virtualization.info Editors

On August 8th oVirt announced release 3.1, this is the second official release of this free platform.

The oVirt project provides a fully featured management platform for virtual machines hosted on any supported backend, it is an open virtualization project for Linux-based KVM virtualization.

The release, now available to download, includes various changes in supports, such as the ‘all-in-one’ proof of concept mode that allows a single machine to both run the management engine and act as a virtualization host.
More informations on the changes made in areas such Infrastructure, User Interface, Storage, Virtualization, Network and Interfaces, could be found in the official release notes.

Today Linux-KVM published a post that shows the basics of a new feature coming with Fedora 18, the ability to take online snapshots of virtual disks with no downtime.

An online snapshotting feature, already available in libvirt with command line-only support, represents a fundamental element in a production environment and will help KVM to shorten the distance with the professional market.

This feature is partially available in Fedora 17 and will be fully supported in the next release.

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Microsoft has released a new version of its Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VSMT) solution accelerator. This tool is the next version of the VSMT 3.0 which was released in September 2010.

The VMST is a patch management solution which can be used to update stopped or saved state VM’s on a Hyper-V or Hyper-V R2 host. And also VM Templates, offline VM’s and offline Virtual Hard Disks(VHD) stored in the VM Library of System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). In order to achieve this, the tool applies updates to the VHD using so called Servicing Jobs.

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Microsoft yesterday announced that it now officially supports running FreeBSD version 8.2 as a guest OS in a Hyper-V Virtual Machine running on top of Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft already announced that it was working on this support in May this year and this announcement follows earlier support additions like the support for CentOS in May last year.

Microsoft together with NetApp and Citrix submitted 8,500 lines of code under the BSD license in order to enable FreeBSD to run on Hyper-V. The FreeBSD integration components provide support for:

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Microsoft has released an online virtualization comparison tool, targeted directly against VMware. The website hosting the Microsoft Server Virtualization Tool compares the software acquisition and support costs between Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and vSphere 5 based on published list prices.

Even though the website comparing Hyper-V to vSphere 5 can be considered dubious because it’s created by Microsoft self, it contains some good information and references to documentation which can help organizations make the comparison for themselves. On the other hand VMware already has a website, where it directly targets Microsoft, called Get the Facts, not the Microsoft Hyper-Bole.

The tool allows you to specify the amount of Virtual Machines in your environment, and the average consolidation ration in your environment: Low (3VMs/Proc), Medium (6 VMs/Proc) and high (12 VMs/Proc). Based on this input a cost comparison is made and presented to the user.

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Microsoft has released a paper titled: Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2012. The paper which contains 150 pages is very comprehensive and contains performance recommendations for Server Hardware and the Networking and Storage Subsystems. Also performance tuning recommendations for several Microsoft and non-Microsoft workloads like Active Directory and SAP are given.

Nowadays performance tuning is based on more requirements than just plain performance, it’s more related to finding a efficient mix between energy consumption, network latency and throughput.

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vOPS Server Explorer (formerly VKernel vScope Explorer) is a suite composed of three free utilities: vScope Explorer, SearchMyVM Explorer and the brand new Environment Explorer.

The new entry, Environment Explorer would allow administrators to detect any efficiency problems, identifies VMs performance issues in configuration such as memory limits and any bottleneck.

The tool gives an insight of the environment and can help administrators to check if there is any issue or if they are running out of capacity.

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Last week Symantec announced the Beta Version of Symantec Workspace Virtualization and Workspace Streaming 7.5.

Symantec Workspace Virtualization and Workspace Streaming are applications created to improve management and control over endpoints and VDI, based on Microsoft Windows, allowing to help the companies entering the growing trend of BYOD (bring your own device).

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Lenovo, the largest PC company in China and the world’s second-largest PC vendor, has signed an agreement with EMC to promote the sale of equipment storage and server devices for corporate networks.

According to this agreement, Lenovo’s machines will be manufactured by EMC, a leader in delivering in the storage market with  cloud computing , the agreement will initially focused in China and will allow EMC to expand its presence in that important growing market, while Lenovo gets extended its product range beyond the computers and expand its presence worldwide.

The reseller agreement focuses on the storage area network. Lenovo will provide cash and will hold a majority interest in this joint venture, that will help them sell storage equipment companies in the SME environment. While EMC will provide assets and resources of Iomega, one of its company, and will own the remaining shares.

Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC said that the agreement with Lenovo is a great opportunity for EMC to expand its presence in China, a very important market, and extend it to other parts of the world over time.

Tucci also mentioned that this new alliance won’t interfere with their relationship with Cisco.

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On July 31, VKernel Corporation, announced the release of vOPS Server Enterprise 6.6.2, in its new feature set is included a new self-learning analytics that allows virtual administrators to deploy dynamic thresholding.

VKernel Corporation, founded in 2007, acquired by Quest in November 2011, offers performance and capacity management products for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualized infrastructures, and virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments.

The new self-learning analytics allows to determine precisely the normality or abnormality of resource usage patterns,in VM CPU, memory, storage and disk I/O utilization. Therefore adding Dynamic thresholding gives the opportunity to analyse consumption of resources and to remove performances issues that could happen in a virtual environment.

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