Year: 2014

Citrix yesterday announced that it has hired former Gartner analyst, Gunnar Berger as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Desktop and Apps Group. Gunnar Berger is one of the many Gartner analysts which joins a big technology company in the recent months. First, in January this year ex Gartner analyst Chris Wolf joined VMware as CTO for Americas and later virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info founder and ex-Gartner analyst Alessandro Perilli joined Red Hat to become General Manager of the Open Hybrid Cloud program.

Berger started his IT career in 1998, and before joining Gartner was System Specialist at Teradici and Directory of End User Computing ad LogicsOne which is now called GreenPages. He worked at Gartner for almost 2 1/2 years.

Earlier this month Symantec released edition 2014 of its comprehensive backup suite: Backup Exec.

What distinguishes this latest version from the previous is the effort that Symantec has invested in the integration of the product into the virtualized infrastructures, leveraging technologies like Microsoft VSS and VMware’s VADP,  in order to provide a unified solution able to cover also the physical machines still in production in many datacenters.

The product also supports multi-hypervisor environments allowing the management of vCenter and Hyper-V hosts together in the same console.

Symantec Backup Exec 2014 also integrates V2P (virtual to physical) and P2V (physical to virtual) features, this last one in particular turns it into a good candidate as a consolidation tool that could fit well for the SMB.

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VMware has just released a new update for its vCenter Server 5.5 that fixes a couple of vulnerabilities including the well known CVE-2014-0224 that affects some versions of the OpenSSL libraries allowing a possibile man-in-the-middle attack.

The other fixed issues are:

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Red Hat yesterday released version 7 of its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Linux-based Operating System. Version 7 is the follow up of version 6.5. which was released in November last year.

The release notes for RHEL 7 can be found here, some of the changes are described below:

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Docker today announced the release of version 1.0 of its container virtualization solution.

Docker provides so called container virtualization, allowing an application and its dependencies to run as an isolated process inside a virtual environment. This environment is then portable from local computers to backend infrastructure and cloud. Docker uses LinuX Containers (LXC) running in the host OS allowing you to share the resouces available to the host.

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Cisco has released a paper titled: "FlexPod Datacenter with Citrix XenDesktop 7.1 and XenServer 6.2 SP1". The paper which is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) contains 401 pages and provides a reference architecture for a 2000 set Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) using Citrix XenDesktop 7.1 on Cisco UCS B200-M3 server blades with NetApp FAS 3250 and the Citrix XenServer 6.2 SP1 hypervisor platform.

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VMware’s former CTO of Storage and end user computing divisions, Scott Davis, just joined Infinio, a start-up company based in Cambridge, Mass., the company announced that Scott Davis joined them with the same role as Chief Technology Officer.

Founded 2011 and backed up by top-tier investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Osage University Partners, Infinio is focused on storage acceleration and offers downloadable storage performance for virtualized environments.

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5nine today announced that it released an updated version of its Cloud Security product which now includes the Anti-Virus engine of Kaspersky.

Cloud Security for Hyper-V is a solution which helps to ensure security and compliance for Hyper-V environments. It provides agentless anti-virus, compliance enforcement and traffic control/VM isolation. Management can be done using a Centralized Management Console or by using a plugin into System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). The product supports Windows 8.x with Hyper-V enabled, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) released at May 30 2014 the ‘AWS Management Portal for vCenter‘. This free plug-in for vCenter allows  management of virtual machines and virtual networks running on Amazon Web Service from the vSphere Client.

AWS Management Portal also allows to import a vSphere virtual machine to AWS. The VMware virtual machine needs to be shutdown to perform a conversion to the Amazon .AMI format (used by the Xen based hypervisor) as well as the upload to an Amazon datacenter.

The Management Portal plug-in also offers self-service access to AWS.

A single console now provides management of both VMware on-premises infrastructures as well as Amazon public clouds. This is not a comprehensive tool for creating and managing AWS resources. The management portal enables vCenter users to get started quickly with basic tasks, such as creating a VPC and subnet, and launching an EC2 instance. To complete more advanced tasks, users must use the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI.

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Today Zerto released Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) 3.5. Virtual Replication does per VM replication and recovery orchestration  and is targeted at enterprises and service providers using VMware vSphere. Especially in the US a growing number of service providers use Zerto VR to offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to their customers.

Zerto partners with Cisco. Cisco is using ZVR in their blueprints for service providers. Cisco customers can use these blueprints to offer DRaaS services to their customers to enhance their business model.

New major features in ZVR 3.5 are:

1. Offsite backup
2. VMware VSAN support
3. new action APi’s
4. alerts and notification enhancements
5. tolerant failover

This release also includes fixes.

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