Year: 2013

CloudPhysics free assist in vSphere 5.5 upgrade

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Server virtualization is a great way to improve server utilization & availability, speed up provisioning of servers etc. However there is a risk of not being in control of the IT-infrastructure. Too many virtual servers to handle because of server sprawl leads to jumping from issue to issue. IT departments becoming reactive instead of proactive.

There are quite a few software vendors active in the space of operations management helping IT to keep their infrastructure healthy.
CloudPhysics is one of those. It is a young company founded by a former VMware employee. CloudPhysics is unique because it is cloud based. The company uses data collected from its customers datacenter to improve the intelligence of the software. The company receives a daily stream of 100+ billion samples of configuration, performance, failure and event data from the global user base. The data is then compared to best practises, do health checks and report back to the customer.

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Paper: VMware Virtual SAN Design & Sizing Guide

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Cormac Hogan, Senior Technical Marketing Architect for Storage at VMware, wrote a 30-page PDF document titled “Virtual SAN Design & Sizing Guide”.

The document is designed to assist customers with sizing decisions when deploying VSAN clusters. It should be used in conjunction with other official VMware collateral related to VSAN, such as the VSAN documentation from
VMware Technical Marketing and VMware Technical Publications.

The image below shows what the document covers:

vsan-design-guide-conten

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Book: Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager Field Experience

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Microsoft has released another free ebook about System Center usage, last month they released Designing Orchestrator Runbooks for their System Center Orchrestrator product and this time the ebook covers System Center Configuration Manager. The title of the book is: "Microsoft System Center: Configuration Manager Field Experience " and is written by by Rushi Faldu, Manish Raval, Brandon Linton, Kaushal Pandey and the System Center series editor Mitch Tulloch. It contains 81 pages.

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EMC announces support for SMB 3.0 Protocol on their VNX and VNXe product lines

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EMC has announced support for the Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 as a default CIFS protocol in their VNX and VNXe product line series storage products. SMB is developed by Microsoft and version 3.0 was introduced with the release of Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. The protocol is used to access file shares over the network capable of providing increased performance, scalability, and continuous availability.

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Release: 5Nine Manager for Hyper-V 3.6

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5Nine today announced the release of version 3.6 of Manager for Hyper-V. Manager for Hyper-V is a local management tool for managing the Hyper-V hypervisor.

Microsoft provides a command line tool (SCONFIG) for the basic configuration tasks in Hyper-V server or GUI-less installations, it provides no local GUI for its management, for GUI access, administrators without any third party software have to rely on remote management through Windows Server, System Center Virtual Machine Manager or Remote Server Administration Tools: this is a space well suited for third party solution providers and 5Nine is among them.

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Citrix releases technical preview of XenDesktop 7.1 – Updated

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Citrix today released a technical preview available for download of version 7.1 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product XenDesktop. You’ll need to have a Subscription Advantage in order to download the Technical Preview. The final version once released will mainly support the Microsoft Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Operating Systems which will be generally available later this month.

Version 7.1 provides the following new features:

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virtualization.info Vanguards reaches 2500 members

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virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info readers are not used to self-celebrating posts but, since Virtualization.info Vanguards is one of our unique assets and one of the most important networks of virtualization and cloud computing professionals, I’ll make an exception to the rule: I’m pleased to announce that we just reached 2500 members.
No cakes or celebrations but an important milestone for a community, started in 2007, from the same people who made and tracked the birth and evolution of completely new, billion dollar markets.
There is a long list of people to thank for the success of Virtualization.info Vanguards but I will limit myself to all those members who have kept it alive until now.
See you again at member number 5000!

Paper: What’s New in VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache

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VMware has released a paper titled:"What’s New in VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache". The paper which contains 13 pages gives an overview of what’s new for Flash Read Cache in vSphere 5.5. Flash Read Cache is a Flash-based storage solution which

provides persistent Flash-based storage tier services by utilizing local Flash-based devices on vSphere hosts.

Because the use of a host-based write-through cache is transparent to applications, the solution enables vSphere virtual infrastructures to use the Virtual Flash Resources without having to modify applications. The Virtual Flash Read Cache solution enhances the performance of read-intensive workloads and provides seamless integration with vSphere enterprise features such as vSphere vMotion, vSphere HA and vSphere DRS.

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Release: vSphere Replication Capacity Planning Appliance

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When designing a solution which does replication one of the questions are: how much bandwidth does the replication traffic uses?
VMware has a solution called vSphere Replication which is able to replicate selected virtual machines for disaster recovery purposes.

To model the impact on the network VMware recently released a new tool named vSphere Replication Capacity Planning Appliance. This free tool available as a fling (unsupported technology preview software) can be used without producing actual replication traffic.

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