Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Over the past two years the virtualization market has faced many challenges and significant changes, virtualization.info has tried to reflect this evolution tracking all the news in a complete and impartial way as it has done since 2003.
Today we would like to thank all our readers that allowed us to be confirmed, also for this year, as one of the leading websites in the industry.
But what are the articles that contributed to achieve this great result? Here the top 10 for 2013:
HP has released a paper titled:"HP Hardware Accelerated Graphics for Desktop Virtualization" The paper which contains 32 pages provides an overview of the concepts and implementation of hardware accelerated VDI environments by HP and its virtualization partners.
The paper explains the differences between the following Hardware accelerated graphic solutions:
Depending on the scenario in which GPU acceleration is used, either pass-through, software virtualized or hardware virtualized GPU can be used.
In June 2008 Microsoft launched their Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). The SVVP allows any vendor which offers hosted or bare-metal virtualization platforms to certify their platform for use with Microsoft Windows and allowing their platform to be supported by Microsoft . Since then most major virtualization platform vendors decided to have their solutions certified within the SVVP program.
Last week, Parallels announced that it will have its type-2 Parallels Hypervisor certified under the SVVP program. Once certified the Parallels Hypervisor will be supported by Microsoft.
Dell has released a paper titled: "Desktop Virtualization with VMware Horizon View 5.2 on Dell EqualLogic PS6210XS Hybrid Storage Array". The paper which contains 44 pages details information in order to understand how to design, properly size, and deploy VMware Horizon View based desktop virtualization solutions using Dell EqualLogic storage.
The paper demonstrates how 2,000 standard user virtual desktops can be deployed in a VMware Horizon View 5.2 (Horizon View) VDI environment leveraging a single EqualLogic PS6210XS hybrid array. The test infrastructure included VMware Horizon View 5.2, VMware vSphere 5.1 hypervisor, Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell Force10 and PowerConnect switches, and Dell EqualLogic storage arrays. Details are provided for the storage I/O characteristics under various VDI workload scenarios like boot and login storms along with performance characteristics throughout the VDI stack. Login VSI was used to generate the test results.
Microsoft has released version 3.5. of its Integration Services for Linux. Hyper-V supports both emulated (“legacy”) and Hyper-V-specific (“synthetic”) devices for Linux virtual machines. When a Linux virtual machine is running with emulated devices, no additional software is required to be installed. However, emulated devices do not provide high performance and cannot leverage the rich virtual machine management infrastructure that the Hyper-V technology offers.
The Linux Integration Services enable synthetic driver support for Virtual Machines running one of the supported Linux Distributions, currently the 32 and 64 bit versions of:
PHD Virtual, which was acquired last week by Unitrends, has released PHD Virtual Backup for Hyper-V. The Product, which is available for free is build on version 7 of the Virtual Backup infrastructure. With supporting Hyper-V, PHD Virtual now supports the hypervisors from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. The product is now provided for free and customers can choose to purchase a support contract. If a support contract is purchased customers are entitled for future product licenses. PHD Virtual uses Virtual Appliances which are integrated as a VM within the Hypervisor and therfore it operates agentless on the VM’s which its backs up.
Microsoft has updated its free Disk2vhd tool to version 2.0. Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD or VHDX versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). You can use the Disk2vhd tool on an online system, because it leverages the Volume Snapshot capabilities in order to create consistent Point-in-Time snapshots available in the OS.
Oracle has released version 4.3.6. of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. Version 4.3.6. can be installed on top of version 4.3 which was released in October this year.
The update is considered a maintenance release and mainly fixes issues as described in the change log.
Microsoft has a free hypervisor offering called Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is fully equal to the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2012. The only item not available in the free edition is the free usage rights for virtual machines running on a host installed with Hyper-V. Each virtual machine instance running on free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 needs to be licensed.
Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 comes as a core installation. This means there is no graphical userinterface available to perform management. Especially connecting to the console of the virtual machine can be a challenge. Hyper-V Manager does not run on the Hyper-V Server itself. Adminstrators needs access to another Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 with Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) installed to be able to access the console of VM’s.
Veeam to the rescue. The company released a free virtual appliance which is a RDP proxy. The appliance runs CentOS and installs on a Hyper-V host. The appliance can connect to virtual machines using VMconnect. VMconnect is a modified RDP for connection to consoles of virtual machines. VMconnect is able to connect even when the virtual machine does not have an IP-address.
