Paper: VMware Virtual SAN Design and Sizing Guide for Horizon View Virtual Desktop Infrastructures

VMware has released a paper titled:"VMware Virtual SAN Design and Sizing Guide for Horizon View Virtual Desktop Infrastructures". The paper which contains 16 pages focuses on the definitions, sizing guidelines, and characteristics of the Virtual SAN distributed datastore for Horizon View virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI).

Read more

Citrix releases Tech Preview of next version of XenServer

Citrix has released a technical preview of XenServer codenamed Creedence the next major version of XenServer, which is now at version 6.2. When released this version will probably be version 6.5 or 7. Citrix XenServer is based on the XenServer code from the XenServer open source project. The technical preview is binary compatible with the Alpha 4 release of XenServer.

The Creedence version provides the following new features:

Read more

Paper: Virtualization Fabric Design Considerations Guide

Microsoft has released a paper titled:"Virtualization Fabric Design Considerations Guide". The paper which contains 53 pages helps you to understand how to design a virtualization fabric that is able to host many virtual machines in your organization. The paper is intended for Information technology (IT) professionals within medium to large organizations who are responsible for designing a virtualization fabric that supports many virtual machines.

Read more

Gartner releases its 2014 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure

Gartner has released its annual Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, again positioning VMware and Microsoft in the leaders Quadrant. Leaders in this market have a clear strategy and road map for their offerings, understand virtualization’s role in infrastructure and operations transformation, and have a clear vision with respect to cloud computing. The Magic Quadrant has been written by Gartner Analysts: Thomas J. Bittman, Mark A. Margevicius and Philip Dawson.

Read more

Release: Oracle VM 3.3

Oracle has released version 3.3 of its enterprise virtualizatoin solution. The virtualization solution is available for both x86 and SPARC based processor architectures and uses the Xen hypervisor technology, supporting Windows, Linux and Oracle Solaris guests.

Oracle VM consists of 2 main components, the Oracle VM Manager, which is a web based console used to manage Oracle VM Servers, which is a server running a version of the Xen hypervisor containing a VM agent which communicates with VM Manager.

Read more

VMware releases public beta of Virtual Volumes

Besides releasing the public beta 2 for vSphere 6.0 today, VMware also released a beta for Virtual Volumes (VVOLs).

Virtual Volumes allows a Virtual Machine and its disk to become a unit of storage management for a storage system by encapsulating virtual disks and virtual machine files. These files are stored natively on the storage system. VVOLs uses the vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) which makes the storage system aware of the virtual volumes and how they relate to the virtual machines. This allows for certain operations like snapshots and clones to be offloaded to the storage systems for better performance. For in-band communication with Virtual Volumes storage systems, vSphere continues to use standard SCSI and NFS protocols.

Read more

VMware announces vSphere 6.0 Public Beta

Today VMware opened the Public Beta Program for the upcoming vSphere 6.0.
This Beta 2, that comes after a relatively small private Beta 1, gives the possibility to virtually any customer to test the next release of VMware’s flagship product, gaining some competitive advantages on its side and providing precious feedbacks to the vSphere Team.

Read more

Release: 5nine Manager 5.0 for Hyper-V

5nine has released version 5.0 of its Microsoft hypervisor management solution 5nine Manager. 5nine Manager is capable of managing multiple versions of Microsoft Hyper-V hosts, and also provdes an agentless antivirus plugin for full and incremental VM and host scans. Besides that it provides features like Hyper-V logs, Application logs, an integrated Best Practices Analyzer, the ability to copy Hyper-V settings between hosts and a File Manager.

Read more

Puppet Labs raises $40 million in funding round

Puppet Labs, provider of IT automation software has raised $40 in a new funding round from existing investors Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Peak Partners, True Ventures and VMware. This round brings the company’s total venture capital investment to $86 million since June 2009.

Puppet Labs also announced it has hired Mukesh Sharma as vice president of sales for the EMEA region. Sharma comes from Canopy, a cloud service provider which is a joint venture between Atos, EMC and VMware where he was Chief Operating Officer (COO).