virtualization.info Editors

Last week Cisco and VMware announced their intention to consolidate their partnership with the common objective of develop integrated product and solutions designed for software defined datacenters.

Both companies will seal the partnership investing in dedicated engineering teams that will collaborate on deeper integrations across VMware cloud solutions and Cisco’s Data Center Networking and Fabric Computing platforms.

The annoucement comes about to calm the voices, spread around after Nicira acquisition, about a possibile impasse in the relationship between the two companies.

From the original press release:

Read more

On August 22, Parallels has announced Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac and today the upgrade has been made available for current users and it will be possible for new users to purchase next tuesday, September 4.

Liquidware Labs, the company founded in 2008 by David Bieneman, announced yesterday August 28, at VMworld 2012 two new offerings of its VDI assessment tool Stratusphere IXD and Stratusphere Adapter.

Liquid Stratusphere IXD is a solution that would enable VDI administrators to  automate the design of corporate desktop gold master images, and size hosts and storage architecture.

Stratusphere Adapter allows an integration feed for Stratusphere FIT desktop assessment metrics and Stratusphere UX user experience metrics into VMware vCenter Operations. IT Administrators can achieve a granular view of users’ desktop experience in a single “pane of glass” delivered from custom dashboards.

Jason Mattox, CTO of Liquidware Labs, comments about Stratusphere IXD:

Stratusphere IXD automates the process of designing key virtual desktop environment components with a very high level of accuracy. Designs are based on actual observed usage patterns which are then applied to the best ‘one-to-many’ shared-image pooled strategy, using precise image, host and storage designs right at the start prevents the cost overruns, poor performance and capacity constraints that can stall View desktop projects and have negative impacts on end users.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD, launched on August 27 FirePro S9000 and S7000 Graphics Processors.

The American company officially presented at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco its latest versions for its line of graphics cards processors, created with the scope of speeding up the delivery of virtual desktops through servers.

S9000 and S7000 would allow IT administrator to reduce server power consumption, with a cost reduction, for a better management of workloads of CAD and media applications.  The new chips would work efficiently with usually graphic intensive software, as well on smartphones and tablets. AMD also realesed a new version of its processor-based server ADM Opteron, designed for virtualization environments.

Read more

Yesterday,  Japanese security software company, Trend Micro announced at VMworld the new version of its server security platform: Deep Security 9.0

Deep Security platform allows to manage server security for both physical, virtual and cloud servers. The platform is composed by integrated modules that allows to enlarge the server security platform in order to guarantee a better security of data protection.

The new release offers:

• Integration into vCloud Director and Amazon Web Services;
• Support for latest VMware releases – vSphere 5.1 and vCloud Networking and Security 5.1;
• Enhancements to Deep Security Agentless Platform;
• Hypervisor integrity monitoring;
• Multi-tenant architecture for software-defined data centers

This Monday VKernel announced the general availability of vOPS Server Standard 6.0 its capacity management product for virtualized data centers and cloud environments.

This release introduces unified multi-data source VM issue diagnosis, change impact modeling and, of course, VMware vCloud Director integration.

Read more

Yesterday, onstage at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, VMware announced its first comprehensive solution to deliver a software-defined datacenter: VMware vCloud Suite 5.1.

The goal of a software-defined datacenter is to abstract all hardware resources, pool them into aggregate capacity to facilitate automation of applications and services deployment.

Today at VMworld®, VMware and its partners are taking a bold step toward simplifying IT, offering customers everything they need to build, operate and manage their cloud environments. The VMware vCloud® Suite delivers the software-defined datacenter – the architecture for implementing cloud computing.

said Paul Maritz, VMware CEO.

VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 aggregates all the components customers need to build, operate and manage a modern, cloud integrated, infrastructure:

• VMware vSphere® 5.1: with more than 100 enhancements and new features constitutes the foundation of the suite
• VMware vCloud Director® 5.1: orchestrates the provisioning of abstracted resources such storage, networking, security and availability pooling them as software-defined datacenter services
• VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.1: VMware’s software defined networking and security solution, enables the dynamic creation of virtual networks and services decoupled and independent from the physical network hardware
• vCenter Site Recovery Manager™ 5.1: simplifies disaster recovery planning and ensures predictable recovery through automated testing and plan execution, can also support datacenter migrations and disaster avoidance, integrates with VMware vSphere Replication and replication technologies from VMware’s partners

As previously announced VMware abandons vRAM licensing and vCloud Suite will be licensed per processor.

Read more

Virsto, the Californian company that provides storage hypervisor software for virtual machines announced today at VMware the release of storage hypervisor for vSphere 1.5

VM-level storage management and seamless integration with VMware vCenter and View Manager

Virsto’s storage hypervisor provides provisioning, management and utilization of storage for the Software-Defined Datacenter

This paper is particularly appropriate for this week, enriched with the VMworld 2012 in San Francisco.

The document summarizes the new features and enhancements introduced with release 5.1 of vSphere:

Compute

• Larger virtual machines: up to 64 vCPUs and 1TB vRAM

• New virtual machine format: with CPU performance counters and virtual shared graphics acceleration

Storage

• Flexible, space-efficient storage for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

Network

• vSphere Distributed Switch: with Network Health Check, Configuration Backup and Restore, Roll Back and Recovery and Link Aggregation Control Protocol support

• Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) support

Read more