virtualization.info Editors

At the annual Microsoft Management Summit, in March this year Microsoft announced that Opalis, which Microsoft acquired in December 2009, would be renamed to System Center Orchestrator.

System Center Orchestrator (SCO) is Run Book Automation (RBA) software, which can be used to define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows. The workflows are defined in the SCO workflow designer, and so called Integration Packs are provided to interact with Microsoft and non-Microsoft products, which run on so called Action Servers.

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Major update released for Trilead VM Explorer, which reaches version 3.5. This is the new stable version.

The backup solution for VMware virtual machines gets some new features and some bugs fixes.

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VMTurbo has released its May update for its capacity management solution appliance, the Virtualization Management Suite. This update is the follow up of the April update which virtualization.info covered last month.

New features in this release:

• Inclusion of 2 additional monitored metrics, Input/Output operations per second (IOPS) and the associated latencies.
• Addition of time selectors, which enable data retrieval and display for any discrete time, upto the retention limits in several new areas of the Monitor.

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Oracle has released a maintenance update for their desktop virtualization solution VM VirtualBox, version 4.0.8. The update, which is considered a maintence release, is available for version 4.0 of VirtualBox which was released in December last year.

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In November last year, VMware released a paper titled: Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide, on which Microsoft responded the week after by stating that Microsoft does not support combining Exchange high availability with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability or migration solutions which automatically failover mailbox servers.

Now Microsoft has announced enhanced hardware virtualization support for Exchange 2010 stating that it is now supported to combe Exchange 2010 high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers. The updated support guidance applies to any hardware virtualization vendor participating in the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), which includes VMware as well.

To further support this Microsoft released a paper titled: Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V. The paper which contains 38 pages details how to implement these scenario’s using Microsoft Hyper-V.

Citrix has released a public Beta of the next major version of XenServer dubbed “Project Boston” (version 6.0 when released), providing private cloud self-service tools and platform, networking, performance and scalability improvements designed to create a multi-tenant environments.

XenServer “Project Boston” features:

• StorageLink and Site Recovery are now fully integrated within XenServer and managed from XenCenter.
• All virtual appliances are now Linux-based, only one Installation ISO as the Linux Supplemental Pack has been removed and Supplemental Pack are now available in virtual appliance format.

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VMware has announced that it acquired Shavlik Technologies, a company which provides software (SaaS and on-premise) that prevents, detects and removes critical security threats from corporate networks.

VMware already OEM’ed the Shavlik solutions for its VMware Update Manager (VUM) – and together with Shavlik developed Go Pro, a hosted web-based console that can be used to manage on-premises vSphere Hypervisor hosts and their virtual machines targeted for SMBs.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be completed later this quarter.

In November last year, Novell announced a deal to sell its assets to Attachmate Corporation and another entity CPTN Holdings LLC. In this deal Attachmate acquired the Platespin product portfolio, which Novell acquired in February 2008.

Now Attachmate is taking the next step, by rebranding the Platespin products to NetIQ, which Attachmate acquired in April 2006. While in November last year there was a possible scenario where the Platespin products would be transferred to Microsoft, which clearly could use the Platespin products to further enhance it’s own portfolio, but with this news Attachmate is clearly taking steps to become a virtualization vendor using its brand NetIQ.

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When Hyper-V was released in June 2008 Microsoft initially only supported the SUSE Enterprise Linux distribution by releasing so called Linux Integration Components providing drivers for synthetic devices. In July 2009 when Hyper-V 2.0 was released, Microsoft extended support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today at its annual Teched conference in Atlanta, Microsoft announced that it will now support the CentOS Linux distribution.

After Microsoft released the Linux Integration Components for hyper-V under the GPL v2 license, many efforts have been taken by the community to extend the Integration Services to other distributions, like for example by Yusuf Ozturk which released a Debian package to install the Integration Services, this remains unsupported by Microsoft though.

Veeam just announced that its Backup and Replication product will support Microsoft Hyper-V later this year. With Hyper-V support, customers will be able to manage backup, replication and restores for both VMware and Hyper-V from a single console. The solution will include changed block tracking and built-in deduplication and compression.

For Hyper-V Veeam is going to provide the following features:

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