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virtualization.info Editors VMware has released a paper titled: "Virtualizing Active Directory Domain Services on VMware vSphere". The paper which contains 62 pages provides guidance based on best practices on deploying AD DS on vSphere.
The virtualization of domain controllers allows administrators to take advantage of a new feature set not available to physical domain controllers. Among those features, cloning and snapshots are two powerful tools that enable rapid deployment, testing, and recovery.
Microsoft has released a paper titled:"Maximizing Storage Efficiency in Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Storage Server 2012 R2". The paper which contains 18 pages examines features in Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 that can be used to maximize storage efficiency.
Even though the paper has a high-level of marketing speak, it still provides a good overview of the Storage capabilities provided by the Windows platform. It covers Data Deduplication, Storage Spaces, Thin Provisioning and Trim
On January 23 Microsoft announced its financial results for the last quarter of 2013.
Total revenue for the quarter ended December 2013 was $24.52 billion. Looking at the financials details we can see that gross margin was $16.24 billion, operating income $7.97 billion, net income $6.56 billion, and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $0.78 each.
VMware today announced that the company will acquire Mobile Device Managment vendor AirWatch. VMware will acquire AirWatch for approximately $1.175B in cash and approximately $365M of installment payments and assumed unvested equity. AirWatch will be integrated into VMware’s End-User Computing group reporting to CEO John Marshall.
"AirWatch provides best-in-class, secure, enterprise-mobile management to thousands of businesses around the world," said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. "With this acquisition VMware will add a foundational element to our end-user computing portfolio that will enable our customers to turbo-charge their mobile workforce without compromising security."
Last year, Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) started a survey asking participants to provide more insight in the non-technical issues related to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Server Based Computing (SBC) deployments. The outcome of the survey which was filled-in by over 1000 people was detailed in a paper later on.
For this year, the survey wants to check how the industry has changed compared to last year. The questions of this survey are both functional and technical and range from “What are the most important design goals set for this environment”, to “Which storage is used”, to “How are the VM’s configured”. In comparison to the 2013 VRC survey, questions have been highly optimized and simplified with the help of your feedback. The 2014 VRC survey will only take 10 minutes of your time.
Microsoft has announced that it has updated it Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica. The Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica was first released in May 2013 providing capacity planning for Hyper-V replica on Windows Server 2012. Now the tool has been updated to support Winodws Server 2012 R2. The Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica allows administrators to plan their Hyper-V Replica deployments based on the workload, storage, network, and server characteristics.
Docker has announced that it has closed a $15 million Series B funding. The round was led by Greylock Partners, with participation by Insight Venture Partners and existing investors: Benchmark (Peter Fenton), Trinity Ventures (Dan Scholnick), and Jerry Yang/AME Cloud Ventures. Jerry Chen from Greylock Ventures will join the board of directors at Dockers. Chen comes from VMware where he was VP of Cloud and Application Services.
Docker provides so called container virtualization, allowing an application and its dependencies to run 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.
VMware has published a paper titled:"Enabling VMware vShield Endpoint for Horizon View". The paper which contains 14 pages addresses the problems of antivirus scanning in a large-scale Horizon View virtual desktop implementation by implementing vShield Endpoint. vShield Endpoint consolidates and offloads all antivirus and associated operations into a centralized security virtual appliance (SVA), supplied by a VMware partner. The SVA runs and manages antivirus software as a dedicated virtual machine on the hypervisor, with very small desktop drivers. This replaces dozens or hundreds or thousands of large AV agents on individual virtual desktops.
vShield Endpoint is included in vSphere 5.1 and later as well as in Horizon View 5.3.
Microsoft has published an technical article giving network recommendations for building a Hyper-V cluster in Windows Server 2012. The guide provides network configuration recommendations that are specific to a Hyper-V cluster that is running Windows Server 2012. It includes an overview of the different network traffic types, recommendations for how to isolate traffic, recommendations for features such as NIC Teaming, Quality of Service (QoS) and Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ), and a Windows PowerShell script that shows an example of converged networking, where the network traffic on a Hyper-V cluster is routed through one external virtual switch.
Microsoft announced General Availability of Hyper-V Recovery Manager. This means the service is supported by Microsoft for production and is backed with a Service Level Agreement.
Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM) is a cloud based service which coordinates failover and failback between two Microsoft System Center 2012 managed datacenters. The cloud based service is a control plane running on Windows Azure. It allows to create runbooks which coordinates the startup of virtual machines in a predefined order. It will also adjust IP-configuration of virtual machines if the secondary site is using a different IP-subnet than the primary site.
HRM is positioned by Microsoft as a better solution than VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). SRM is a DR coordination software solution as well. SRM needs to be installed on-premise and requires unlike HRM quite some mouseclicks to get configured.
