Bertrand Serlet joins Parallels Board of Directors

Today Paralles announced the appointment of Bertrand Serlet, former Senior Vice President (SVP) of Software Engineering at Apple Inc., to its board of directors.

Serlet, in his 14years history at Apple, was one of the supervisors of the release of Apple’s OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard. His role as a non-executive director for Paralles will accelerate growth and integration among Parallels products and Apple’s operating systems.

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Cisco acquires Virtuata

Today Hilton Romanski, Cisco VP of corporate development, announced, through a blog post, the acquisition of Virtuata Inc. a private held company located in Silicon Valley and specialized in virtual machine security.

As companies move toward virtualized or cloud solutions, the security of virtual machines, deployed locally or through multiple datacenters or infrastructures, grows in importance.

Cisco, following the example of several startups in the market, acquires, with Virtuata, the competence needed to complete his offering.

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Release: VMware vFabric Data Director 2.0

Last week VMware announced VMware vFabric Data Director 2.0 that introduces the support for virtualization of Oracle databases on vSphere.

Provide Database as a Service is an important goal for IT departments that supports development projects or a large number of databases with different lifecycles, vFabric Data Director 2.0 promises more simplification and automation in the whole management process.

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Release: VMware vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1a

Yesterday VMware announced the general availability of VMware vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1a, the firs major update since version 5.0 release.

The main improvements are:

  • vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1a introduces support for the following vCenter Databases
    • Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, Standard ONE Edition Release 2 [11.2.0.3] – 64 bit
    • Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, Standard ONE Edition Release 2 [11.2.0.3] – 32 bit
  • vCenter Server Appliance Database Support: The DB2 express embedded database provided with the vCenter Server Appliance has been replaced with VMware vPostgres database. This decreases the appliance footprint and reduces the time to deploy vCenter Server further.

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VKernel releases Integration Support with Microsoft System Center 2012

Yesterday VKernel announced the release of vOPS Server Standard 5.1 which includes integration capabilities between its vOPS Server product line and Microsoft System Center 2012 that can now monitor multi-hypervisor environments and raise alerts for performance and capacity issues in virtual machines.

This solution joins the previously announced integrations from Veeam and InMon.

The integration between VKernel vOPS Server Product Line and the new System Center 2012 will help to expand the monitoring cover for those customer who use System Center for both their physical and virtual environments adding the support for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).

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Microsoft announces Windows Server 2012 & Windows 8 availability

According to Windows Server Blog and Windows Team Blog, yesterday at Microsoft’ annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Tornoto, Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2012 will be released to manufacturing in the first week of August then the product will be generally available to customer worldwide in September.

Same fate for Windows 8 that will be released in RTM (Release to Manufacturing) and made available for enterprise customers with Software Assurance benefits, the first week of August.

Windows 8 general availability is still planned for the end of October.

Microsoft published Windows 2012 Editions and Licensing

In these days Microsoft published an overview on Windows 2012’s Editions and Licensing.

From an editions perspective we find two “main” editions, Standard and Datacenter, differentiated only by virtualization rights: two virtual instances for Standard and unlimited for Datacenter.

The VMs are entitled to run on up to two processors for both editions.

All the features available in the Datacenter edition are also available in the Standard edition, including high availability features like failover clustering, that make the choice between Windows Server 2012′ editions based only on companies’ virtualization strategy.

Windows 2012 Essential and Foundation don’t have any virtualization right.

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