virtualization.info Editors

Yesterday VMTurbo announced that Dennis Hoffman, currently Senior Vice President, Service Provider at EMC Corporation, has joined the company’s Board of Directors.

With more than 20 years of industry experience and a security background, Hoffman was one of the key men in the acquisition of RSA Security and the formation of EMC’s security division.

Service providers are building out cloud infrastructures on vCloud Director, CloudStack and OpenStack platforms and must run these environments at high levels of efficiency to compete with commodity providers like Amazon EC2. At the same time, they have to differentiate themselves with service, service level assurance and management capabilities. VMTurbo is perfectly positioned to assist on both fronts and I look forward to helping advise the company as they accelerate these efforts.

Said Hoffman.

Yesterday the Fedora Project announced the general availability of Fedora 17, the latest version of Red Hat sponsored free open source operating system distribution.

In the rich set of new features worth to mention the update of OpenStack and the addition of project oVirt.

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Last week Quest Software announced the availability of vRanger 5.4 its backup, replication and recovery solution for VMware.

The main feature of this new release is the plug-and-play integration with Data Domain Boost software, EMC’s deduplication software that distributes part of the deduplication process among backup server or application clients enabling it to send only unique data segments to a Data Domain system.

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Last week VKernel announced the release of vOPS Server Standar 5.0 with a particular emphasis on the introduction of new automation features like on-click auto-deployment of capacity reservations, automated risk assessment of VM configuration modifications and automatic rollback capabilities for unauthorized environments changes.

VKernel, sensitive to the automation challenge supported from the other vendors, extended these capabilities in this new release  allowing automatically deployment of Virtual Machines based on capacity reservations. These virtual machine reservation are now able to autonomously trigger virtual machine deployments closing the capacity management process loop.

vOPS Server 5.0 also features a new Change Analyzer module that collects, analyzes and archives all the data needed to automatically assess the risk related to environment changes, the same module grants the possibility to enable a quick roll back of the changes made.

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Today Milan hosted the VMware Forum 2012, during the opening keynote Brian Gammage, VMware’s Chief Market Technologist, tried to collect all the news and declarations we heard in the last few days, like the acquisition of Wanova and Stephen Herrod’s speech at another italian event, and give an univocal reading to the entire plan.

The starting point of the keynote was “we just came out from Mainframe to Client-Server transition, which started with an economical advantage and endend with an incredible overhead just to control the new power given to the users we must be careful with the transition to Cloud-era“.

“Its easy to get confused with VMware’s products line because we are the only company with such a large offering” continued Gammage, probably referring to the supposed gaffe of Stephen Herrods, then presented a slide that resumed VMware’s offering in a SIMPLIFY-MANAGE-CONNECT schema.

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Yesterday VMware announced the acquisition of Wanova Inc. a company whose main product is called Mirage.

Mirage is a centralized management and recovery solution for physical desktop images over the cloud, uses a layering technology to segment OS, applications and user personalizations into isolated containers allowing administrators to manage separately hardware and each layer of software.

Wanova’s technology will be integrated into VMware View finally offering layering functionalities and a deeper user customization, maybe will also introduce a little bit of physical desktop culture into VMware’s offering.

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Yesterday VMware published a paper focused on VMware vMSC (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster), a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List intended for environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a key requirement.

vMSC infrastructures are implemented with the goal of bringing the same benefits of high-availability clusters in local sites, but in a geographically distributed model with two data centers in different locations.

The document, written for a technical audience, describes how vSphere handles specific failure scenarios in environments where the distance between datacenters is limited, often metropolitan or campus environments.

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Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.

Terms of the transaction were not released.

The move suggest the intentions of EMC to compete with consumer-focused storage offering like DropBox and applications more enterprise-like as VMware’s Project Octopus, neo-released in beta.

The addition of Syncplicity also extends EMC’s strategy of enabling the ‘New User’ in the Post PC era, those who want to access, share, collaborate and participate in business processes on their preferred device.

This quote reminds us the growing trend of BYOD (bring your own device) workplaces where employees of large corporate struggle for shared storage services and the enterprise IT tries to control the security implications of the phenomenon.

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On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.

This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.

All the new key features are devoted to simplify the work for Virtualization Administrators and follows the application-driven approach to virtualization that Oracle has kept so far.

The new features could be summarized as follows:

• Enhanced User Interface: The new Oracle VM 3.1 Manager introduces a new set of wizards for large-scale deployments, tasks and workflows execution in a Web browser interface.
• Enhanced Storage Configuration Capabilities: Focused on the simplification of backup and disaster recovery, now allows access to NFS external storage and the quick copy of iSCSI and Fiberchannel-based storage repository from one cluster to another, including across WANs.
• Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops

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In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the release 5.1 of VMware View.

The post touches 4 main points:

• PCoIP Efficiency: The Team claims to have achieved, through compression protocols refinements and general performances optimization, up to 1.3X reduction in PCoIP overheads.
• Client Optimizations: Even in this case the Team talks about up to 3X improvement in video playback performance, with a particular focus to low-performing processors that can now reach a smooth 720p playback.

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