Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
virtualization.info Editors Docker today announced the release of version 1.0 of its container virtualization solution.
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. Docker uses LinuX Containers (LXC) running in the host OS allowing you to share the resouces available to the host.
Cisco has released a paper titled: "FlexPod Datacenter with Citrix XenDesktop 7.1 and XenServer 6.2 SP1". The paper which is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) contains 401 pages and provides a reference architecture for a 2000 set Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) using Citrix XenDesktop 7.1 on Cisco UCS B200-M3 server blades with NetApp FAS 3250 and the Citrix XenServer 6.2 SP1 hypervisor platform.
VMware’s former CTO of Storage and end user computing divisions, Scott Davis, just joined Infinio, a start-up company based in Cambridge, Mass., the company announced that Scott Davis joined them with the same role as Chief Technology Officer.
Founded 2011 and backed up by top-tier investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Osage University Partners, Infinio is focused on storage acceleration and offers downloadable storage performance for virtualized environments.
5nine today announced that it released an updated version of its Cloud Security product which now includes the Anti-Virus engine of Kaspersky.
Cloud Security for Hyper-V is a solution which helps to ensure security and compliance for Hyper-V environments. It provides agentless anti-virus, compliance enforcement and traffic control/VM isolation. Management can be done using a Centralized Management Console or by using a plugin into System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). The product supports Windows 8.x with Hyper-V enabled, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) released at May 30 2014 the ‘AWS Management Portal for vCenter‘. This free plug-in for vCenter allows management of virtual machines and virtual networks running on Amazon Web Service from the vSphere Client.
AWS Management Portal also allows to import a vSphere virtual machine to AWS. The VMware virtual machine needs to be shutdown to perform a conversion to the Amazon .AMI format (used by the Xen based hypervisor) as well as the upload to an Amazon datacenter.
The Management Portal plug-in also offers self-service access to AWS.
A single console now provides management of both VMware on-premises infrastructures as well as Amazon public clouds. This is not a comprehensive tool for creating and managing AWS resources. The management portal enables vCenter users to get started quickly with basic tasks, such as creating a VPC and subnet, and launching an EC2 instance. To complete more advanced tasks, users must use the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI.
Today Zerto released Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) 3.5. Virtual Replication does per VM replication and recovery orchestration and is targeted at enterprises and service providers using VMware vSphere. Especially in the US a growing number of service providers use Zerto VR to offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to their customers.
Zerto partners with Cisco. Cisco is using ZVR in their blueprints for service providers. Cisco customers can use these blueprints to offer DRaaS services to their customers to enhance their business model.
New major features in ZVR 3.5 are:
This release also includes fixes.
In December last year, Microsoft released version 2.0 of its User Environment Management solution called User Experience Virtualization (UE-V). The solution is delivered as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) which is available for Microsoft customers which use a Software Assurance subscription. Now Microsoft has announced a beta for the upcoming 2.1 version of the UE-V product. Once released UE-V will ship with an upcoming new version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP)
Version 2.1 will provide the following new features:
While VDI solutions are starting to attract a wider audience in the enterprises, the challenge is moved to provide 3D graphics-enabled virtual desktops.
Yesterday NVIDIA launched its NVIDIA GRID Test Drive, available now for Windows in North America, with Asia Pacific and European deployments available soon, VMware on its side published two videos that show Horizon suite’s ability to provide Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration (vSGA) and Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA) solutions.
To be clear with a vSGA solution you are sharing server-side GPU resources (from one or more video cards) through multiple virtual machines, with a vDGA solution you are dedicating a specific video card or GPU to a specific VM via DirectPath I/O.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3VDWqr3DfA#t=114[/youtube]
This week VMware has provided access to the Technology Preview 2014 of its desktop virtualization platforms: Workstation 11 and Fusion 7.
The main highlights of this preview on both platforms are:
After releasing a beta version in March this year, VMware today announced the release of version 2 of its vCenter Log Insight. vCenter Log Insight is VMware’s product for log aggregation, management and analysis. Introduced in June 2013, Log Insight is kept updated with a fast pace in order to be competitive on this market where Splunk, which provides similar functionalities, is still considered the leader.