Veeam has released version 5.7 of the nworks Smart Plug-In (SPI) software for monitoring and management of VMware from HP Operations Manager and version 5.7 of the Management Pack for monitoring and management of VMware using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. This version will be the follow up of version 5.6 which was released in February this year.
virtualization.info Editors
Release: Citrix VDI-in-a-Box 5
Citrix has released version 5 of VDI-in-a-Box, the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution targeted at SMB’s it acquired after taking over Kaviza in May this year.
VDI-in-a-Box offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers. Customers just have to deploy the virtual appliance on their hypervisor of choice and they are ready to go. This version is the follow-up of version 4.1 which was released in April this year.
Paper: VMware vSphere 5.0 Upgrade Best Practices
VMware has released a paper titled: VMware vSphere 5.0 Upgrade Best Practices. The paper which contains 46 pages provides an overview of the ESXi 5.0 upgrade process and provides recommendations for a smooth and seamless transition. With this release, users have the ability to do an in-place upgrade from ESX 4.x to ESXi 5.0.
The paper covers the following topics:
Paper: VMware ESXi 5.0 Operations Guide
VMware has released the VMware ESXi 5.0 Operations Guide. The guide which contains 29 pages explains the architecture of ESXi and describes how various management tasks are performed in it. It can be used to plan a migration to the ESXi architecture and help to improve day-to-day operations.
The paper covers the following topics:
Release: VMware Player 4.0/ACE 2.7.5
Last month VMware released version 8.0 of Workstation, and while normally in line with Workstation, no update of Player or ACE was released. Now VMware has released version 4.0 of its virtualization platform Player and version 2.7.5 of its platform wrapper product ACE.
VMware player now only installs on workstations which have a 64-bit x86 CPU, and have LAHF/SAHF support in long mode, and if you want to install guests with a 64 bit os, you need either an AMD CPU with segment-limit support in long mode, or an Intel CPU which has VT-x support.
Player 4.0 provides the following new functionality:
Release: VMTurbo appliance update for October 2011
VMTurbo today announced the availability of the October 2011 update for its capacity management solution appliance, introducing Application Performance Management (APM) and multi-tenant support to fulfill specific needs of Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Hosting and Cloud providers. This version is the follow up of the August 2011 release which introduced support for Microsoft Hyper-V.
New features in this release are:
Release: Citrix XenServer 6.0.0
In March this year Citrix released a first public beta of the next version of XenServer called Project Boston, followed by another beta release in July this year. Now Citrix has released XenServer 6.0, which provides networking, performance and scalability improvements, based on the Xen hypervisor.
Citrix has now introduced the Open vSwitch (OVS) standard as the default network stack of the product. Citrix has decided not to release the Self-Service Manager feature available in the beta, because Citrix wants to line up with the Cloud.com products CloudStack and Cloud Portal which it acquired in July this year. Version 6.0 is available for download a the XenServer download page at Citrix.
Cisco extends support for its Nexus virtual switch to Hyper-V 3.0
During VMworld 2008 Cisco announced its virtual switch for ESX 4.0, called the Nexus 1000V, which is a a piece of software built on NX-OS, that plugs into ESX and that can be configured through the familiar Cisco command line interface.
Now that Microsoft announced the upcoming functionality in Windows Server 8, Cisco announced it will extend the Nexus 1000V to Microsofts hypervisor Hyper-V as well.
Release: VMware Fusion 4.0
VMware has released version 4.0 of its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion. This product is the follow up of version 3 for which the latest released version was 3.1.3. which was released in June this year.
Version 4.0 provides the following new features:
Tool: Quest vWorkSpace Desktop Optimizer
Quest has released a new tool called the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer. The tool contains Quests knowledge on how to optimize a Virtual Desktop, and although it is especially written for vWorkspace its also applicable to Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View.
The tool contains a list of 40 optimization settings stored in an XML which can be enabled or disabled using either a GUI interface or using the command line.