virtualization.info Editors

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.

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Goliath Technologies, headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, provider of a proactive system management solutions for physical, virtual and cloud infrastrucure, with customers worldwide including ADP, ING Direct, NASA, Thompson Reuters and Shell, announced on January 14 wider support for monitoring VMware storage components via direct API integration to the hypervisor. With this update the company now delivers new dashboards and alerting capabilities on hosts, virtual machines and data store metrics from the VMware hypervisor.

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VMware has released a document titled: Hardened Virtual Appliance Operations Guide. The paper, which contains 16 pages, is a guide targeted towards securing the appliace base platform to meet high governance requirements. In 2013, VMware started to standardize the security profile of its virtual appliaces to meet governance compliance requirements according to the Security Technical Information Guides (STIG).

VMware has released a paper titled: “Getting Started with OpenStack and VMware vSphere“. The paper which contains 21 pages, it is a guide targeted towards the implementation and use of OpenStack on top of a vSphere compute and storage infrastructure that becomes the provider of Nova compute instances and Cinder block storage volumes.
In this guide is leveraged the VMware OpenStack Virtual Appliance, a single Ubuntu Linux VM with all the required OpenStack services, in order to semplify the deployment.

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Atlantis Computing has released a paper titled:"High-Performance Persistent Virtual Desktop Architecture Powered by NetApp FAS Array and Atlantis ILIO". The Paper which contains 27 pages covers a reference architecture provided by Atlantis Computing and NetApp offering a storage architecture to meet VDI IOPS requirements, allowing to provide more than 55 IOPS per desktop and 30GB per virtual desktop for 1,000 persistent virtual desktops using a dual controller FAS 2240-2 with Clustered Data ONTAP optimized with Atlantis ILIO software. Testing was done using the Login VSI benchmarking suite.

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Nutanix, provider of appliance-based servers with built-in storage has announced that it now supports running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V. With this announcement Nutanix now supports the hypervisor platforms from VMware, Microsoft and KVM.

The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is a scale-out cluster of high-performance nodes, or servers, each running a standard hypervisor and containing processors, memory and local storage (consisting of SSD Flash and high capacity SATA disk drives). Each node runs virtual machines just like a standard virtual machine host.

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Convirture has announced a new release of its management platform called ConVirt Enterprise extended with the support for Microsoft Hyper-V. ConVirt Enterprise is now able to manage multiple Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines, this comes in addition to existing support for major virtualization platforms like KVM, Xen and VMware.

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Citrix today announced that it has released a DesktopPlayer version for Apple Mac. DesktopPlayer is a type-2 hypervisor targeted to mobile MacBook users, and allows users to use XenDesktop with Windows whether they are online, offline of on slow network connections. By using DesktopPlayer with XenDesktop and ShareFile users are able to switch between local and hosted VMs with synchronization of profiles and data.

VMs are synchronized using Synchronizer, which only updates changes from the golden OS image in the background, all managed centrally. Also the virtual machine can be restored to its original state.

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Citrix announced the acquisition of Framehawk, provider of a software platform for application mobilization. The acquisition is a strategic move as the Framehawk Platform enables high-performance of virtual desktops and application delivery to mobile devices, Citrix might take advantage of the Framehawk platform and use it with XenApp and XenDesktop in order to improve its performance on bad networking conditions.

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VMware finally has a new Chief Technology Officer named Ben Fathi. After Steve Herrod left the company as CTO in January 2013 the company did not have a CTO.  Paul Strong has been a  Acting Chief Technology Officer for VMware lately.

Fathi joined VMware in 2012 and most recently served as senior vice president, R&D. He has over 30 years of experience in IT.

A VMware blog on the introduction of Ben Fathi is here