Paper: What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.5 Networking

VMware vSpere 5.5 was released in September 2013 and introduced a couple of improvements to the networking capabilities of the vSphere platform.

These enhancements could be resumed as follows:

  • More hashing algorithms for link aggregation
  • More link aggregation groups
  • Traffic-filtering support
  • Differentiated Service Code Point (DSCP) marking support
  • Improved host-level packet-capture tool
  • Improved single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) support
  • 40GB network adapter support

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VMware announces Horizon 6, adding Server Based Computing as a solution

VMware today announced the release of version 6 of its end user computing suite: Horizon.

Starting with this version VMware not only provides a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution based on View, but now also provides a Server Based Computing (SBC) solution leveraging Remote Desktop Services (RDS) from Microsoft. With the addition of SBC, VMware is now capable of publishing applications, where the application runs on a server which is shared with other users at the same time.

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VMware announces Q1 vExperts 2014

VMware vExpert is the program, started in 2009, that “rewards” the individuals who has been recognized as active contributors of the community that rotates around the VMware ecosystem.

The program provides three possible paths: Evangelist, Customer and VPN (VMware Partner Network) in order to include all the bloggers, book authors, speakers, tool developers, etc. who wish to apply for this annual award.

Yesterday VMware announced the first round of 2014 vExperts through a post on the VMTN blog and I would like to congratulate with Kenneth, Marcel and, in for the first time, myself for being on this list (.. and, of course, with all of those who are there with us).

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Red Hat releases beta of Enterprise Virtualization version 3.4

Red Hat has released a beta for an upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform version 3.4. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) is Red Hats virtualization platform based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 Beta is available immediately to existing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers.

New features in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 Beta include:

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Release: Citrix XenApp 7.5 and XenDesktop 7.5

In January Citrix announced the upcoming 7.5 version of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product XenDesktop and desktop and virtualization product XenApp. At that time especially the fact that the XenApp product returned since it was integrated in XenDesktop when version 7.1 was released. The reason for this was the integration of both platforms to the Flexcast Management Architecture (FMA) platform, providing better integration between the XenApp and XenDesktop products.

Transforming the feature set from XenApp 6.5 to the XenDesktop 7.1 caused a lot of features in the XenApp product to disappear, as noted by Citrix CTP Alexander Ervik Johnsen en Brian Madden on his website. Based on these articles, we can conclude that bringing back the XenApp product name is more marketing related than technical.

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Release: Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.3.10

Oracle has released a new version of its virtualization platform VM Virtualbox. Version 4.3.10 is considered a maintenance release which improves stability and add some new experimental features.

Some of the changes as detailed in the changelog:

  • Experimental HID LEDs synchronization for Windows and Mac OS X hosts: fixed keyboard re-synchronization if the feature is disabled
  • Fixed a crash of the VirtualBox Manager when re-starting guest export
  • Windows installer: make the –silent parameter work again
  • Install correctly on Ubuntu guest systems with a /usr/lib64 directory

Midokura and Cumulus Networks announce partnership

Midokura and Cumulus Networkd announced a partnership preparing an offer for customers to manage workloads on virtual and non virtualized infrastructure, besides the cooperation between the two companies will allow its users the flexibility to adopt different industry standard networking hardware, networking operating systems and applications according to customer’s needs.
Japanese startup Midokura, focused on network virtualization and based in San Francisco and Cumulus Networks a company designs and sells a Linux-based operating system for industry standard network switches to deliver networking solutions for large datacenter, cloud computing and enterprise environments and which is a VMware partner that supports NSX. The partnership plans to offer a joint technology solution between Q2 and Q3 2014.

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