Paper: Decoding Microsoft’s VDI Licensing Arcanum

Login Consultants has released a paper titled: “Decoding Microsoft’s VDI Licensing Arcanum“. The paper which contains 43 pages is written by Falko Gräfe can be downloaded for free from the Login Consultants website after registration.

The paper covers Microsoft’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) licensing and compares this against Server Based Computing licensing and single user terminal server licensing being used by some of the Desktop as a Service (DaaS) providers nowadays.

The paper contains the following chapters:

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VMware announces Log Insight 1.5 TP 2

VMware announced the availability of VMware Log Insight 1.5 Technical Preview 2, its log management, aggregation and analysis solution.

This was indeed a very fast release, probably representing the need of VMware to accelerate the release cycle in order to compete with the massive popularity of Splunk.

VMware published a video that introduces the new features in version 1.5.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiL5uQp5zBw[/youtube]

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Peder Ulander, former VP of Product Marketing at Citrix joins Cisco

Cisco System has a new Vice President of Marketing: Peder Ulander. According to his LinkedIn profile Ulander was Vice President of Product Marketing, Cloud Platform Group at Citrix for the last two years, he will be starting to work for Cisco next Monday and he will be managing Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group.
Peder Ulander is an expert in marketing and strategy, having started his career at Symantec as Product Manager and Business Development Analys about 20 years ago, he then served as Director of Marketing at Sun Micro Systems. Ulander was VP of Strategy at Pure Networks, when the company was acquired by Cisco Systems.

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VMware adds a new member to its Board of Directors

Yesterday, September 10, VMware announced the appointment of Pamela Craig, former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Accenture, to its board of directors.

With more than 34 years of industry experiences Pamela Craig served Accenture in various operational and finance roles, now after her retirement she has been selected to come after Renee James, who served as a member of the VMware mergers and acquisitions committee  since September 2007 and informed of her resignation on September 5, to focus on her responsibilities as President of Intel Corp.

Craig, in her 34 years history at Accenture, was one of the key members who focused on rigorous financial discipline that has contributed to Accenture’s performance. Ms. Craig’s long experience in the market will help contributing with a deep understanding of the challenges technology companies face in a rapidly changing environment. Further to her new role in VMware, Ms. Craig is also a director of Akamai Technologies, where she is currently the chair of the Audit Committee.

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Cisco announces acquisition of Whiptail

Cisco System Inc. just announced to have the intention to acquire solid state memory systems company: Whiptail, for approximately $415 millions in cash plus incentives for the acquisition. The parties expect the acquisition to close during the first quarter of 2014.

The acquisition is a strategic move as Cisco is aiming to improve  its Unified Computing System application performance adding to the solution a solid state memory into the UCS’s fabric computing architecture, the scope is to integrate business critical applications, such as virtualized, Big Data, database, High Performance Computing and transcoding workloads, delivering optimized performance.

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Release: HyTrust Appliance 3.5

Half a month after its Series C funding HyTrust released version 3.5 of its HyTrust VMware vSphere-compatible appliance.

HyTrust Appliance, once deployed in a vSphere environments, integrates with Microsoft ActiveDirectory to leverage pre-existing users, roles, and groups, provides two-factor authentication solutions support (like RSA SecurID or CA AuthMinder), the ability to lockdown privileged local accounts and to generate temporary passwords to enable time-limited privileged account access. The appliance also provide a set of pre-configured templates and the ability to create custom ones in order to assess VMware Hosts’ security configurations.

The new features introduced in version 3.5 provides administrator privileges monitoring protecting private clouds and virtualized data centers from unauthorized VMs copy, deletion or misconfiguration.

This new version also introduce a new “monitor only” mode that allows observation and logging of administrative activity before configuring granular roles and access policies and the support for VMware’s Security Hardening Guide 5.1.

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