with folder redirection solution the UE-V solution will apply settings when applications are opened, and save that settings when the applicaitons is closed, in contradiction to the User Profile Virtualization which loads settings at logon and saves them at logoff. For UE-V to work another agent needs to be deployed, (when will Microsoft release one mangement agent?). Settings location templates, which are XML based are used to tell the agent which applications should store their roaming information from thefile system and registry to a network location. Templates can be generated with the UE-V generator tool.

For more information about UE-V, see this post on the Microsoft Springboard series blog.

App-V 5.0. promises deeper platform integration, allowing App-V applications to work more like traditional installed applications. App-V 5.0 will will allow for local application store to be turned off, reducing disk requirements.

App-V 5.0 will also introduce a new web-based management interface based on Silverlight, and introduces support for both Windows 7 and Windows 8 which is now in public beta.

For more information about User Environment Management (UEM), we recommend reading the UEM Smackdown paper, written by Ruben Spruijt which can be downloaded via BrianMadden.com

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On April 2 VMware released his iOS App related to Project Octoups.

Its description, extremely succinct, suggests how VMware wants to keep a low profile on this new project.

Project Octopus enables secure, anywhere access to files from any device. Users can share and collaborate on their files with anyone inside or outside the company.

The App is only available to members of the Octopus private beta, but the few screenshots available push to an immediate comparison with the Dropbox App.

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On March 19 VMware announced the availability of vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5 that provides configuration management capabilities within VMware vCenter Operation Management Suite.

The primary theme for vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5 release is “Cloud Ready”.  New capabilities within this release significantly increase the ability of the Virtual Infrastructure team to ensure that their VMware Infrastructure is properly configured to meet the rigorous demands associated with virtualizing business critical workloads; including addressing requirements associated with VMware’s own hardening guidelines.

What gives more value to this release is the introduction of Change Management Dashboard, an high level dashboard that allows easily to track changes in configurations of VMware Infrastructure by product type and magnitude.

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On 3th of April Dell has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wyse Technology in order to extend its desktop virtualization offerings.

Dell’s goal is to gain a strong position in VDI thin client market and this operation may lead to great changes in an area where HP has already done its move.

“Desktop virtualization can help organizations streamline IT management, improve productivity and security, and increase cost efficiency for discrete workloads or usage scenarios. The Wyse Technology desktop virtualization capability complements Dell’s strongest-ever device and computing solutions portfolio, and strengthens our position in offering customers among the broadest set of computing choices from the edge to the core to the cloud.”

Jeff Clarke, president, End User Computing Solutions

Dell Inc.

Wyse Technology product portfolio includes thin clients, zero clients and software for mobile cloud connectivity like PocketCloud.

Source: http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/acq-wyse.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=corp

Aidan Finn, a Microsoft MVP with he Virtual Machine expertise wrote an article focused on one of the killer features of Windows Server 8: Hyper-V Replica.

In the article Finn explains how this feature is designed for low bandwidth, high latency networks that small and medium enterprises use for inter-site replication.

The HRL (Hyper-V Replica Log file) replay mechanism is actually quite clever; it replays the log file in reverse order, and this allows it only to store the latest writes.  In other words, it is asynchronous (able to deal with long distances and high latency by write in site A and later write in site B) and it replicates just the changes.

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March 2012 – VMware stars a new online publication with the purpose of raising the awareness among its customer and prospects about the new R&D areas where the company from Palo Alto is investing.

This first publishing covers distributed resource management, user experience monitoring and a couple of other topics we can resume with this index:

1. Introduction
   Steve Herrod, CTO
2. VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient Handling of System Images
   Olivier Cremel
3. A Software-based Approach to Testing VMware® vSphere® VMkernel Public APIs
   Lan Xue, Sreevathsa Sathyanarayana, James Truong, Sriram Sankaran, Ramesh Pallapotu, Thorbjoern Donbaek, Eric Lorimer
4. Providing Efficient and Seamless Desktop Services in Ubiquitous Computing Environments
   Lizhu Zhang, Wenlong Shao, Jim Grandy
5. Comprehensive User Experience Monitoring
   Lawrence Spracklen, Banit Agrawal, Rishi Bidarkar, Hari Sivaraman
6. StatsFeeder: An Extensible Statistics Collection Framework for Virtualized Environments
   Vijayaraghavan Soundararajan, Balaji Parimi, Jon Cook
7. VMware Distributed Resource Management: Design, Implementation, and Lessons Learned
   Ajay Gulati, Anne Holler, Minwen Ji, Ganesha Shanmuganathan, Carl Waldspurger, Xiaoyun Zhu
8. Identity, Access Control, and VMware Horizon
   Will Pugh, Kyle Austin
9. VMworld 2011 Hands-On Labs: Implementation and Workflow
   Adam Zimman, Clair Roberts, Mornay Van Der Walt

VMware will try to publish this journal on a  regular basis in the future.

Source: http://labs.vmware.com/publications/vmware-technical-journal

Trend Micro has announced his new comprehensive Security Platform for physical, virtual and cloud server: Deep Security 8.0.

Designed specifically for next-generation datacenters consists of 7 main modules:

• Anti-Malware Protection for VMware Environments
• Intrusion Detection and Prevention
• Application Control
• Bidirectional Stateful Firewall
• Integrity Monitoring
• Web application Protection
• Log Inspection

The platform supports all main operating system (modern releases for Microsoft, Linux, Solaris and UNIX) and virtualization platforms (VMware ESX/vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft HyperV) and covers the entire technology landscape from physical machines to VDI environment allowing high level of compliance (PCI DSS 2.0, HIPAA, FISMA/NIST, NERC. SAS 70, and more.) with proportionate, cost-effective investments.

Via: http://vmblog.com/archive/2012/03/15/trend-micro-announces-deep-security-8-0.aspx

Source: http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/cloud-solutions/deep-security/index.html

On 29th of March Login Consultants announced the new Client Side Performance Testing module for Login VSI.

Included as an option in Login VSI Pro 3.6 the module allows full end-to-end measurement of the user experience in desktop virtualization environments.

This tool may fill the gap for a more realistic VDI environment benchmark that includes end-to-end performance metering.

VDI Client Side Testing module is still a beta and the final price has yet to be announced.

The new testing scenarios introduced includes:

• What if we increase the number of users on a single server- or pool of servers? What is the impact of responsiveness of protocol on client side?
• If we switch from Server Side to Client Side rendering, what is the impact on bandwidth consumption and therefore protocol responsiveness?
• What is the real effect of WAN accelerators on response time at the endpoint (no caching = realistic results)?

Source: http://www.loginvsi.com/en/news/press-release-vdi-benchmarking-tool-login-vsi-enhanced-with-client-side-performance-testing