Year: 2012

VMware has released a paper titled: VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), the paper which contains 19 pages details the current vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) available today. When VAAI was introduced in the vSphere 4.1 timeframe there were three block based storage (Fibre Channel, iSCSI and FCoE) and with the introduction of vSpere 2 VAAI primitives for NAS storage and vSphere Thin Provisioning were introduced.

VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), also referred to as hardware acceleration or hardware offload APIs, are a set of APIs to enable communication between VMware vSphere ESXi hosts and storage devices. The APIs define a set of “storage primitives” that enable the ESXi host to offload certain storage operations to the array, which reduces resource overhead on the ESXi hosts and can significantly improve performance for storage-intensive operations such as storage cloning, zeroing, and so on. The goal of VAAI is to help storage vendors provide hardware assistance to speed up VMware I/O operations that are more efficiently accomplished in the storage hardware.

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Lanamark last week announced that it has released a new module called the DR Capacity Planning Module, to be included into its Lanamark Suite paid Services Edition. The module allows cloud and virtualization solution providers to design fault-tolerant, multi-site DR solutions for server workloads and virtual desktops across public, private and hybrid clouds.

The DR Capacity Planning module integrates with the Hybrid Cloud Design Module and Desktop Transformation Module. It enables site recovery planning with unidirectional protection from a primary to a secondary site, bidirectional protection between sites and multisite recovery to a shared DR site. Each group of users and machines can be assigned to a recovery site and disaster recovery plans for shutting down low priority server workloads and virtual desktops can be defined to free up resources during failover. These settings are then used to optimize infrastructure capacity and model failover scenarios while meeting specified DR policies and service level agreements.

VMware yesterday released version 5.6 of its performance, capacity and configuration analytics product vCenter Operations Manager. The product which was first released in March last year, combines several products acquired by VMware in the past and is part of the vCloud suite, which besides vCenter Operations Manager also includes vSphere, vCloud Connector, vCloud Director, vCloud Networking and Security, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, vFabric Application Director, en vCloud Automation Center. vCloud Operation Manager functionality is partly available in the vCloud Advanced licensed suite and fully in the Enterprise version as detailed here.

vCenter Operations Manager provides performance, capacity and configuration analytics for management of highly virtual infrastructures and cloud infrastructures. It does so by analyzing and correlating data across the monitored IT infrastructure in a pretty unique way: for each tracked resource, it can identify the normal behavior of every metric (which implies a dynamic adjustment of thresholds) and then automatically recognize an anomaly. Capacity Management is provided to enable users to users to analyze, forecast, and plan the capacity needs of their virtual datacenter environment. Configuration and Compliance Management is provided by collecting, fixing, provisioning and managing configurations.

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HP has released a new tool called the HP Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV). The tool is capable of detecting, diagnosing and trouleshooting issues in virtualized environments. The Virtualization Performance Viewer is offered in a free edition which is limited and a Licensed version providing full functionality.

vPV supports the hypervisors from VMware and Microsoft and is available as a CentOS-based virtual appliance (VA), which can be deployed using the vSphere client or as a Linux installer on RHEL version 6.x. The free version is also available for Windows Client Operating Systems.

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Three Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), Hans Vredevoort, Aidan Finn and Damian Flynn are conducting a research on Hyper-V adoption. The goal of the survey is to gain insight about if people have learned about Windows Server 2012 and its included Hypervisor Hyper-V 3.0 and System Center. The survey also want to know who is using them, if people are planning on using them and how they are intending to use the products.

You can participate in the survey by filling out 72 questions available here, the survey is available until December 1st. The results will be posted shortly after that.

In 2011, this group also conducted a survey which is still available for download here.

Today, November 26, CA Technologies published a press release where it is announched that according to a comparative product review made by Network Testing Labs, its product CA ARCserve R16 has beaten Veeam® Backup & Replication™ 6.5 in every category.

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VMware has released version 1.0 of its vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager, an optional module which is capable of managing the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor from vCenter. While vCenter markets the product as a Multi-Hypervisor product this version clearly targets Microsoft because it only supports the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 hypervisors at this time. It’s not clear if VMware is planning to support Windows Server 2012 which contains Hyper-V 3.0 or the Xen Hypervisor any time soon.

Microsoft also provides multi-hypervisor management capabilities in its System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) product, the major difference though is that SCVMM still needs vCenter while this plugin can directly manage Hyper-V hosts without needing an SCVMM infrastructure.

The vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager provides some functionality (management) from the vCenter XVP Manager and Converter on which virtualization.info reported in February last year. This fling, although still in Technical Preview status is still available from VMware as well but doesn’t support vSphere 5 yet.

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Internal VMware’s magazine, called “Innovate”, has been made accessible for everyone to download.

The reachable edition of Innovate is about VMware’s internal R&D Innovation Offsite (RADIO) 2012, a gathering of about people from across VMware’s R&D organization and from around the world, the magazine introduces datas and themes mentioned in the conference.

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VMware last week released version 4.7.3. of its application virtualization product ThinApp. This version is the follow up of version 4.7.2. which was released in July this year. This release adds support for packaging and execution of virtualized applications on the Windows 8 OS from Microsoft.

Besides adding support for Windows 8, the update also resolves some issues, like the JavaScript errors when the EULA screen is displayed while installing the ThinApp application. These resolved issues and known issues can be found in the release notes.

VKernel, now part of DELL has released a paper titled:"Best Practices for Oversubscription of CPU, Memory and Storage in vSphere Virtual Environments". The paper which can be downloaded after registration contains 13 pages and is written by Scott D. Lowe and provides insight in the pros and cons of oversubscription of Processing, Memory and Storage resources. Scott also details how far oversubscription should be taken before it becomes dangerous.

Scott uses vOps Server Explorer, for which VKernel recently released version 6 as the tool to monitor the resources. He details the metrics to watch when oversubscribing and gives some insight in just how far resource overcommitment can be taken.

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