Year: 2013

Citrix has released a Technical Preview of a new connector for XenDesktop. This connector will enable customers to use System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) to deploy application to a XenDesktop Server OS Farm ensuring that if you are using PVS or MCS for provisioning that clones do not get caught in install/reboot issues and that the master VM of the PVS/MCS catalog get correctly updated. The connector does not support XenDesktop Client OS scenario’s (VDI).

Once the application is deployed ConfigMgr can then be used to publish the application in Citrix StoreFront where it can be selected for use by users on any device that has Receiver installed (iPad, Android, Mac, PC, Windows Phone etc). Its also possible to selectively deploy an applications as an App-V, MSI OR XenDesktop Published Application to Managed PCs

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In august this year, VMware announced the first public beta of Virtual SAN. Today VMware announced a new version of the beta being available. Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage tier embedded directly within vSphere 5.5 hypervisor (but licensed separately) and constitutes (with NSX) one of the key components of VMware’s vision of a Software-Defined DataCenter (SDDC). Customers currently in the beta program of Virtual SAN are advised to update to this new version, which contains:

• A fix for the AHCI controller issue encountered in the beta testing
• New Ruby Virtual Console commands
• A new PowerCLI fling
• Changes to certain VSAN limits; a disk group may now contain a single SSD and up to seven HDDs so that all disk slots on a server can be utilized.

Red Hat has released version 6.5. of its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Linux-based Operating System. The OS is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was forked from Fedora 12 and contains many backported features from Fedora 13 and 14.

New functionality includes:

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VMware today released version 5.3 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product Horizon View. With this release, VMware also updated the View clients to version 2.2.

Version 3.5 was announced during VMworld Europe in October last year, together with vCloud Automation Center 6.0, vCloud Operations Management Suite 5.8, vCenter Log Insight 1.5, IT Business Management Suite 8.0 and Horizon Mirage 4.3.

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Just a week after releasing a free version of their security product for Microsoft Hyper-V called Security for Microsoft Hyper-V with built in Security and Compliance scanner, 5nine released version 3.7 of their Security Standard product. Security Standard provides an agentless anti-virus and anti-malware protection solutions for Hyper-V hosts and VMs running on top of Hyper-V. Version 3.7 adds an Active Protection feature allowing for monitoring and protecting files, virtual disks and memory of VMs and hosts in real time. For this to work an Agent, called the VM Active Protection Agent must be installed though. Customers can choose between VIPRE or Sophos as their anti-malware engines.

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Catbird is a well-known security player in the virtualization market with its vSecurity product able to proactively secure the virtual network and guest operating systems by analyzing and responding to network events and attack, and enforcing correct VM configuration automatically mapping to industry-standard compliance frameworks such PCI, HIPAA, FISMA and COBIT.

vSecurity for Microsoft Hyper-V, whose release is planned for December 2013, will support Hyper-V Server 2012, SP1 and R2 and promises the same functionalities now provided to VMware vSphere and ESX users.

The solution will be delivered with two components: a web management console, providing policy definition, visualization and workflow on a logical zone basis, called Catbird Control Center and a virtual machine appliance to be deployed for each virtual switch or hypervisor.

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5nine has released a free version of its 5nine Security product, called 5nine Security for Microsoft Hyper-V with built-in Security and Compliance Scanner v1.0. 5nine Security for Hyper-V Free provides a host-based / agent-less security solution for virtual machines running on top of Hyper-V. The product is also availble in paid versions (Standard and Datacenter editions) which ofcourse provide more functionality, as detailed in this product comparison.

The solution provides anti-virus and anti-mailware scanning for hosts and virtual machines, a virtual firewall, and control over each VM – which are controlled using a centralized management console, via PowerShell of via WCF APIs. The built-in Security and Compliance Scanner will help you to investigate present and potential security problems on your server. It also performs an aggressive anti-malware scan on a server during the overall scanning process. Upon scan completion Security and Compliance Scanner provides detailed reports on each identified security issue.

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vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for vCloud Director 5.5 allows access to vCloud Director’s functionalities and API to be used in vCenter Orchestrator, VMware’s workflow automation platform.

This new release has its main purpose in the complete support for vCloud Director 5.5 but also introduces new features such the enhanced performances of the object finder methods, the possibility to configure the cache timeout through the plug-in settings, the ability for Cloud administrators to automate the management of vApp and VM snapshots through the scripting objects of the plug-in and a couple of bug fixes.

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Veeam has released an update for version 7 of its Backup & Replication product for VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V which was released in August this year. The product is therefore the first backup product to support both vSphere 5.5. and Hyper-V 2012 R2.

The update, which Veeam versions as R2 provides the following new features:

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Last month Gartner released a paper titled:"How to Choose between Hyper-V and vSphere". The paper written by Thomas J. Bittman, is made available for free viewing by Microsoft, which actually tells something about the outcome of the paper already.

The paper covers acquisition costs, ease of management including operational complexity and cost and also covers functionality richness of both the VMware and Microsoft virtualization platform solutions.

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