virtualization.info Editors

In April this year, virtualization.info announced that Quest started a partnership with MokaFive to bundle its client virtualizations solution, with its own VDI connection broker software, calling it the vWorkspace MokaFive Suite.

The combined solution is capable of providing a local Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution, which will be able to manage, secure and deliver virtual desktops to Windows and Mac. With this combined solution Quest now has the opportunity to support client based VMs running on top of VMware Player or Fusion, Virtual Box or Parallels Workstation, or even the MokaFive BareMetal hypervisor which MokaFive released in May this year.

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During VMworld in Las Vegas last week, VMware announced the availability of version 5 of its disaster recovery tool for vSphere environments, Site Recovery Manager. Site Recovery Manager enables you to build, manage and execute automated distaster recovery plans for your vSphere infrastructure. This version provides support for vSphere 5 which was released at the end of last month.

VMware also announced that some of its partners will provide the SRM functionality in a Software as a Service (SaaS) scenario, partners include FusionStorm, Hosting.com, iland and VeriStor.

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Virtual Computer has released version 4 of its client hypervisor NxTop.

NxTop consists of two tiers, NxTop Client which is a Xen-based client hypervisor and NxTop Center, its centralized management component. It combines network-based storage with a stateless client-side hypervisor.

NxTop hypervisor is also available in a Workstation edition, which is a scaled down free version of the platform, including a centralized management solution, capped to a maximum of five managed computers.

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As part of the release of vSphere 5, VMware also released version 4.2 of its runbook automation software, called vCenter Orchestrator. This version is the follow up of version 4.1 which was released in August 2010. This version provides mainly bug fixing, mainly because VMware focussed more on releasing more plugins for Orchestrator, which are 7 at this moment.

When you install vCenter Server 5.0 this version will already be installed, if you want to install Orchestrator on another system, you can use the standalone installer.

During VMworld in Las Vegas VMware announced the availability of version 5.0 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform View. This version is the follow up of version 4.6 which was released in February this year.

VMware claims that View 5 consumes up to 75 percent less bandwidth over LAN and WAN connections. This version also introduces the profile management technology for stateless desktops which VMware acquired from RTO Software in March 2010, and originally expected to be released with VMware View 4.5.

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VKernel has announced version 4.0 of its vOperations Suite. vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and Chargeback functionality for VMware and Hyper-V environments. Support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) which VKernel announced earlier this month will be added in Q4 this year.

vOperations Suite 4 provides the following new functionality:

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VMware has released version 4.6.2. of its application virtualization solution ThinApp. Version 4.6.1. is the follow up of version 4.6.1. which was released in February this year. This version is considered a maintenance release providing mainly bug fixes and application compatibility improvements.

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VMware has announced that it has acquired PacketMotion, a company focusing on User Activity Management and Network Visibility. PacketMotion which was covered by virtualization.info in May this year when it introduced its PacketSentry Virtual Probe product, which provides a VM-to-VM monitoring solution. Besides that PacketMotion provides solutions which deliver user activity context for network segmentation and data access monitoring.

VMware will integrate the technologies of PacketMotion into its vShield portfolio, where the product will provide visibility in who is accessing data. The team will be integrated into the Cloud infrastructure Business Unit.

Duncan Epping, working as a Principal Architect at the VMware Tech Marketing team and Frank Denneman who is Consulting Architect at VMware have published a book titled: VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive.

The book explains the concepts and mechanisms and covers the necessary steps to create a vSphere High Availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) cluster and create vSphere Storage DRS, a new feature in vSphere 5.

The book also covers HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools, Datastore Clusters and resource allocation settings and provides basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures and fundamental supporting features like (Storage) vMotion, Storage I/O Control and much more.

VMware has released a paper titled: "vSphere High Availability Deployment Best Practices". The paper which contains 17 pages covers how to configure vSphere High Availability in order to enable rapid recovery from outages and HA for applications running in VMs based on best practices from the field.

The paper covers the following topics:

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