virtualization.info Editors

Citrix today announced that its has completed its acquisition of Sanbolic. Sanbolic which has a product called Sanbolic Scale-Out Platform which can be seen as an aggregation of both local storage plus legacy SAN storage (EMC, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems) as well as cloud storage (Amazon Web Services) managed as a single resource by software using a single management console as described in more detail in this article published on virtualization.info in May last year.

The Sanbolic team will join the Citrix organization immediately. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Two years ago, Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) started a survey asking participants to provide more insight in the non-technical issues related to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Server Based Computing (SBC) deployments. The outcome of the survey which was filled-in by over 1000 people was detailed in a paper later on. Last year the project continued with a new survey for 2014.

For this year, the survey wants to check how the industry has changed compared to the last years. The questions of this survey are both functional and technical and range from “What are the most important design goals set for this environment”, to “How are the VM’s configured?”. The survey will be closed February 15th this year.

Click here to fill out the Project Virtual Reality Check “State of the VDI and SBC union 2015” survey.

VMware has released a reviewers guide for its End User Computing solution Horizon version 5. The paper titled: "VMware Mirage 5.0 Reviewer’s Guide" contains 209 pages and allows readers to evaluate the VMware Mirage solution which provides a management solution for physical desktops, virtual desktops and mobile devices.

The guide covers what VMware Mirage is, its key features, packaging and licensing, components and architectures, installation and configuration and provides hands-on evaluation excersises.

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As we know IBM and Red Hat have a story of collaboration behind its back and they have been working lately together on various projects, the latest announcement they made together last December was about a new collaboration to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to IBM’s Power systems through Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Power.

Last year IBM declared its commitment to invest $1 billion in Linux and open source technologies for Power Systems, and it has accomplished with the next – generation Power Systems server integrating the POWER8 processor, designed for Big Data which allows to deliver the highest level of performance.

This announcement means that users can take advantage of IBM’s next-generation Power Systemes technology and the features of Red Hat Virtualization, which will enable enterprises to build a flexible infrastructure based on open source hardware and software solutions.

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Microsoft has released a paper titled:"Large scale Virtual Desktop Infrastructure deployment using Windows Server 2012 R2 with Storage Tiers and Data Deduplication". The paper which contains 49 pages explains a large-scale Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment with virtual machines based on Hyper-V.

The virtual disks are deployed on a Scale-Out File Server cluster running Window Server 2012 R2.By using a combination of the Storage Spaces and Data Deduplication features in Windows Server 2012 R2, a highly resilient solution with good performance and high savings rates for storage can be delivered.

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I’m thrilled to announce that I recently accepted a position in Red Hat as Cloud Management Strategy Director. I joined the Strategy Team led by Alessandro Perilli in Red Hat’s Management Business Unit.

When Alessandro left virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info at the end of 2010 to join Gartner, I inherited the editorial control and we didn’t have the possibility to work together for the next 4 years. It’s great to finally have that chance.
This role will give me a great opportunity to apply what my customers taught me over the past 10 years to help shaping better solutions to real world problems.

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VMware has released version 5.2 of its centralized image management solution for Windows desktops: Mirage. Version 5.2 is the follow-up of version 5.1 which was released in September this year.

VMware Mirage is also part of the Horizon FLEX offering, VMware’s end user computing suite that complements View, the company’s VDI product.

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After announcing vRealize Log Insight 2.5 in October this year, VMware today released the version to its customers. Log Insight is a log aggregation, management and analisys tool, and version 2.5 is the follow up of version 2.0 which was released in May this year.

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VMware has released version 6.0 of its monitoring tool vRealize Operations Manager. vRealize Operations Manager provides performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Its provided in a Standard, Advanced and Enterprise edition.

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In August this year, VMware acquired CloudVolumes, a company providing an application containerization solution, similar to what Docker is currently providing. Actually buying the CloudVolumes solution was quite confusing, since VMware already had Mirage and ThinApp available.

In a nutshell, VMware explains that the three products can be used complementary to each other, to further understand how this work, the following blogpost by Tim Arenz, senior consultant for EUC at VMware gives a good overview of the possiblities: "CloudVolumes, Mirage and ThinApp: when to use what?"

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