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Release: Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac

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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.

Parallels Desktop 8 is a desktop virtualization platform that allows to run both Windows 8 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion applications together, this integration benefits of Mountain Lion’s new features and implements them to Windows programs, such as support for Launchpad, Dictation, Notification Center and Mission Control.
This release follows the recently introduced Fusion 5 from VMware, which improved considerably overall performance for both Mountain Lion and Windows 8 virtualization on Macs.

Liquidware Labs: two new offerings of Stratusphere Product Line

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liquidwarelabs logo

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.

Release: AMD new FirePro S9000 and S7000 and Opteron

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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.

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Release: Trend Micro Deep Security 9.0

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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

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Convirture: new version of ConVirt Enterprise Cloud with VMware Support

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Convirture the company, founded in 2006 that offers an open source management console to manage open source virtualization platforms,  announced today August 28th,  the release of a Beta version of ConVirt Enterprise Cloud.

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud aims to be the single tool used to manage virtual and cloud infrastructures based on the open-source hypervisors KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), Xen, OpenStack and Amazon EC2. The new Beta version of the program would permit the management of VMware-based datacenters as well.
Arsalan Farooq, founder and CEO at Convirture comments in the press release:
As data centers increasingly deploy a mix of technologies, IT managers are looking for a ‘single pane of glass’ to manage all of them, which is what this version of ConVirt Enterprise Cloud offers, from our perspective, the hypervisor and cloud wars are meaningless. Whether it’s VMware, KVM, Xen and any of the clouds, organizations just want the best tool for the job. With ConVirt, we can provide users with a management layer that also brings in Xen, KVM and all cloud platforms. It will deliver the everyday needs for their ongoing, day-to-day management of virtual environments.

Release: VMware vCloud Suite 5.1

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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.

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Release: Virsto for vSphere 1.5

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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

Virsto developed an integrated solution that aims to manage performance and utilization of storage for virtualized datacenters, the purpuse of this upgrade is to optimize VM storage for Software-Defined datacenters increasing storage IOPS without buying new hardware.
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

Paper: What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1

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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

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Release: Unidesk Corporation Unidesk 2.0

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Unidesk Corporation launched at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco the new Unidesk 2.0, offering to the attendees live demos of their virtual desktop management software.

Unidesk offers the all in one desktop layering solution,  its integrated third party VDI management solution for VMware View allows IT managers to create customized desktops. Since last may Unidesk Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DVS) is available as part of Dell’s porfolio.

Unidesk now includes VMware vSphere® Hypervisor integrations, user layer snapshots and restore point automation for desktop recovery and backup, among the new capabilities also the integration of Storage tiers for cost/performance optimization and Installation wizards.

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