virtualization.info Editors

On January 9, Stratus Technologies announced the availability of the new Stratus ftServer systems with vSphere 5.1

The fault tolerant system company, founded 1980 and headquartered in Massachusetts, launched, in September 2012, the sixth generation ftServer that integrates into existing infrastructures and the vendor says that is able to provide uptime of 99.999% for the server and equivalent to 5.26 minutes of downtime annually, using the vSphere hypervisor apparently with very few staff oversight.

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Even though the newest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is currently at version 6.3, and Red Hat is working on version 6.4 it still releases updates for RHEL 5 according to its 10-year lifecycle promise. Last week it released version 5.9 of its RHEL Linux distribution.

Version 5.9 introduces Microsoft Hyper-V drivers so that RHEL can be installed in a Virtual Machine running on top of Hyper-V natively.

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On January 7, Brian Gammage, brought to our attention, through a blog post, an interesting video.

David Davis, Virtualization and Cloud savvy at TrainSignal, Author and vExpert, discussed on the vmWare blog of a recent Google+ Hangout about cost and business benefits of Virtual Desktops.

Davis explored the financial and technical benefits of desktop virtualization, still using the concept of cost saving as a trigger, he gave examples of how an organization can have centralized control and application consistency increasing security.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM9YXmaTo4Y[/youtube]

Andreas Groth, virtualization and cloud architect working for IBM has created a website comparing the virtualization features from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. This week his virtualization matrix was updated to include Windows Server 2012 with its Hyper-V version 3.0 hypervisor and System Center 2012.

The reference matrix, allows you to select and compare license specific capabilities of selected x86 server virtualization technologies, seperated by feature category (General, Management, Hypervisor and Extensions). The comparison is available at the following website: http://www.virtualizationmatrix.com/

Citrix has released version 5.2 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product: VDI-in-a-box. Citrix acquired the VDI-in-a-box product after acquiring Kaviza in May 2011. VDI-in-a-Box offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers. It consists of a single virtual appliance that provides all the functionality needed to create, provision, manage, and load balance virtual desktops. The VDI-in-a-Box appliance, known as VDI-in-a-Box Manager or vdiManager, runs as a virtual machine on a hypervisor. vdiManager creates and manages virtual desktops on the local physical server by communicating with the local hypervisor.

Besides supporting the latest hypervisors in this release, Citrix is integrating the VDI-in-a-box products more and more with its existing products, like introducing support for Cloud Gateway and the ability to export images for use with XenDesktop.

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VMware has released an update for vCenter Server 5.1. The update contains some bugfixes as described in the release notes. The problems solved are:

• Timeout errors occurring when logging in to the vSphere Client have been addressed.
• You can log in to a vSphere Web Client as a user of an Active Directory domain that has a non-standard UPN.

Although VMware already released version 5.1 of vSphere it still updates earlier supported versions as well. VMware has released Update 2 for both its hypervisor ESXi and its hypervisor management platform vCenter 5.0. This update can be installed on top of vSphere 5.0 or vSphere 5.0 Update 1.

ESXi 5.0 update 2 adds some support for additional Operating Systems and fixes a long list of issues as described in the release notes:

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Login VSI has released version 3.7 of its vendor independent Login Virtual Session Indexer benchmarking utility. Login VSI measures the performance and scalability of Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) and Server Based Computing (SBC) environments by simulating unique user workloads. Eventually developed as a free tool by Login Consultants to benchmark systems for use with Project Virtual Reality Check, Login VSI evolved into a company of its own and has become a commonly used benchmarking tool used by different vendors nowadays. Login VSI is provided for free as an Express Edition, there is also a Pro edition which is supported by Login VSI.

Version 3.7 adds support for Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Office 2012 and Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

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VMware has released version 5.1.2. for its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product View. This version is considered a maintenance release which can be used to upgrade from View 5.1 which was released in May this year or View 5.1.1.

Some of the issues resolved in this release are:

• Network printers were not being redirected into desktop virtual machines after upgrading to View 5.1.
• VMware View contains a critical directory traversal vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to retrieve arbitrary files from affected View Servers.
• Installing View Agent 5.0 on a Windows XP SP3 virtual machine caused a Stop Error (BSoD) on the virtual machine.

HP has released a paper titled: "HP DBC Reference Architecture technical overview". The paper which contains 55 pages contains a reference architecture solution for database consolidation, provisioning, and running thousands of I/O demanding database workloads in a Microsoft private cloud model. The DBC RA provides a foundation for building a high-performance Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platform that has been optimized to consolidate and provision hundreds to thousands of database workloads while providing extremely high availability at all levels – from the underlying network and storage fabrics up to the virtual machine (VM) layer.

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