Yesterday, November 12, AMD announced AMD FirePro™ S10000, a server graphics card intended to be the most powerful and would be used for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads and graphics intensive applications.
Year: 2012
Paper: N series Reference Architecture for Virtualized Environments
IBM has released a draft paper titled:"N series Reference Architecture for Virtualized Environments". The Paper which IBM calls Redbook contains 76 pages and is still in draft but not less interesting because of that. The final release is expected at the end of January 2013.
The paper covers how IBM addresses data storage and compute challenges with IBM System Storage N series solutions, in conjunction with IBM servers and networking solutions, by providing deployment guidelines, workload estimates and best practices resulting in a Reference Architecture for virtualized environments using VMware vSphere, IBM System x Server/BladeCenter, IBM System networking and IBM System Storage N series.
Release: VMware Workstation 9.0.1
VMware has released version 9.0.1 of its desktop virtualization platform Workstation. This maintenance release can be installed on top of version 9.0 which was released in August this year.
The 9.0.1 update (build 894247) adds support for Ubuntu 12.10 as a host and guest and Solaris 11 as a guest OS. Besides this some issues are resolved, like the ability to mount a .vmdk file as a drive by right-clicking the file in File Explorer and use of more memory on host systems having more than 4 GB of memory as detailed in the release notes.
Release: VMware Fusion 5.0.2
VMware last week updated its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac to version 5.0.2 (build 900491). This version is the follow up of version 5.0.1 which was released in September this year and is intended to be used on top of the major release version 5 released in August.
Version 5.0.2. is a so called maintenance release, meaning that only issues are solved and no new functionality is introduced. The main issues solved are USB 3.0 stability and graphic improvements when running Microsoft Office 2013 preview, the full list of issues solved can be found in the release notes.
Brocade acquires Vyatta
Yesterday Brocade announced the acquisition of Vyatta, a company that delivers a software-based network operating system that leverages x86 servers as well as virtualization and cloud computing platforms.
Data center networking solutions provider Brocade is planning to use Vyatta competence aiming to offer an end-to-end virtualized data center infrastructure solution. Brocade expects to close the acquisition by the end of the calendar year and privately held Vyatta will be acquired in an all-cash transaction.
The merge of the two companies is going to deliver a product which would be the result of Vyatta’s cloud computing platforms, network virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN) with ethernet fabric architecture of Brocade.
Release: VKernel vOps Server Explorer 6.0
VKernel today announced the release of vOps Server Explorer version 6.0 suite. Version 6.0 is the follow up of version 5.1 which was released in August this year.
Version 6.0 which is offered as a free download and is now also offered as a Virtual Appliance (VA) which runs on Hyper-V. Besides that vOps Server Explorer already provided appliances for VMware vSphere and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).
In order to run the appliance on Hyper-V, VKernel requires that either Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM) R2 or System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager and System Center 2012 Operations Manager are available as well.
Paper: VMFS File Locking and Its Impact in VMware View 5.1
VMware has released a paper titled:"VMFS File Locking and Its Impact in VMware View 5.1". The paper which contains 16 pages describes what VMware has done in order to extend the support to a maximum of 32 hosts in a ESX cluster when VMware vStorage Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is used. Versions prior to View 5.1 only supported 8 hosts in an ESX Cluster when (VMFS) was used, when NFS storage is used for linked clone replica creation.
McAfee announces New Data Center Security Suites
On October 15, McAfee announced a solution of four new Data Center Security Suites designed to offer a combination of security for physical, virtual and cloud-based environments.
The suites offer the ability to protect physical and virtual servers and desktops with merged technologies in a single solution.
- McAfee Data Center Security Suite for Server provides a complete set of blacklisting, whitelisting, and optimized virtualization support capabilities for basic security on servers of all types
- McAfee Data Center Security Suite for Server–Hypervisor Edition provides a complete set of blacklisting, whitelisting, and optimized virtualization support capabilities for basic security on servers of all types and is licensed per Hypervisor
- McAfee Data Center Security Suite for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure provides comprehensive security for virtual desktop deployments without compromising performance or the user experience
- McAfee Database Server Protection provides data base activity monitoring and vulnerability assessment in a single suite, for all major database servers in the data center
PHD Virtual provides Backup Solutions for Enterprise Environments
Yesterday, November 5th, PHD Virtual Technologies announced their solutions are well-suited for large enterprise environments as well as small businesses with growing data storage, backup and recovery needs.
PHD Virtual, based in Philadelphia USA, provides virtual backup for VMware and Citrix and monitoring solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments.
PHD Virtual features for large enterprise environments include:
- Complete or partial restorations – provides administrators with the ability to restore a complete server from scratch, by simply selecting a restore point and target. No agents, no operating system install, just restore a complete duplicate of the VM.
- TrueDedupe technology – a true source-side deduplication of data, meaning the deduplication and compression of the source data is performed before sending the information across the WAN/LAN and before the data is written to disk. This type of efficient deduplication is critical for enterprises that require disk space to house the backups for massive amounts of data while also being more scalable and pairing down the overall backup window time. PHD performs deduplication by comparing REAL data existing on the backup target while ensuring to eliminate duplicate copies of data across ALL VMs stored on the target making it more robust and preventing unnecessary job management to achieve storage efficiencies.
Tech: VMware ESXi 5.1 Reference Poster
VMware has updated its reference poster for ESXi 5.1. The poster which can be downloaded in PDF format gives an overview of all the features provided by ESXi 5.1, like Name spaces, Host, Virtual Machine, Storage and Network commands and much more.
More VMware posters, like VMware Management with PowerCLI 5.1, VMware vCloud Networking Poster and the VMware Hands-On Labs 2012 Poster are available at the following URL: http://vmware.com/go/posters/