virtualization.info Editors

Microsoft has released another free eBook titled: "Microsoft System Center: Network Virtualization and Cloud Computing". The Book which is written by Nader Benmessaoud, CJ Williams, and Uma Mahesh Mudigonda and Mitch Tulloch as a series editor and contains 94 pages.

This brief book identifies some key usage and deployment scenarios for cloud computing to provide some deep technical background on the Microsoft Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution, enabling IT professionals to quickly learn the internals of HNV, how it works from end to end, and where and how it should be used.

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In december 2010, Alessandro Perilli founder of both virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info announced his transfer to research firm Gartner, becoming research director covering cloud computing, virtualization and datacenter technologies in the IT Professionals research team.

At the end of 2013, Alessandro caused some commotion in the OpenStack community by publishing several articles on his blog criticizing OpenStack (What I saw at the OpenStack Summit and Why vendors can’t sell OpenStack to enterprises). Alessandro’s critical comments haven’t been unnoticed by the OpenStack community, causing Red Hat to offer Alessandro the position of running its OpenStack based hybrid cloud program, as reported by Barb Darrow on the GigaOM website. At Red Hat Alessandro will be in a postition to work on his own criticized points and actually change OpenStack for the better.

We wish Alessandro the best with this new assignment at Red Hat.

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A couple of days ago VMware quietly released Update 1 of its management platform for vSphere, vCenter Server 5.5.

This release, unlike 5.5.0.b released in december 2013, aside several resolved issues, introduces also some new features such vCloud Hybrid Service vSphere Client Plug-in availability in vSphere Web Client and vCenter Server support on Windows Server 2012 R2.

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The Xen Project, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), transferred from Citrix to the Linux Foundation, today announced the availability version 4.4.0 of the Xen Hypervisor.

Version 4.4 contains 1193 change sets, and from now on the Xen Project will try to work with a release cycle of 6 months.

Version 4.4. provides the following new features and improvements as detailed in the change log:

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In august last year, VMware announced the first public beta of Virtual SAN (VSAN), a software-defined storage tier embedded directly within vSphere 5.5 hypervisor (but licensed separately). It constitutes (with NSX) one of the key components of VMware’s vision of a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). Now VMware has announced that VSAN is generally available.

Customers will be able to deploy VSAN nodes in a couple of ways:

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Dell has released a paper titled: "Dell Wyse Datacenter for Citrix Graphics Reference Architecture". The paper which contains 47 pages describes a Reference Architecture, covering the design, configuration and implementation for Citrix XenDesktop using shared graphics acceleration options on NVIDIA GRID cards. The Reference Architecture uses XenDesktop 7 on VMware vSphere 5 and XenServer 6.

The paper contains the following sections:

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VMware has released version 4.4. of its centralized image management for Windows desktops with backup and OS migration capabilities: Horizon Mirage. Horizon Mirage uses a layering technology to segment OS, applications and user personalizations into isolated containers allowing administrators to separately manage hardware and each layer of software.

Horizon Mirage is build on the technology which VMware acquired when it acquired Wanova in 2012. VMware later integrated this into its Horizon product suite containing the end-user computing products.

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Oracle last week released a beta version of the upcoming version 3.3 of its enterprise virtualization solution Oracle VM. Oracle VM is available for both x86 and SPARC with a common management tool called Oracle VM Manager to manage the virtualization platform.

Version 3.3. provides the following new features:

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Cisco has released a paper titled: "FlexPod Datacenter for 2000 Seats of Citrix XenDesktop 7.1 on VMware vSphere 5.1". The paper which contains 275 pages describes a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) covering FlexPod Datacenter for 2000 Seats of Citrix XenDesktop 7.1 on VMware vSphere 5.1 including technologies XenDesktop 7.1, Cisco UCS Blade Servers, Cisco UCS unified fabric, as well as NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2.

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Oracle has released a maintenance update for its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. The maintenance update includes bug fixes and improves the stability. Version 4.3.6. can be installed on top of version 4.3.x which was released in October last year.

The bug fixes and stability improvements are detailed in the change log.