virtualization.info Editors

Project VRC, an ititiative started by LogIn Consultants and PQR, has released a new Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) whitepaper titled:”Phase VII – Impact of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 5.0, Optimizations and Best Practices“. The paper written bij Ryan Bijkerk and Ment van der Plas contains 64 pages and describes the the impact on performance and capacity of using Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) version 5 on hosted desktop environments.

For measuring the different scenario’s the Login VSI benchmarking tool was used.

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Microsoft has released Update Rollup (UR) 4 for its System Center Suite of products. The update rollup can be installed on top of System Center 2012 R2 products and is a cumulative update.

Update Rollup 4 consists of several downloads per product, the following products are affected:

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Zerto, provider of Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) has announced that its product will also support the Hyper-V virtualization platform from Microsoft. Virtual Replication does per VM replication and recovery orchestration and is targeted at enterprises and service providers.

The addition of Microsoft Hyper-V to the list of hypervisors supported by Zerto Virtual Replication is the first step in the realization of a Cloud Fabric unveiled by Zerto earlier this year. Zerto Cloud Fabric enables enterprises to utilize any type of workload on any hypervisor or any cloud, regardless of underlying infrastructure

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Microsoft has released a paper titled:”Windows Server Technical Preview Step-by-Step Guide: Storage Quality of Service“. The paper which contains 16 pages covers a new Windows Server technology which became available with the Technical Preview of the next version of Windows Server.

Storage Quality of Service (Storage QoS) in Windows Server Technical Preview provides a way to centrally monitor and manage storage performance for virtual machines using Hyper-V and the Scale-Out File Server roles. The feature automatically improves storage resource fairness between multiple virtual machines using the same file server cluster and allows specific Minimum and Maximum performance goals to be configured in units of normalized IOPs.

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VMware has released a paper titled: “VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.1 – Reference Architecture“.

The paper which contains 35 pages provide a reference architecture for setting up vCloud Automation Center 6.1, vCloud Application Services 6.1 and IT Business Management Standard Edition 1.1. The paper covers deployment topologies, hardware specifications, interoperability and scalability for the VMware components in scope.

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On October 22, Citrix announced its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2014, ended September 30, 2014.

The revenues for the third quarter were $759 million for an increase of 6% compared to Q3 2013 and 1% of decrease in performance compared to Q2 2014.

Net income was $48 million and non-GAAP operating income was $125 million, respectively a decrease of 38% and of 5% that reflect the charge related to a previously disclosed patent lawsuit as well as several restructuring costs that the company faced to better align its strategy.

Cash flows were $164 million compared with $223 million for the third quarter 2013.

On October 21, VMware released the financial results for the third quarter of 2014.

The revenues for the third quarter were $1.53 billion for an increase of 18% compared to Q3 2013 and 1% in performance compared to Q2 2014.

Operating income was $242 million and non-GAAP operating income was $460 million, respectively a decrease of 16% and an increase of 5% reflecting the impact of AirWatch acquisition.

Cash flows were $7.09 billion and unearned revenues were $4.37 billion as of September 30, 2014.

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Citrix has released a paper titled: “Reference Architecture: Director and EdgeSight“. The paper which contains 32 pages contains a reference architecture for setting up Citrix Director and Citrix Edgesight.

Citrix Director is a visualization aggregation point for metering of the Citrix User Experience brought by a culmination of Citrix virtualization technologies. Citrix EdgeSight provides visibility into the network facet of the end-to-end communication between the Receiver and the XenDesktop environment(s). Together they provide a total solution capable of troubleshooting issues around desktops and applications running on top of Citrix Solutions.

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Cisco has released a paper titled: “Cisco UCS C240-M3 Rack Server with NVIDIA GRID GPU cards on Citrix XenServer 6.2 and XenDesktop 7.5“.

The paper which contains 38 pages will help partners and customers integrate NVIDIA GRID graphics processor cards with Cisco UCS C240 M3 rack servers on Citrix XenServer 6.2 SP1 and Citrix XenDesktop 7.5 in both pass through and virtual graphics processing unit (vGPU) modes.

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In a knowledge base article titled: “Security considerations and disallowing inter-Virtual Machine Transparent Page Sharing (2080735)” published on October 16th, VMware states that it will disable the Transparant Page Sharing functionality by default in future updates and the next version of ESXi.

The decision to do so, is based on a recent academic research which levegad TPS to gain unauthorized access to data. The outcome of the research can be found in the following document: “Additional Transparent Page Sharing management capabilities in ESXi 5.5 patch October 16, 2014 and ESXi 5.1 and 5.0 patches in Q4, 2014 (2091682)“

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