Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
virtualization.info Editors 
Two days ago InMon Corp., a company based in San Francisco and focused on the development of traffic monitoring solutions for high-speed switched networks, announced that its sFlow Agent for Hyper-V now works with the Virtual Machine Manager component of System Center 2012.
The sFlow Agent for Windows Server Hyper-V is a traffic monitoring component that integrates with the Microsoft Hyper-V extensible switch to monitor the virtual network traffic in the same way as physical network traffic.
Today Embotics, a Canadian company that entered the VM lifecycle management market in 2007 with a product called V-Commander, announced that it has closed $8.4 million in equity financing.
This investment, led by VentureLink and Convington Fund II Inc. with $2.5 million each raises the total funding amount to $18 million.
This round comes after Embotics’ most successful year to date with 300% growth in sales over the past year and 220% year-on-year growth in new customers, including Bell, Deloitte, Cisco, CSC, etc.
We continue to support Embotics because of its proven track record of successfully developing products that address the problems in virtual data center environments. Our experience investing in the virtualization sector, along with Embotics’ success in assisting companies with private cloud management, automation and self-service provisioning, make for a smart business and investment partnership between our two organizations.
said Phil Reddon, managing partner of Covington.
Last week Citrix announced the achievement of a definitive agreement to acquire Bytemobile, a privately held company founded in 2000 and focused on video optimization over mobile networks.
The transaction is expected to close during the third quarter of 2012.
Bytemobile will open the doors of more than 130 mobile operators in 60 countries to Citrix, significantly increasing the company’s market reach and expanding his mobile solutions portfolio with new synergies.
With the advent of the Cloud Era, mobile operators are experiencing explosive growth in network traffic, driven by the combination of new consumer devices, rich multimedia content, and high speed 3G, 4G and LTE networks. By joining forces, Citrix and Bytemobile will be able to offer these operators combined solutions that deliver a high quality user experience to mobile subscribers, while helping operators manage the exponential growth of mobile network traffic with the best performance, visibility and efficiency. The acquisition builds on a strategic partnership announced earlier this year that combined the Bytemobile Smart Capacity™ technology with the Citrix NetScaler® line of cloud networking solutions.
Last week Microsoft published a comprehensive schema called Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Component Architecture Poster.
This document provides a visual reference that describes Hyper-V technologies in Windows Server 2012 in the following areas:
Today VMware published a paper intended for costumers that are evaluating an implementation of VMware vSphere Storage DRS in combination with advanced storage device features or other VMware Products.
Virtual machine storage provisioning historically has imposed operational challenges. Monitoring datastore capacity and I/O load has proven to be very difficult and as a result is often neglected. During the provisioning process for virtual machines, virtual disk datastores are often randomly selected, leading to hot spots and over- or underutilized datastores. Storage DRS is a new feature introduced in VMware vSphere® 5.0 that provides smart virtual machine placement and load balancing mechanisms based on I/O and space capacity.
It will help decrease operational effort associated with the provisioning of virtual machines and monitoring of the storage environment.
This Week Parallels updated its Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac introducing experimental support for Windows 8 Consumer Preview, released last week at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, including automated download and installation via the Parallels New Virtual Machine Wizard.
This update also adds:
If you take a look into the Productivity category of Apple’s AppStore you will find an useful app called vPowerCLI5 Reference.
This app is to be used for referencing the 300 and more VMware vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets.
PowerCLI is the vSphere command line tool that lets administrators automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, VM, guest OS, etc.
Today CiRBA announced release 7.1 of CiRBA Control Console, one of the components of its capacity management tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI), that will be generally available in July. This new release extends the same technology used with VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments to manage virtualized AIX Infrastructures based on IBM PowerVM Platform. CiRBA 7.1 is able to analyze all the PowerVM Platform advanced capabilities like Logical Partitions (LPARs), Virtual I/O Servers (VIOS), shared processor pools, Capacity on Demand and HA failover nodes providing detailed infrastructure healt reports valorized with historical utilization data and comparehensive policies, that determine where and with how many resources, workloads and applications should be placed within the infrastructure. 
Today Veeam Software announced the general availability of Veeam Backup Free Edition, the successor of its free backup tool FastSCPTM, in conjunction with the release of version 6.1 of its disaster recovery solution, Backup & Replication.
Veeam Backup Free Edition, that combines well with Veeam One Free Edition released in April, includes the following features:
- VeeamZIP™: Ad-hoc backup of a running VM for operational, archival or portability purposes. For example, admins can now back up a VM before applying patches, create an archive copy of a VM, or copy a VM to a remote test lab—without powering off the production VM.
- Instant File-Level Recovery: Restore individual guest files directly from an image-level backup.
- File Manager: Easily manage VM and host files.
- Quick Migration for VMware: Migrate a running VM to any host or datastore—even if you don’t use clusters or shared storage.
Last week Ben Armstrong, Senior Program Manager Lead at Microsoft, published a post on his MSDN Blog that gathers all the official links related to Hyper-V on the RC version of Windows Server 2012.
Among all the documents, coming from Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform site and the Technet Library, you can find and interesting comparison guide between Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 RC which unveils all the new features with the following classification:
