Video: vSphere & OpenStack Framework Integration with the vSphere OpenStack Virtual Appliance

OpenStack Summit 2013 is coming to its end and in the last few days we have read and written extensively on OpenStack Framework realizing that very often we feel a lack of actual implementation examples.
This video, published from VMware on its official YouTube channel, shows the integration capabilities between a vSphere infrastructure and the OpenStack framework by deploying a single instance of vSphere OpenStack Virtual Appliance (not officially supported from VMware) as the OpenStack cloud controller onto a vSphere 5.5 infrastructure.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Leaxe-DiJc[/youtube]

Release: VMware ThinApp 5.0

VMware has released version 5 of its application virtualization product ThinApp. With the release VMware announced that the product lifecycle has been extended to 5 years.

ThinApp is available as a standalone product and part of all Horizon bundles and the Horizon Suite. Since this is a major release, customers must also fulfill their subscription and receive new license keys along with the download of the bits at My VMware.

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Release: Xen 4.3.1

The Xen Project, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) and which is now transferred from Citrix to the Linux Foundation, today announced the release of version 4.3.1 of the Xen hypervisor. This so called Point release is the follow up of version 4.3 which was released in July this year.

Besides fixing some vulnerabilities, this release also introduces around 80 bug fixes and improvements, like adjustments to XSAVE management and bug fixes for nested virtualization, other low level system state handling and libxl tool stack.

VMware releases VMware vCenter Server 5.5.0a

VMware released VMware vCenter Server 5.5.0a. This is a minor maintenance update to vCenter Server 5.5 without having new features.

It solves for example a couple of single sign-on issues.  Other issues resolved are related to upgrades from vCenter Server 5.1 to 5.5 and related to connection issues using the vSphere Web client.

Issues resolved with this release are as follows

  1. Attempts to upgrade vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) 5.1 Update 1 to version 5.5 might fail with error code 1603
  2. Attempts to log in to the vCenter Server might be unsuccessful after you upgrade from vCenter Server 5.1 to 5.5
  3. Unable to change the vCenter SSO administrator password on Windows in the vSphere Web Client after you upgrade to vCenter Server 5.5 or VCSA 5.5
  4. VPXD service might fail due to MS SQL database deadlock for the issues with VPXD queries that run on VPX_EVENT and VPX_EVENT_ARG tables
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Paper: App-V 5.0 and Citrix Integration

Microsoft has published a paper titled: “App-V 5.0 and Citrix Integration“. The paper which contains 28 pages provides guidance for combining App-V 5.0 and Citrix solutions. It discusses the benefits of App-V 5.0 and Citrix, recommendations for Citrix images, App-V cache management, App-V management with Citrix, factors that impact user experience and administrative effort, and the Citrix XenApp Connector for Configuration Manger 2012 SP1.

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Paper: IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure with VMware View

IBM and VMware released a Reference Architecture titled: "IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure with VMware View". The paper, which contains 52 pages and describes the reference architecture for using VMware View 5.1 on the ESXi 5 hypervisor. It

gives an architecture overview and component model of the VMware View and then describes the deployment model of VMware View using different number of users on a variety of IBM® hardware platforms including IBM Flex System, IBM PureFlex System, IBM System x, IBM networking, and IBM storage.

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