History

Beth Pariseau posted an interesting article on the SearchServerVirtualization.com website giving more information about the expected VMware Aware Storage APIs (VASA). The VASA will be provided by VMware with support from several storage partners, and will provide improved visibility into the physical storage infrastructure through vCenter and CapacityIQ.

VASA will be a standardized API that all storage vendors can write to that will actually push data into the vCenter database, so that analytics products can do additional analysis on the data.

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The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) has released a report titled: Lab Validation Report, Citrix XenServer, Complete, Cost-effective Data Center and Server Virtualization. The report which contains 20 pages documents hands-­‐on testing of Citrix XenServer 5.6 with a focus on manageability, consolidation, and cost effectiveness. The following features were tested: Initial deployment, managebility, XenConvert, OVG Appliance Import, Dynamic Memory Control, Workload Balancing, XenServer HA and StorageLink with Site Recovery.

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The VMware performance team has published an article about VMware Load-Based Teaming (LBT) Performance. LBT is a dynamic and traffic-load-aware teaming policy introduced in vSphere 4.1. that can ensure that physical NIC capacity in a NIC team is optimized. While traditional load balancing options base their routing on virtual switch port ID, IP hash or source MAC hash, LBT bases its load balancing on current network traffic, making sure traffic is effectively distributed among the physical uplinks. LBT also takes into consideration the disparity of the physical NIC capacity, for example a mixture of 1GBe and 10GBe physical NICs in a NIC team.

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virtualization.info today got confirmation from a reliable source that Patrick Lin, who was Vice President of Product Management has left VMware to join Jive Software, a company which makes enterprise social media software.

Lin joined VMware in 2004, where he became director of product management, working his way up to Vice President of Product Management since January 2009.

VMware has published a paper titled: VMware High Availability (HA): Deployment Best Practices. The paper which contains 10 pages describes the best practices and guidance for deploying VMware High Availability in vSphere 4.1. The paper also includes some discussions about proper network and storage design, and recommendations on settings for host isolation response and admission control.

The paper contains the following sections:

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As part of its free holiday gift for the virtualization community, Veeam announced that VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals(VCP) and VMware Certified Instructors(VCI) will be able to download a free two-socket license of Veeam products for their home lab.

The offer includes the use of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 with vPower, and the Veeam ONE solution which consists of Veeam Monitor, Veeam Reporter and Veeam Business View.

The Not-for-resale (NFR) software license keys are available for non-production use at http://www.veeam.com/go/free-nfr-license.

Liquidware Labs has released version 4.7 of Profile Unity, extending support to VMware ThinApp. ProfileUnity is a profile migration and management tool which works with Windows XP/2000/Vista and Windows 7 profiles. It provides migration of Windows native user data to Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, Windows 7 environments and now also VMware ThinApp keeping the profiles in the native Windows format.

Profile Unity, is a rebranded product which originally was called Script Start from a company called Entrigue Systems, which Liquidware Labs acquired in September 2009.

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After releasing a beta in November for Citrix XenServer this year, PHD has now released version 5.1 of its Virtual Backup product for VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer environments. The product is delivered as a Virtual Appliance which integrates into the console of XenCenter or vSphere client offering a single pane of glass.

PHD Virtual Backup can backup running and powered down VMs and VM Templates.

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Virtual Computers has hired John Glendenning as its new Senior Vice President(SVP) of Worldwide Sales, PRWeb reports. Glendenning comes from Citrix where he was VP Worlwide OEM Sales and Vice President EMEA, Server Virtualization for allmost 2 1/2 years. Before that he was Vice President Worldwide Sales at XenSource, which was acquired by Citrix in October 2007.

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After VMWare aquired the mobile virtualization startup Trango for which the outcome is now reflected in the VMware Mobile Virtual Platform (MVP) Architecture, Citrix invested in one of Trango’s biggest competitors: Open Kernel Labs in order to provide Windows virtualization for smartphones.

Open Kernel Labs has been very critical since on the VMware MVP architecture, detailed by virtualization.info in November this year, where Open Kernel Labs critizes the use of a type-2 architecture by VMware.

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