virtualization.info Editors

Microsoft has released version 3.5. of its Integration Services for Linux. Hyper-V supports both emulated (“legacy”) and Hyper-V-specific (“synthetic”) devices for Linux virtual machines. When a Linux virtual machine is running with emulated devices, no additional software is required to be installed. However, emulated devices do not provide high performance and cannot leverage the rich virtual machine management infrastructure that the Hyper-V technology offers.

The Linux Integration Services enable synthetic driver support for Virtual Machines running one of the supported Linux Distributions, currently the 32 and 64 bit versions of:

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PHD Virtual, which was acquired last week by Unitrends, has released PHD Virtual Backup for Hyper-V. The Product, which is available for free is build on version 7 of the Virtual Backup infrastructure. With supporting Hyper-V, PHD Virtual now supports the hypervisors from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. The product is now provided for free and customers can choose to purchase a support contract. If a support contract is purchased customers are entitled for future product licenses. PHD Virtual uses Virtual Appliances which are integrated as a VM within the Hypervisor and therfore it operates agentless on the VM’s which its backs up.

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Microsoft has updated its free Disk2vhd tool to version 2.0. Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD or VHDX versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). You can use the Disk2vhd tool on an online system, because it leverages the Volume Snapshot capabilities in order to create consistent Point-in-Time snapshots available in the OS.

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Oracle has released version 4.3.6. of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. Version 4.3.6. can be installed on top of version 4.3 which was released in October this year.

The update is considered a maintenance release and mainly fixes issues as described in the change log.

Microsoft has a free hypervisor offering called Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is fully equal to the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2012. The only item not available in the free edition is the free usage rights for virtual machines running on a host installed with Hyper-V. Each virtual machine instance running on free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 needs to be licensed.

Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 comes as a core installation. This means there is no graphical userinterface available to perform management. Especially connecting to the console of the virtual machine can be a challenge. Hyper-V Manager does not run on the Hyper-V Server itself. Adminstrators needs access to another Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 with   Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) installed to be able to access the console of VM’s.

Veeam to the rescue. The company released a free virtual appliance which is a RDP proxy. The appliance runs CentOS and installs on a Hyper-V host. The appliance can connect to virtual machines using VMconnect. VMconnect is a modified RDP for connection to consoles of virtual machines. VMconnect is able to connect even when the virtual machine does not have an IP-address.

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PHD Virtual, a well known player in the VM backup and recovery market has been acquired by Unitrends. Unitrends also specializes in backup solutions and will integrate the PHD Virtual product suite into its own portfolio. Combined, Unitrends and PHD Virtual will serve more than 10,000 customers worldwide and have more than 8,000 global channel partner representatives.

Both companies have primary investments from Insight Venture Partners, a leading global private equity and venture capital firm. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

VMware has released a paper titled: “VMware NSX Network Virtualization Design Guide“. The paper which contains 32 pages is a design guide targeted towards virtualization and network architects interested in deploying VMware NSX. NSX network virtualization programmatically creates, snapshots, deletes, and restores software-based virtual networks.

The paper contains the following sections:

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Last week Friday Citrix released Service Pack 1 for its virtualization platform Citrix XenServer 6.2, which was released in June of this year. Besides providing a rollup of all released hotfixes until now the Service Pack adds the following new features as described in the release notes:

• 3D graphics pack supporting NVIDIA GRID GPUs
• GPU pass-through improvements
• Support for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2
• Improvments to the Site Recovery Wizard for large deployments
• Support for up to 50 new fibre-channel HBASRs to be created in a single step

VMware released the vCloud Hybrid Service vSphere Client Plug-in. This plug-in allows administrators to manage both their on-premise vSphere infrastructure as well as the virtual datacenters running on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). vCHS is the VMware public IaaS platform currently available in the US only, while in the UK a single datacenter is running in beta.

More on the roadmap of vCHS here.

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Atlantis Computing provider of storage solutions for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments has announced Atlantis ILIO for Hyper-V 3.0, the version of Hyper-V which comes with Windows Server 2012 R2. ILIO allows customers to run persistent and non-persistent virtual desktops using storage which runs in memory only, using deduplication and compression techniques. Atlantis claims this makes the VM faster and cheaper than a physical pc.

With this announcement Atlantis ILIO will support the vSphere, XenServer and Hyper-V hypervisors. Atlantis didn’t disclose when Atlantis ILIO for Hyper-V 3.0 will be released.