As announced less than a couple of weeks ago by Brad Anderson, VP for Windows Server and System Center with a blog post, Microsoft today, August 27, announced in a blog spot the released to manufacturing of Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 client.
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VMware launches NSX
Along with Virtual SAN technology VMware launched NSX (available in Q4 2013) its network virtualization platform that virtualization.info already covered in March.
VMware NSX unifies in a single platform Nicira NVP and VMware vCloud Network and Security, covering the entire network and security model from Layer 2 to Layer 7 and integrating in the hypervisor to ability to manage switching, bridging, routing and firewall.
The key highlights are resumed in this post from the “Office of the CTO”:
VMware Virtual SAN Public Beta
Among all the announcements made in the first day of VMworld 2013, the public beta of VMware Virtual SAN technology is one of the most interesting.
Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage tier embedded directly within vSphere 5.5 hypervisor (but licensed separately) and constitutes (with NSX) one of the key components of VMware’s vision of software-defined datacenter.
vSAN leverages the local storage (each host will require at least one SSD and one magnetic disk) from a number of ESXi hosts (limited to 8 in the beta) that belongs to a cluster and presents the aggregate as a single shared datastore.
This datastore can be used exactly as a “standard” one, for example for VM placement, vMotion, DRS and HA and could be scaled-out on the fly adding additional physical storage to the hosts.
VMware hires new CIO: Tony Scott, former Microsoft
According to Anthony Scott LinkedIn’s profile, the former corporate vice president and chief information officer of Microsoft Corp, now is the new CIO at VMware.
Scott has been the senior vice president and chief information officer of The Walt Disney Co., and chief technology officer at General Motors Corp before joining Microsoft. At VMware Scott will be in charge of managing the VMware’s global information technology organization, a group that manages critical technology systems supporting the company’s worldwide business operations.
HyTrust raises $18.5M in Series C funding
Today, August 26, Mountain View, CA, headquartered HyTrust Inc., a Cloud Security Automation (CSA) Company, announced Series C funding from Intel Capital and Fortinet, as well as VMware and In-Q-Tel. The new funding will be invested to growth and operation in the area of sales and marketing, enabling development on the cloud security platform as well as Role-Base Monitoring (RBM).
VMware announces vSphere 5.5
During the first day of VMworld 2013 in San Francisco VMware announced the release of vSphere 5.5 (the general availability has not yet been disclosed).
The elements introduced with 5.5 (thanks to Marcel van den Berg) are the following:
Release: Proxmox VE 3.1
Proxmox Virtual Environment is an open source virtualization management solution that leverages KVM technologies.
This week Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH released version 3.1 of its platform introducing:
- New Enterprise Repository: PVE-Enterprise, that contains only stable updates and PVE-no-subscription intended for non-production servers.
- Updates via GUI: now all updates can be done from the GUI as well as CLI.
- SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments): introduced as an alternative to VNC connection SPICE offloads most of the intensive CPU and GPU task to the client delivering better interaction experience with VMs.
- GlusterFS storage plugin: introduce the support of GlusterFS volumes.
HotLink announces DR Express, DR&CB solution to Amazon Web Services
This week HotLink announced the first disaster recovery and business continuity solution that leverages Amazon Web Services to protect VMware vSphere virtual machines: HotLink DR Express.
DR Express is a plug-in that extends VMware vCenter capabilities to integrate data protection and manage disaster recovery and business continuity to a remote site within Amazon Web Services.
HotLink DR Express is an economical to protect workloads that could not sustain the cost of a replica DR site, using, according to what HotLink declares, the best offerings for all public cloud providers: AWS EC2.
Matching this profitable capability, HotLink DR Express automatically uploads the initial VM to Amazon S3 along with the ongoing differentials according to the parameters configured within vCenter.