Microsoft updates its Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica

Microsoft has announced that it has updated it Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica. The Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica was first released in May 2013 providing capacity planning for Hyper-V replica on Windows Server 2012. Now the tool has been updated to support Winodws Server 2012 R2. The Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica allows administrators to plan their Hyper-V Replica deployments based on the workload, storage, network, and server characteristics.

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Docker raises $15 million in Series B funding

Docker has announced that it has closed a $15 million Series B funding. The round was led by Greylock Partners, with participation by Insight Venture Partners and existing investors: Benchmark (Peter Fenton), Trinity Ventures (Dan Scholnick), and Jerry Yang/AME Cloud Ventures. Jerry Chen from Greylock Ventures will join the board of directors at Dockers. Chen comes from VMware where he was VP of Cloud and Application Services.

Docker provides so called container virtualization, allowing an application and its dependencies to run 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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Paper: Enabling VMware vShield Endpoint for Horizon View

VMware has published a paper titled:"Enabling VMware vShield Endpoint for Horizon View". The paper which contains 14 pages addresses the problems of antivirus scanning in a large-scale Horizon View virtual desktop implementation by implementing vShield Endpoint. vShield Endpoint consolidates and offloads all antivirus and associated operations into a centralized security virtual appliance (SVA), supplied by a VMware partner. The SVA runs and manages antivirus software as a dedicated virtual machine on the hypervisor, with very small desktop drivers. This replaces dozens or hundreds or thousands of large AV agents on individual virtual desktops.

vShield Endpoint is included in vSphere 5.1 and later as well as in Horizon View 5.3.

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Tech: Network Recommendations for a Hyper-V Cluster in Windows Server 2012

Microsoft has published an technical article giving network recommendations for building a Hyper-V cluster in Windows Server 2012. The guide provides network configuration recommendations that are specific to a Hyper-V cluster that is running Windows Server 2012. It includes an overview of the different network traffic types, recommendations for how to isolate traffic, recommendations for features such as NIC Teaming, Quality of Service (QoS) and Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ), and a Windows PowerShell script that shows an example of converged networking, where the network traffic on a Hyper-V cluster is routed through one external virtual switch.

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Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager is now in General Availability

Microsoft announced General Availability of Hyper-V Recovery Manager. This means the service is supported by Microsoft for production and is backed with a Service Level Agreement.

Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM) is a cloud based service which coordinates failover and failback between two Microsoft System Center 2012 managed datacenters. The cloud based service is a control plane running on Windows Azure. It allows to create runbooks which coordinates the startup of virtual machines in a predefined order. It will also adjust IP-configuration of virtual machines if the secondary site is using a different IP-subnet than the primary site.

HRM is positioned by Microsoft as a better solution than VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). SRM is a DR coordination software solution as well.  SRM needs to be installed on-premise and requires unlike HRM quite some mouseclicks to get configured.

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Goliath Technologies extends support for VMware

Goliath Technologies, headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, provider of a proactive system management solutions for physical, virtual and cloud infrastrucure, with customers worldwide including ADP, ING Direct, NASA, Thompson Reuters and Shell, announced on January 14 wider support for monitoring VMware storage components via direct API integration to the hypervisor. With this update the company now delivers new dashboards and alerting capabilities on hosts, virtual machines and data store metrics from the VMware hypervisor.

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Paper: Hardened Virtual Appliance Operations Guide

VMware has released a document titled: Hardened Virtual Appliance Operations Guide. The paper, which contains 16 pages, is a guide targeted towards securing the appliace base platform to meet high governance requirements. In 2013, VMware started to standardize the security profile of its virtual appliaces to meet governance compliance requirements according to the Security Technical Information Guides (STIG).

Paper: Getting Started with OpenStack and VMware vSphere

VMware has released a paper titled: “Getting Started with OpenStack and VMware vSphere“. The paper which contains 21 pages, it is a guide targeted towards the implementation and use of OpenStack on top of a vSphere compute and storage infrastructure that becomes the provider of Nova compute instances and Cinder block storage volumes.
In this guide is leveraged the VMware OpenStack Virtual Appliance, a single Ubuntu Linux VM with all the required OpenStack services, in order to semplify the deployment.

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Paper: High-Performance Persistent Virtual Desktop Architecture Powered by NetApp FAS Array and Atlantis ILIO

Atlantis Computing has released a paper titled:"High-Performance Persistent Virtual Desktop Architecture Powered by NetApp FAS Array and Atlantis ILIO". The Paper which contains 27 pages covers a reference architecture provided by Atlantis Computing and NetApp offering a storage architecture to meet VDI IOPS requirements, allowing to provide more than 55 IOPS per desktop and 30GB per virtual desktop for 1,000 persistent virtual desktops using a dual controller FAS 2240-2 with Clustered Data ONTAP optimized with Atlantis ILIO software. Testing was done using the Login VSI benchmarking suite.

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Nutanix extends support to include Windows Server 2012 R2

Nutanix, provider of appliance-based servers with built-in storage has announced that it now supports running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V. With this announcement Nutanix now supports the hypervisor platforms from VMware, Microsoft and KVM.

The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is a scale-out cluster of high-performance nodes, or servers, each running a standard hypervisor and containing processors, memory and local storage (consisting of SSD Flash and high capacity SATA disk drives). Each node runs virtual machines just like a standard virtual machine host.

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