Year: 2013

PHD Virtual, a well known player in the VM backup and recovery market has been acquired by Unitrends. Unitrends also specializes in backup solutions and will integrate the PHD Virtual product suite into its own portfolio. Combined, Unitrends and PHD Virtual will serve more than 10,000 customers worldwide and have more than 8,000 global channel partner representatives.

Both companies have primary investments from Insight Venture Partners, a leading global private equity and venture capital firm. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

VMware has released a paper titled: “VMware NSX Network Virtualization Design Guide“. The paper which contains 32 pages is a design guide targeted towards virtualization and network architects interested in deploying VMware NSX. NSX network virtualization programmatically creates, snapshots, deletes, and restores software-based virtual networks.

The paper contains the following sections:

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Last week Friday Citrix released Service Pack 1 for its virtualization platform Citrix XenServer 6.2, which was released in June of this year. Besides providing a rollup of all released hotfixes until now the Service Pack adds the following new features as described in the release notes:

• 3D graphics pack supporting NVIDIA GRID GPUs
• GPU pass-through improvements
• Support for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2
• Improvments to the Site Recovery Wizard for large deployments
• Support for up to 50 new fibre-channel HBASRs to be created in a single step

VMware released the vCloud Hybrid Service vSphere Client Plug-in. This plug-in allows administrators to manage both their on-premise vSphere infrastructure as well as the virtual datacenters running on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). vCHS is the VMware public IaaS platform currently available in the US only, while in the UK a single datacenter is running in beta.

More on the roadmap of vCHS here.

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Atlantis Computing provider of storage solutions for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments has announced Atlantis ILIO for Hyper-V 3.0, the version of Hyper-V which comes with Windows Server 2012 R2. ILIO allows customers to run persistent and non-persistent virtual desktops using storage which runs in memory only, using deduplication and compression techniques. Atlantis claims this makes the VM faster and cheaper than a physical pc.

With this announcement Atlantis ILIO will support the vSphere, XenServer and Hyper-V hypervisors. Atlantis didn’t disclose when Atlantis ILIO for Hyper-V 3.0 will be released.

Announced at VMworld Barcelona back in October VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.8 has been released today.

VMware vCOPS that converges the management of performance, capacity and configuration in vSphere environments, introduces in version 5.8 the following enhancements:

• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V servers, Amazon’s AWS and several business critical applications such Microsoft Exchange and SQL Servers via vCenter Operations Management Pack for vCenter Hyperic
• Integration with VMware Log Insight to monitor the vCenter Operations Manager infrastructure
• Several new management packs available for download at https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/vcops

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VMware has released the RDP VC Bridge SDK. This SDK is intended for ISVs who have applications that today run on Microsoft RDP using the RDP WTS APIs.

By simply recompiling and linking their code with the header and library files included in the SDK, ISVs can quickly enable their applications to run over the PCoIP protocol on VMware Horizon View.

One of the use cases for this SDK is in healthcare. In hospitals ECG and bloodpressure devices are used to monitor the health of patients. These devices can be attached to a laptop next to the bed. Software on the laptop can be used to monitor things like heartbeat. For a central monitoring in a hospital control room the software can be installed on a Microsoft Remote Desktop Services server or a Citrix XenApp server. The protocol must devices support are ICA and RDP.

To be able to use PCoIP to use the healthcare software remotely the VMware RDPVCBridge comes in handy.

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Helge Klein, which we know from tools such as SetACL, SetACL studio and Delprof2 has released a Splunk agent for Windows called the uberAgent for Splunk. The agent is capable of monitoring user experience and system performance.

The agent provides the following functionality:

• Process Startup
• System Boot Performance
• Logon Time Monitoring
• Application Usage Metering
• Browser Performance – Per Website
• Automatic Application Identification

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In June this year Microsoft released the betas for App-V 5.0 SP2 and UE-V 2.0. Both products are now released within the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2013 R2, which is available for Microsoft Customers with Software Assurance. This version of MDOP adds support for Windows 8.1 and the virtualization of Office 2013.

The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack contains the following technologies:

• User Experience Virtualization (UE-V)
• Application Virtualization (App-V)
• Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V)
• Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM)
• Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM)
• Diagnostics and Recovery Toolkit (DaRT)

In the 2013 R2 version of MDOP the following products have been updated:

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Log Insight is VMware’s product for log management and analysis, introduced in June and quickly updated in the following months in order to be competitive on this market that sees Splunk among its leaders.

This week VMware released a video (thanks to Eric Sloof for reporting), through VMware Learning YouTube channel, where Manuel Duron does a quick demo showing the key capabilities of the product and explains its key benefits.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3bBxH_fdQk[/youtube]

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