virtualization.info Editors

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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Based on the recent releases of Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6, Citrix has updated its design guidance called the "Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook 7.x". The handbook which contains 202 pages provides methodology, experience and best practices used by Citrix Consulting during thousands of virtualization projects.

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VMware has announced the release of version 2.5 of its log aggregation, management and analysis product Log Insight. This version will be the follow up of version 2.0 which was released in May this year. Starting with version 2.5 the product will be rebranded to vRealize Log Insight in line with the recently announced changes of other management products. VMware expects to release version 2.5 by the end of 2014.

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Oracle has released a new version of its virtualization platform VM Virtualbox. Version 4.3.18 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:

• Memory leak fixed in Guest Control
• Fixed a crash on Linux hosts with older Linux kernels when using USB
• Properly parse port forwarding rules to allow UDP rules
• Some Windows 10 tweaks
• Fixed more startup problems on certain Windows hosts due to conflicts with anti-virus software

VMware has released a paper titled: "Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 5.5". The Paper which contains 33 pages demonstrates that large Microsoft SQL Server databases can achieve great performance and fully utilize current-generation server and storage technology using VMware vSphere 5.5.

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VMware has released a paper titled: "Microsoft Exchange Server Performance on VMware Virtual SAN". The paper which contains 9 pages shows the results of performance tests of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 running on Virtual SAN clusters.

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Microsoft has announced that it will support for Docker in its next version of Windows Server. Docker which provides a so called container virtualization solution currently receives a lot of support from developers using the technology to deploy their software. Docker provides so called container virtualization, allowing an application and its dependencies to run as an isolated process inside a virtual environment. This environment is then portable from local computers to backend infrastructure and cloud.

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Microsoft has released a paper titled:"Achieving Over 1-Million IOPS from Hyper-V VMs in a Scale-Out File Server Cluster Using Windows Server 2012 R2". The paper which contains 24 pages demonstrates the high-performance storage and virtualization capabilities for a Hyper-V virtualized application using the Scale-Out File Server platform in Windows Server 2012 R2.

The platform uses industry standard servers, disks, and JBOD enclosures. With the block storage made available through Storage Spaces combined with the Scale-Out File Server in a failover cluster, Microsoft can deliver extremely high levels of storage performance and resiliency similar to a traditional SAN using Microsoft Storage Solution and inexpensive shared Direct Attached Storage.

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VMworld Europe 2014 in Barcelona has seen Pat Gelsinger (VMware CEO), Bill Fathers (EVP and GM, Hybrid Cloud Services Business Unit) and Sanjay Poonen (EVP and GM, End-User Computing) in Tuesday’s general sessions, Carl Eschenbach (President) and Ben Fathi (CTO) on stage today.

A lot of focus was on the consolidation and enrichment around vCloud Air service base, presented at VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, but the announcements covered several areas and can be summarized as follows:

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Microsoft has released version 3.0 of its converter tool from the VMware platform to Hyper-V and Windows Azure, the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC). Version 3.0 is the follow-up of version 2.0 which was released in April this year.

New in this version is that the MVMC is now also able to do a Physical to Virtual (P2V) migration of machines running Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista or above.

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