virtualization.info Editors

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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Yesterday, August 1st, Veeam released the results about its growth for Q2 2012.

Veeam, founded in 2006, is a VMware Technology Alliance Partner and member of the VMware Ready Management program, providing software for managing VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

Among the spotlights of what happened during the second quarter, Veeam gained more than 6.000 new customers, for a total of over 43.000, the company had 12.000 customers two years ago, in Q2 2010.

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Today Microsoft released to manufacturing a new version of its Server Operating System Windows Server 2012 together with a new release of its client Operating System Windows 8. Windows Server 2012 will become generally available on September 4 while Windows 8 will be generally available on October 26 this year, but sooner for MSDN and Technet subscribers as described here.

Both Windows Server 2012 as Windows 8 contain version 3.0 of the Hyper-V type-1 hypervisor for which the expected features were already covered by virtualization.info in September last year. For a quick overview of which features the Hyper-V hypervisor contains we suggest you look at the Hyper-V component architecture poster, which Microsoft released in June this year.

It is expected that Microsoft will release an update to its System Center 2012 management suite which is now in CTP 2 soon in order to support installation on top and management of the new Windows Server 2012 OS and its features.

On Monday Oracle announced its plan to buy privately held Xsigo, a company based in California and specialized in virtual networking.

The company, founded eight years ago, backed by Kleiner Perkins, Caufield Byers, Greylock Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, has BritishTelecom, eBay, Softbank  and Verizon Communications Inc. among its customers.

Oracle did not disclose the terms of the agreement.

This news is strictly related to the acquisition of Nicira Inc., announced last week by VMware, for $1.26 billions to expand its portfolio and establish a leadership position in virtual networks.

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On May 29th, the Fedora Project announced the release of Fedora 17, the latest version of Red Hat sponsored free open source operating system distribution that includes Open vSwitch.

Open vSwitch can be used to manage virtual networks across a virtual infrastructure and it is a key component for Fedora’s virtual network management capabilities.

With Open vSwitch, Fedora’s users could create, manage and monitor virtual networks using the software network switch, as is explained in this tutorial.

Open vSwitch provides kernel support for comparable packet forwarding performance and allows scaling across a large number of servers while managing through a central controller.

Open vSwitch kernel module is compatible with the linux bridge module for KVM virtual machines, and uses libvirt to manage the VMs.

The kernel datapath is already distributed with Linux, and packages are available for Ubuntu, Debian, and now Fedora.

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In June we covered an interesting experimental feature included in the VMware Workstation Technology Preview: WSX Server.

Today, the lead developer Christian Hammond, announced through his twitter account a new release of WSX July Tech Preview, with many technical improvements, some of them specially addressed to iPad users, bug fixes and known problems.

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Yesterday VMware announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2012.

Total revenue for the Q2 was $1.12 billion, an increase of 22% compared to Q2 2011 and 7% from Q1 2012.

Looking at the financials we can see how the growing trend of license revenue and software maintenance still holds with respectively 11% and 34% growths.

Closes the services revenue the professional services, up to 23% from Q2 2011.

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VMware just announced to have signed a definitive agreement for the acquisition of Nicira, Inc., for approximately $1.05 billion in cash plus $210 million of assumed unvested equity awards.
The parties expect the acquisition to close during the second half of 2012.
The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both VMware and Nicira and the stockholders of Nicira.

Nicira, Inc. is specialized in software-defined networking (SDN) and a leader in network virtualization for open source initiatives.

VMware, already a market leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions, relies in this acquisition to expand its networking scenery.

We’re curious to see the implications of this acquisition on the relationship between VMware and Cisco.

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On July 3rd, 2012 Rod Johnson, the australian creator of the Spring Framework and co-founder of SpringSource, announced on his twitter account and officially on the Springsource blog that he is going to leave VMware.

Rod Johnson, Founder and CEO of SpringSource, with over 15 years of experience in Technology and management, and author of “Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development” and “J2EE without EJB.” joined VMWare in august 2009 when SpringSource was acquired by VMWare.

The Spring Framework is an open source application framework and Inversion of Control container for the Java platform.

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