Year: 2014

I’m not a huge fan of converged infrastructure solutions but a lot of companies love the simplicity and the initial agility of such implementations, that has led to the relative success of solutions like VCE vBlock and FlexPod.

The hyper-converged systems aim to provide the same advantages, like guaranteed performance and hardware compatibility, a single point of contact for the support, etc, but in a smaller piece of hardware and with an higher level of automation.

Today at VMworld 2014 VMware announced EVO:RAIL a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCIA) that allows VMware’s OEM partners (initially Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, NetOne and SuperMicro) to enter in the same market of vendors like Nutanix and SimpliVity.

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This week Citrix announced the upcoming 7.6 version of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product XenDesktop and desktop and virtualization product XenApp.

XenApp product returned in version 7.5 since it was integrated in XenDesktop when version 7.1 was released. Both platforms are built upon the third-generation Flexcast Management Architecture (FMA) platform, and are designed to be deployed in on-premise or hybrid environments.

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Application containerization is one of the hot topics of 2014, the idea of abstracting applications from the underlying OSes is intriguing and suggests a more simple and agile way to distribute and manage business applications than the per-VM model.

Docker is a good representative of this technology, started in March 2013 is  now supported by major technology and service providers like Canonical, Google Cloud Platform and Red Hat.

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Today Parallels announced the availability of version 10 of its desktop virtualization platform for Mac: Parallels Desktop.

The new release obviously includes the support for OS X 10.10 Yosemite, better performances and battery life improvements when running on a laptop.
Parallels Desktop 10, also released in its Enterprise edition, will tighten the integration between Yosemite and the Windows applications running in the VMs, supporting iCloud Drive, iMessages and SMS text sharing directly from Windows OSes, the control of virtual machines from Spotlight preview and Finder QuickLook.

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The Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open source software library for Linux User Space applications that enables higher levels of packet processing throughput, that gives application developers the ability to address compute and I/O intensive workloads, typically found in Telecom and networking use cases, on general purpose, Intel architecture-based processors, without the need of dedicated hardware.

This paper, titled Intel Data Plane Development Kit (Intel DPDK) with VMware vSphere, describes the solution, result of a VMware and Intel partnership aimed to migrate legacy solutions into virtualized, cloud-ready, data centers.

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Teradici is the developer of the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) remote desktop protocol, which is leveraged in several VDI solutions and provided with Teradici hardware solutions which are OEM’ed by several vendors. Teradici announced, at SIGGRAPH, the release of Teradici PCoIP Workstation Access Software, in a collaboration with Dell which propose a new software for Dell Precision workstations which allows instant access to remote computing.

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Veeam released Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V, a free tool for monitoring and management of Microsoft Hyper-V.
You all know Windows Task Manager, the system monitor and startup – task manager included with Microsoft Windows, used by system administrators to start the troubleshooting of various issues that could appear on a server.

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Login VSI has released version 4.1 of its vendor independent Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) benchmarking utility. Version 4.1 is the follow up of version 4.0 which was released in May 2013.

Login VSI measures the performance and scalability of Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) and Server Based Computing (SBC) environments by simulating unique user workloads. Eventually developed as a free tool by Login Consultants to benchmark systems for use with Project Virtual Reality Check, Login VSI evolved into a company of its own and has become a commonly used benchmarking tool used by different vendors nowadays. Login VSI is provided for free as an Express Edition, there is also a Pro edition which is supported by Login VSI.

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Horizon Mirage is VMware’s centralized image management for Windows desktops with backup and OS migration capabilities, the product uses a layering technology to segment OS, applications and user personalizations into isolated containers allowing administrators to separately manage hardware and each layer of software.

Horizon Mirage is build on the technology which VMware acquired when it acquired Wanova in 2012 and later integrated this into Horizon product suite containing the end-user computing products.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFDSa2XbZHg[/youtube]

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