Year: 2013

Release: Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2013

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Microsoft has released a new version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) version 2013. MDOP is a suite which consists of several desktop management tools available for subscribers to the Microsoft Software Assurance Program. The 2013 update contains a new version of the Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) tool and provides Service Pack 1 releases for AGPM 4.0, DaRT 8.0, App-V 5.0 and UE-V 1.0.

This release doesn’t include any updates to the Microsoft Enterprise Destkop Virtualization (MED-V) tool, most likely Microsoft will not provide any update for this tool anymore therefore supporting it for use on Windows 8, since it hasn’t been updated since 2011 where it added support for Windows 7.

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Release: VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.7

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VMware has released version 5.7 of its operations suite, vCenter Operations Manager. This version is the follow up of version 5.6 which was released in November last year. The product which was first released in March 2011, combines several products acquired by VMware in the past and is part of the vCloud suite.

This version introduces several new functionalities, as described in the release notes:

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Release: Veeam Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 6.0

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Veeam today released version 6.0 of the Management Pack for monitoring and management of VMware using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012. The management pack extends System Center Operations Manager with the ability to monitor VMware environments from the Operations Manager console. This new release of Veeam MP includes new capacity planning reports for VMware on host failure modeling, performance forecasts for datastores, performance forecasts for vSphere clusters, and VM capacity prediction.

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Release: Dell vWorkspace 8.0

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Dell has released version 8 of its VDI connection broker software vWorkspace. This is the first release rebranded under the Dell brand after Quest was acquired by Dell in September last year.

Version 8 of vWorkspace supports Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, and Dell claims that by using the new RemoteFX/RDP8 capabilities of this platform it can reduce bandwidth consumption with 80%. Windows 8 is supported as a VDI platform and vWorkspace Connector platform.

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Midokura raises $17.3M in Series A funding – UPDATED

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On April 9, Midokura announced that is going sponsor, exhibit and present at the OpenStack Summit which will be held in Portland, Oregon next April 15-18. The executives of the japanese company are going to present on topics including network virtualization and SDN throughout the event.

Japanese startup Midokura, focused on network virtualization and based in San Francisco, Barcelona and Tokyo, announced today it has raised  $17.3M in Series A funding from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), a Japanese public-private partnership, among the investors who participated also NTT Group’s Venture Fund: NTT Investment Partners, L.P. and NEC Group’s Venture Fund: Innovative Ventures Fund Investment L.P.

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Survey: VMware vSphere storage reservation

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Frank Denneman senior technical marketing architect within the Cloud Infrastructure Product Marketing group at VMware is conducting a survey about storage reservation, a feature coming to vSphere which is currently in development.

The current version of Storage I/O Control provides tools to prioritize and provide fairness to I/O streams of virtual machines. However the current version does not provide a function to specify number of IOPS to guarantee a minimum level. Because the storage subsystem can be shared, external workloads can impact the performance capacity (in terms of IOPS) of the datastores and therefore a guarantee cannot be met temporarily. This is one of the challenges that must be taken into account when developing storage reservations and we must understand how stringent you want the guarantee to be.

You can take the survey here.

Paper: Top Six Tips for Configuring vSphere Resource Pools

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Quest Software, which is now part of Dell has released a paper titled: "Top Six Tips for Configuring vSphere Resource Pools". The paper which contains 7 pages is written by Greg Shields, a VMware vExpert. The Paper details six key tips to keep in mind when configuring resource pools in VMware vSphere.

Resource pools aren’t going anywhere. In fact, as our industry continues its slow embrace of cloud computing, we’re likely to see more of resource pools in the near to midterm future. No matter whether you’re cloud-bound or sticking with classic virtualization for now, keep an eye on your resource pools and remember these six key tips for using them wisely.

The paper can be downloaded after registration on the website of Dell.