virtualization.info Editors

On March 19 VMware announced the availability of vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5 that provides configuration management capabilities within VMware vCenter Operation Management Suite.

The primary theme for vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5 release is “Cloud Ready”.  New capabilities within this release significantly increase the ability of the Virtual Infrastructure team to ensure that their VMware Infrastructure is properly configured to meet the rigorous demands associated with virtualizing business critical workloads; including addressing requirements associated with VMware’s own hardening guidelines.

What gives more value to this release is the introduction of Change Management Dashboard, an high level dashboard that allows easily to track changes in configurations of VMware Infrastructure by product type and magnitude.

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On 3th of April Dell has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wyse Technology in order to extend its desktop virtualization offerings.

Dell’s goal is to gain a strong position in VDI thin client market and this operation may lead to great changes in an area where HP has already done its move.

“Desktop virtualization can help organizations streamline IT management, improve productivity and security, and increase cost efficiency for discrete workloads or usage scenarios. The Wyse Technology desktop virtualization capability complements Dell’s strongest-ever device and computing solutions portfolio, and strengthens our position in offering customers among the broadest set of computing choices from the edge to the core to the cloud.”

Jeff Clarke, president, End User Computing Solutions

Dell Inc.

Wyse Technology product portfolio includes thin clients, zero clients and software for mobile cloud connectivity like PocketCloud.

Source: http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/acq-wyse.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=corp

Aidan Finn, a Microsoft MVP with he Virtual Machine expertise wrote an article focused on one of the killer features of Windows Server 8: Hyper-V Replica.

In the article Finn explains how this feature is designed for low bandwidth, high latency networks that small and medium enterprises use for inter-site replication.

The HRL (Hyper-V Replica Log file) replay mechanism is actually quite clever; it replays the log file in reverse order, and this allows it only to store the latest writes.  In other words, it is asynchronous (able to deal with long distances and high latency by write in site A and later write in site B) and it replicates just the changes.

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March 2012 – VMware stars a new online publication with the purpose of raising the awareness among its customer and prospects about the new R&D areas where the company from Palo Alto is investing.

This first publishing covers distributed resource management, user experience monitoring and a couple of other topics we can resume with this index:

1. Introduction
   Steve Herrod, CTO
2. VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient Handling of System Images
   Olivier Cremel
3. A Software-based Approach to Testing VMware® vSphere® VMkernel Public APIs
   Lan Xue, Sreevathsa Sathyanarayana, James Truong, Sriram Sankaran, Ramesh Pallapotu, Thorbjoern Donbaek, Eric Lorimer
4. Providing Efficient and Seamless Desktop Services in Ubiquitous Computing Environments
   Lizhu Zhang, Wenlong Shao, Jim Grandy
5. Comprehensive User Experience Monitoring
   Lawrence Spracklen, Banit Agrawal, Rishi Bidarkar, Hari Sivaraman
6. StatsFeeder: An Extensible Statistics Collection Framework for Virtualized Environments
   Vijayaraghavan Soundararajan, Balaji Parimi, Jon Cook
7. VMware Distributed Resource Management: Design, Implementation, and Lessons Learned
   Ajay Gulati, Anne Holler, Minwen Ji, Ganesha Shanmuganathan, Carl Waldspurger, Xiaoyun Zhu
8. Identity, Access Control, and VMware Horizon
   Will Pugh, Kyle Austin
9. VMworld 2011 Hands-On Labs: Implementation and Workflow
   Adam Zimman, Clair Roberts, Mornay Van Der Walt

VMware will try to publish this journal on a  regular basis in the future.

Source: http://labs.vmware.com/publications/vmware-technical-journal

Trend Micro has announced his new comprehensive Security Platform for physical, virtual and cloud server: Deep Security 8.0.

Designed specifically for next-generation datacenters consists of 7 main modules:

• Anti-Malware Protection for VMware Environments
• Intrusion Detection and Prevention
• Application Control
• Bidirectional Stateful Firewall
• Integrity Monitoring
• Web application Protection
• Log Inspection

The platform supports all main operating system (modern releases for Microsoft, Linux, Solaris and UNIX) and virtualization platforms (VMware ESX/vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft HyperV) and covers the entire technology landscape from physical machines to VDI environment allowing high level of compliance (PCI DSS 2.0, HIPAA, FISMA/NIST, NERC. SAS 70, and more.) with proportionate, cost-effective investments.

Via: http://vmblog.com/archive/2012/03/15/trend-micro-announces-deep-security-8-0.aspx

Source: http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/cloud-solutions/deep-security/index.html

On 29th of March Login Consultants announced the new Client Side Performance Testing module for Login VSI.

Included as an option in Login VSI Pro 3.6 the module allows full end-to-end measurement of the user experience in desktop virtualization environments.

This tool may fill the gap for a more realistic VDI environment benchmark that includes end-to-end performance metering.

VDI Client Side Testing module is still a beta and the final price has yet to be announced.

The new testing scenarios introduced includes:

• What if we increase the number of users on a single server- or pool of servers? What is the impact of responsiveness of protocol on client side?
• If we switch from Server Side to Client Side rendering, what is the impact on bandwidth consumption and therefore protocol responsiveness?
• What is the real effect of WAN accelerators on response time at the endpoint (no caching = realistic results)?

Source: http://www.loginvsi.com/en/news/press-release-vdi-benchmarking-tool-login-vsi-enhanced-with-client-side-performance-testing

On March 9, VMware published a paper, intended mainly for business decision-makers, where tries to explain its vision of VDI future in terms of cost & time savings.
An important step is where the author rationalizes the entire product portfolio that VMware puts on the market (now or in the near future) to complete his vision:

• VMware View: Virtual desktops as a managed service
• VMware ThinApp: Virtual applications as a managed service
• Project AppBlast: HTML5-based delivery of legacy applications via a web browser
• Project Octopus: Secure data share and sync
• Horizon Application Manager: Now, policy-based management of applications (SaaS, web applications, ThinApp virtualized Windows applications, and enterprise applications). Soon, policy-based management of all public and private cloud services (desktops, applications, and data).
• Horizon Mobile: A secure, managed, and policy-driven virtual smartphone for work, isolated and protected inside a personal smartphone

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Oracle has released version 4.1.8 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version which can be considered a maintenance release can be installed on top of any VM VirtualBox 4.1.x installation and is the follow up of version 4.1.6. which was released in November this year.

This version fixes a couple of issues which are described in the changelog.

VKernel, recently acquired by Quest Software has released version 4.5. of its vOperations Suite (vOps). vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and Chargeback functionality for VMware and Hyper-V environments.

This version lacks the support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), which the company announced in August and promised to deliver in Q4 this year.

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Teradici is the developer of the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) remote desktop protocol, which is leveraged in software (by VMware view) and provided with Teradici hardware solutions which are OEM’ed by several vendors. Teradici announced the release of firmware version 3.5.0. for its PCoIP zero client devices and version 1.7 of it’s Management Console which it announced in April last year, providing USB peripheral, login and security enhancements.

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