virtualization.info Editors

NetApp has released a new whitepaper titled: VMware vSphere 4.1 Storage Performance: Measuring FCoE, FC, iSCSI, and NFS Protocols. The Paper which contains 25 pages covers the relative I/O performance available from SAN and NAS storage protocols with vSphere 4.1 and a NetApp FAS array. The paper results obtained from shared and non-shared datastores, has VAAI enabled and measures the gains provided by the Paravirtual SCSI adapter. The paper covers both large numbers of VMs accessing shared datastores and single VMs generating high levels of concurrent I/O using a nonshared datastore.

The tests were conducted on a 8-node vSphere 4.1 cluster. Each host was powered by a Fujitsu Primergy RX200 with 2 Quad-core Intel Xeon E5507 Nehalem CPUs & 48GBs of memory, Qlogic CNA & HBAs, and Intel NICs. The I/O load was generated by 128 VMs, each running IOMeter. The storage array comprised of a NetApp FAS 6210 running Data Ontap 8.0.1RC2, configured with 190 15k SAS drives, connected to a pair of Cisco Nexus 5020 unified fabric network switches via NetApp’s Unified Connect CNA.

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Yusuf Ozturk, the guy who developed the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V Debian Package just released a new tool called: Unattended Linux VM Configuration Tool for Hyper-V. The tool which is provided as a Windows PowerShell module is able to create Linux Virtual Machines on a Hyper-V host is able to modify VM templates or clean installed Linux VMs, supporting Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat and Suse Linux, with automatic Linux integration components installation. If you create a source Linux VM, you are able to clone it and change the information via Set-LinuxVM command.

The module can be executed on a Hyper-V host directly, no System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) environment is needed, but SCVMM is supported as target.

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Citrix has released Service Pack 2 for its virtualization platform product XenServer 5.6. Service Pack 2 can be installed on top of XenServer 5.6 or XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 which was released in December last year adding functionality such as distributed virtual switching, automated VM protection and recovery and a web management console for delegated administration.

Service Pack 2 contains fixes and adds the following new features since Feature Pack 1:

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VKernel has released version 2.6 of its Chargeback with Hyper-V product adding support for Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV).Chargeback with Hyper-V is capable of measuring actual or allocated resource usage by application or business group.

Chargeback with Hyper-V is provided as a Virtual Appliance which provides similar functionality as the VKernel Chargeback product for VMware environments which VKernel recently combined with their report module and rebranded as vOps Reporting and Chargeback becoming part of their vOperations Suite. Chargeback with Hyper-V collects information directly from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and connects into the SCVMM Self Service Portal.

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VKernel has released version 4.4. of its Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V product adding support for Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V is capable of finding current & future performance bottlenecks in storage, memory, CPU & storage I/O.

Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V is provided as a Virtual Appliance which provides similar functionality as the VKernel Capacity Analyzer product for VMware environments which VKernel recently rebranded as vOps Capacity Manager becoming part of their vOperations Suite. Capacy Analyzer with Hyper-V collects its performance metrics from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

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Liquidware Labs announced that it has hired Jason Mattox, ex- CTO and co founder of Vizioncore as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Mattox comes from Quest, where he was appointed Director and Chief Technologist in July 2009 after Vizioncore was acquired by Quest in January 2008.

In December last year, Citrix released version 5 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform XenDesktop. Now Citrix has released Service Pack 1 adding support for XenServer 5.6 Service Pack 2, Microsoft SCVMM R2 Service Pack 1 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Service Pack 1 and VMware vSphere 4.1 Update 1.

Besides fixing issues, Citrix XenDesktop 5 Service Pack 1 adds the following new features:

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The XenServer Engineering team has just released a new guide that provides advanced design and best practice information about networking.

The 89 pages of this new guide complete and extend informations contained in the Introduction on XenServer NetWorking  guide, released on December 2010.

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Following up version 1.0, released last August, VDI Works just announced the second version of its iPad client for its custom-protocol VDI solution.

The software is already available for download from iTunes for USD 6.99.

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After supporting the Eucalyptus platform, reaching 25.000 cloud deployments and customers as large as Nasa, Ubuntu will abandon Eucalyptus for OpenStack, said today at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Bucarest Canonical’s Server Engineering manager.

Neil Levine, the head of the cloud initiative and one of the top execs of the company, left Canonical only a few days ago: it is very easy today to make a connection between the two events.
The latest version of OpenStack, Cactus, will be available for the 11.04 Ubuntu release: however, the change will be effective since Oneric Ocelot, where the default cloud platform will effectively be OpenStack.

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