Year: 2016

Encryption of virtual machines is something that has been requested for years by the security community. VMware continued to postpone its implementation due to the negative operational impact that many solutions proved to have, until now. With vSphere 6.5 VMware introduced an agnostic, policy driven VM Encryption feature claiming that the impact on I/O performance is very minimal.
To prove that VMware published a 16 pages Performance Study which presents the results of several I/O experiments aimed to quantify CPU cost and I/O throughput and latency when enabling a VM with encryption.

The paper contains the following sections:

Executive Summary

• Introduction
• VM Encryption Overview
• Design
• Key Management
• Performance Study
• Experimental Setup
• Server Hardware
• Server Storage
• Workload and Virtual Machine Configuration
• Metrics
• Server Software Configuration
• Results
• I/O Performance
• VM Provisioning Operations
• Conclusion
• References

In September 2012 Dell announced to have completed the acquisition of Quest Software, a Californian company with an history in systems management, security, business intelligence and, falling back in our own area of interest, virtualization, cloud automation and backup & recovery.
Today, after 3 years, Quest is announcing its renewed independency thanks to a new acquisition by Francisco Partners and Elliott Management Corporation.

Dell is currently in the spotlight due to its acquisition of EMC Corporation, owner (among others) of VMware and Pivotal.

Jeff Hawn, chairman and CEO said:

As companies continue to embrace business transformation, particularly through adopting cloud-centric technology models, they need a trusted partner through this critical journey. In relaunching Quest, our products will be purpose-built and backed by a level of support and services that will help our customers and partners succeed. We’ll take the best of what made Quest a market maker for the past 30 years and infuse a renewed focus on security and cloud.

Citrix announced its financial results for third quarter 2016.

The revenues for the second quarter were $841 million for an increase of 3% compared to Q3 2015.

Net income was $132 million and non-GAAP operating income was $208 million, an increase compared to $168 million for Q3 2015.

Examining the results in contrast with the same quarter 2015:

• Product and license revenue remained flat;
• Software as a service revenue increased 9 percent;
• Revenue from license updates and maintenance increased 5 percent;
• Professional services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, product training and certification, decreased 19 percent;
• Net revenue increased in the Americas region by 8 percent, decreased 4 percent in the EMEA region and increased in the Pacific region by less of 1 percent;
• Deferred revenue totaled $1.6 billion as of September 30, 2016, compared to $1.5 billion as of September 30, 2015, an increase of 7 percent;
• GAAP operating margin was 18 percent; Non-GAAP operating margin was 30 percent;
• Quarterly cash flow from operations of $288 million, up 11 percent year-over-year.

2016 edition of VMworld US has been quite turbulent, on the other hand during VMworld Europe, happening these days in Barcelona, the company announced a few more products for the joy of its loyal audience.

vSphere 6.5 announced yesterday, for instance, is a release focused on addressing three main challenges: simplify the user experience, integrate security capabilities and support traditional and new generation applications side by side.

To do that this dotted release introduces:

• A newly optimised vCenter Server Appliance, with a fully integrated vSphere Update Manager, file-based backup and recovery, native VCSA high availability and a brand new HTML5-based vSphere Client plus a set of REST-based APIs for VM Management. To speedup the migration from “traditional” Windows deployments VMware also provide a brand new vCenter Server Appliance Migration tool.
• A series of security features such: VM-level disk encryption, encrypted vMotion, secure boot model for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system and enhanced audit-quality logging capabilities that collect more information about user actions.
• vSphere Integrated Containers now shipped with vSphere bundles.

Alongside vSphere VMware also announced Virtual SAN 6.5, the new dotted release of its software-defined storage offering that enables pooling of storage capabilities within exsisting servers.
Key new features are:

• Virtual SAN iSCSI Service
• 2-Node Direct Connect
  • Witness Traffic Separation for ROBO
• 512e drive support

Log Insight is a log aggregation, management and analisys tool, that VMware first introduced in 2013 and now is usually compared with Splunk.

Yesterday VMware announced Log Insight’s new major release 4.0, scheduled for a vague “later this year”.
According to VMware’s announcement, this release is focused on delivering a brand new user interface based on Clarity standard, enhanced alert management capabilities, with a centralised interface and historical views, and better integration with vSphere, vRealize, and other VMware products.

In detail the new functionalities introduced by vRealize Log Insight 4.0 are:

New Server Capabilities

• New Clarity UI
• vSphere 6.5 compatibility
• New Admin Alerts Management UI
• FIPS-compliant deployment
• Octet-framing over TCP
• Public Installer APIs

Improved Agent Capabilities

• Agent Auto-Update

New General UI Items

• DeviceID to name Aliasing
• New “field does not exist” filter
• New gauge chart
• New “blur” on session timeout

New Tech Preview Features

• Agent scripted-input
• vIDM SSO Support

Yesterday Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server 2016 which the company defines as a cloud-ready OS.

Beside fancy definitions, one of the most relevant perks of this release is that enables windows users to consume container virtualization technologies through two different technologies: Windows Server Containers & Hyper-V Containers.

The first allowed Docker Engine to be ported on windows, where has been in technical preview for over a year.
As a consequence Docker and Microsoft announced a commercial partnership during the Ignite, but, despite this relationship, Docker Engine is not an integral part of Windows Server setup, nor Windows Update. Though a PowerShell script is at your disposal to make the magic happen.

Hyper-V Containers comes from Microsoft’s strategy to support containers within its pre-existing hypervisor ecosystem, a similar (but not identical from a technology standpoint) approach to VMware’s vSphere Integrated Containers. Using Microsoft’s own definition:

multiple container instances can run concurrently on a host; however, each container runs inside of a special virtual machine. This provides kernel level isolation between each Hyper-V container and the container host

You can give a peek downloading Windows Server 2016 Evaluation from this link.

During Oracle OpenWorld 2016 the company released version 3.4.2 of its enterprise virtualization solution.

Oracle VM is available for both x86 and SPARC based processor architectures and uses the Xen hypervisor technology, supporting Windows, Linux and Oracle Solaris guests.

Some of the changes and new features introduced with version 3.4.2:

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Today was the last day of VMware’s flagship conference VMworld in Las Vegas, an highly controversial edition which left a good chunk of the audience disoriented if not properly disappointed.

The debate started during Day 1 Keynote and then proliferated over Twitter in various strands. Part of the audience commented that the message delivered during the keynote suggests developers and cloud-native applications (delegated to Day 2 Keynote) as second-class citizens in VMware’s world.

Others complained that the announcements of VMware Cloud Foundation and Cross-Cloud Services (moreover in technical preview) are too few and too late to amend the One Cloud mantra VMware has drummed for an entire year.

Anyway each of these (legit) comments has been addressed by the vast legion of VMware’s aficionados and you can enjoy the discussion on Twitter with the hashtag #VMworld and form your own opinion.

Criticism hasn’t ruined the party and here is a compendium of the announcements that followed:

• A further development of VMware Integrated Containers with the addition of a self-service portal (Admiral) and a registry (Harbor)
• VMware Integrate OpenStack 3, based on OpenStack Mitaka release
• A new release of VMware vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager
• A new set of disaster recovery offerings for vCloud Air: VMware vCloud Availability
• Dotted releases for: Workstation 12.5 Player, Workstation 12.5 Pro, Fusion 8.5, Fusion 8.5 Pro
• Enhancements in Blast and new validated appliances for Horizon Air: VMware Horizon

Ansible is one of the four main players in the automation market, younger then the well known Chef and Puppet, has been launched in 2013 in Durham, N.C. and acquired last October by Red Hat.
Ansible itself is especially popular within the developers’ community, thanks to its simplicity and agentless nature while Ansible Tower is its control visual dashboard providing centralisation, role-based access control, job scheduling and graphical inventory management.
At the end of July Ansible launched release 3 of Ansible Tower under the name of Ansible Tower by Red Hat.

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Yesterday IBM announced its results for Q2 2016.

If we compare with the same quarter in 2015 earnings per share, from continuing operations, decreased 22%. Net income, from continuing operations, decreased 24%.
Consolidated diluted earnings per share down 20% YoY and operating (non-GAAP) diluted earnings per share, from continuing operations, decreased 21%.
These results reflect the continuous shrinking of IBM’s server hardware and z Systems business but, considering investors’ reaction, emerging business such Cognitive Solutions (aka Watson) and cloud (aka BlueMix/Softlayer) are enough to keep Big Blue an appealing investment.

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