virtualization.info Editors

Like each year VMware saves some of the announcements for VMware Europe. Most are made at the US event.

VMware announced in Barcelona new releases of products part of  its end-user computing and management portfolio:

• vCloud Automation Center 6.0 (general availability middle of November 2013)
• vCloud Operations Management Suite 5.8 (general availability middle of December 2013)
• vCenter Log Insight 1.5 (general availability middle of December 2013)
• IT Business Management Suite 8.0 (general availability middle of November 2013)
• VMware Horizon View 5.3
• VMware Horizon Mirage 4.3

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Oracle today released version 4.3 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This release is the follow up of version 4.2 which was released in September last year.

Virtualbox is a desktop virtualization solution also known as a type-2 Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). VirtualBox can be installed on top of Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux and it can run Windows, Linux and Solaris as guest.

The product was initially developed by innotek, which was acquired by Sun in February 2008, Sun rebranded the product to Sun VM VirtualBox. In April 2009 Sun on its turn was acquired by Oracle, which rebranded the product to Oracle VM VirtualBox. In July this year, Oracle announced that it will stop with the development of their own VDI Sun Ray software and focus fully on the Oracle Secure Global Desktop and VM VirtualBox software.

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Microsoft has made available for download several posters detailing the key Hyper-V components of the upcoming version of Hyper-V coming with the release of Windows Server 2012 R2. The posters focus on Generation 2 virtual machines, Hyper-V with virtual hard disk sharing, online virtual hard disk resizing, storage quality-of-service, enhanced session mode, live migration, Hyper-V failover clustering, and upgrading a Microsoft private cloud.

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A month after the release of TP 2, VMware announces the availability of VMware Log Insight 1.5 Technical Preview 3, another fast release of this log management, aggregation and analysis tool that is trying to compete with more affirmed competitors like Splunk.

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VMware has released a paper titled: “VMware Horizon View Large-Scale Reference Architecture“. The paper which contains 30 pages details a reference architecture based on real-world test scenarios, user workloads and infrastructure system configurations. The RA uses the VCE Vblock Specialized System for Extreme Applications, composed of Cisco UCS server blades and EMC XtremIO flash storage, to support a 7,000-user VMware Horizon View 5.2 deployment. Benchmarking was done using the Login VSI Max benchmarking suite.

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VMware has announced that it acquired Desktop as a Service (DaaS) platform provider Desktone. Desktone, which was founded in 2007 and is based in Boston, MA provides the DaaS platform for service providers and telecommunication companies.

The Desktone Platform can deliver three seperate types of hosted virtual desktop to end users:

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Each year at VMworld VMware announces new or updated products. This year we saw at VMworld US  the announcement of many new releases like vSphere 5.5 and the public beta of Virtual SAN.

VMware saves some of the new announcements for VMworld Europe. The European edition of one of worlds largest IT-events is to be held in Barcelona, Spain October 15-17.

While VMware is always very secret about new releases (even about the version number) the content of breakout sessions give a clue.

This blogposting published by VMware gives some clues on new announcements. Many sessions on vCenter Operations.

Oct 15 Tue 11am, VCM5539 – The Missing Link: Storage Visibility In Virtualized Environments

Oct 16 Wed 2pm, VCM4992 – Tips and Tricks for Capacity Risk Assessment, Rightsizing and Planning

Oct 16 Wed 2pm, VCM5811 – How to Manage vSphere and Hybrid Cloud with vCenter Operations Management

Oct 16 Wed 3pm, VCM5008 – vCenter Operations and the Quest for the Missing Metrics

Oct 16 Wed 3:30pm, VCM5100 – How to Customize Your vCenter Operations Management Deployment for Your Specific Business Needs

Oct 16 Wed 5pm, VCM5009 – Practical Real World Reporting with vCenter Operations

Oct 17 Thu 9am, VCM4952 – Practicing What We Preach: VMware IT on  vCenter Operations Management Suite and vCloud Automation Center

Oct 17 Thu 12pm & 3pm, VCM5169 – How to troubleshoot VM performance issues across applications, infrastructure and storage using vCenter Operations Management(Live Demonstration!)

Oct 17 Thu 1:30pm, VCM4981 – How to Identify if Your vSphere Environment is Configured to Meet Your Internal IT Standards

Oct 17 Thu 1:30pm, VCM5781 – What’s New and What’s Next in vCenter Operations: A Tech Preview

Oracle made a big step forward by officially supporting running Oracle Linux on both VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V. Per October 9 2013 Oracle has certified both for Joint Support.

There has been many discussions about supporting Oracle software running on hypervisors. Those discussions are on licensing as well as on technical support. Oracle cannot being accused of being very transparent in their licensing policies. When an Oracle Director was very clear about licensing during a taped interview at VMworld 2012, the video was removed from the VMworld TV site within a few hours after publication. Guess who ordered the removal.

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At October 10 VMware released version 1.5.1 of Horizon Workspace Manager. This is a minor update to 1.5.0.

New in this release are updated VMware Horizon Workspace Client for Macintosh & Windows.

Download here.

Horizon Workspace Manager enables mobile devices and mobile users to access corporate data and applications. It can be seen as a broker. For accessing data it can be seen as the Dropbox for the Enterprise.
While Dropbox does not allow control by the IT-department, Horizon Workspace Manager does. Policies can be set to define who is able to access what data, set quotas, define who can view what filetypes and much more.

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Microsoft has released two papers related to Desktop Hosting. The first is called: "Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide" and the second is called: "Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide". Both documents provide a blueprint for creating secure, scalable, multi-tenant desktop hosting solutions using Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager or using Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.

The documents are targeted to hosting providers which deliver desktop hosting via the Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA). Desktop hosting in this case is based on Windows Server with the Windows Desktop Experience feature enabled, and not Microsoft’s client Operating Systems like Windows 7 or Windows 8.

For some reason, Microsoft still doesn’t want service providers to provide Desktops as a Service (DaaS) running on top of a Microsoft Client OS, as outlined in the "Decoding Microsoft’s VDI Licensing Arcanum" paper which virtualization.info covered in September this year.

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