Year: 2014

Release: VMware ESXi and vCenter Server 5.5 Update 2

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This week VMware released version 5.5 Update 2 of two of its flagship products, ESXi and vCenter Server, updates that were announced at VMworld 2014 in San Francisco.

Among the things to consider updating to this release we noticed that the vSphere Web Client, based on Adobe Flash, no longer supports Linux OSes (because the lack of support from Flash itself), Windows XP and Windows Vista and that vCenter Server removes the support for IBM DB2 as the vCenter Server database.

VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 2 introduces in this release the following new features:

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Release: Red Hat Satellite 6

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Satellite is Red Hat’s server life-cycle management based on the community project Spacewalk, it basically provides provision, patch, configuration and subscription management across Red Hat’s ecosystem.

Yesterday the Raleigh company announced the general availability of Red Hat Satellite 6 with an extended support for both Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and a new integration with Puppet Forge and GIT.

With this release Red Hat is obviously trying to better integrate Satellite in its Open Hybrid Cloud portfolio, stressing, for example, the ability to provision on bare metal, virtualized infrastructure, and on public or private clouds.

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Release: Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.3.16

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Oracle has released a new version of its virtualization platform VM Virtualbox. Version 4.3.16 is considered a maintenance release which can be installed on top of version 4.3. The update improves stability and fixes regressions.

Some of the changes as detailed in the changelog:

  • Fixed restoring 32-bit FPU state on 64-bit capable VMs and restoring guest FPU in raw-mode VMs
  • Fixed a rare crash for certain VHD images from other products
  • Improved IPv6 support when bridging to a wireless interface

Release: VMware Fusion 7

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Following the technology preview announced in May VMware has released version 7 of its desktop virtualization platform for OS X: Fusion.

This new release, that comes in the normal and Pro flavours, introduces the extended support for OS X 10.10 Yosemite that will be released this fall, in order to natively leverage all its new features alongside with an all new set of optimizations for the last generation of Macs computer.

Among the new features introduced from this release we can list:

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VMworld 2014 Wrap-Up: The open source side

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As we mentioned last week, VMware used the stage of VMworld 2014 to “remind” its audience how deeply the company is involved in the open source community.

The company took this opportunity to announce its OpenStack distribution, named VMware Integrated OpenStack, alongside with the new Gold Level Membership in the Open Compute Project.

To quickly recall, the Open Compute Project was launched by Facebook in 2011 and its mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing and rely on a foundation that believes in openly sharing ideas, specifications and all the other intellectual properties.

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Nutanix raises $140 million in Series E funding

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Nutanix, provider of web-scale IT infrastructure to medium and large enterprises with its software-driven Virtual Computing Platform, announced to have raised $140 million in a Series E funding over a $2 billion valuation, the funding round was lead by two Boston-based public market investors with over $3 trillion in combined assets under management.

This round brings the company’s total venture capital investment to $312 millions.

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VMworld 2014 Wrap-Up: End User Computing Announcements

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The first day at VMworld 2014 was all about the new vCloud Air catalog and VMware’s “we are all open source folks” strategy but progressing in the event has also emerged some room for the End User Computing BU to make some announcements.

  • VMware Workspace Suite: A new integrated platform that aims to unify the management of mobile devices, desktops, applications and data. In other words this suite combines Horizon 6 Enterprise, Workspace Portal and the newly acquired AirWatch Mobility Management Suite and Secure Content Locker in order to provide a comprehensive and (we hope) integrated enterprise BYOD solution. The suite is available immediately

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Red Hat’s CTO resigns

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On August 27 Red Hat disclosed that Brian Stevens, the company CTO, has resigned after over 12 years of service, an unexpected news that drew open-source community attention on the the next future of the Raleigh company.

In his career in Red Hat, Brian Stevens has been in charge as Corporate CTO while maintaining a strong engineering involvement into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat has been extremely telegraphic, announcing the step down of Stevens as CTO in the company and that Paul Cormier, President of products and technologies at Red Hat, is going to take over as CTO until a substitute is found.

The news catches everyone unprepared but we can argue that is the result of the changes that Red Hat is planning in its go to market strategy, a process that partially began with the hiring of the former Gartner analyst, Alessandro Perilli as General Manager of the Open Hybrid Cloud program.

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Release: VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.8 and vSphere Data Protection 5.8

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Among the announcements made today at the VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, there are two new releases. VMware disclosed the delivery of new version of its Disaster Recovery and Backup products: VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.8 and vSphere Data Protection 5.8.

VMware vCentre Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.8 aims to deliver next-generation disaster recovery capabilities for vSphere environments.

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