Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
PHD Virtual has released version 6.1 of its product Backup. This version is the follow-up of version 6.0 which was released in august this year. PHD Virtual Backup is a Virtual Appliance which is capable of backing up both VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer environments. The product integrates into the console of XenCenter or the vSphere client to offer a single pane of glass.
Version 6.1 provides the following new functionality:
Dell has released a paper titled: "Deploying a Hypervisor using the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter in a Dell Active System Manager Environment" The paper which contains 14 pages details configuration of a Dell PowerEdge M1000e chassis with a Management Template in Active System Manager, and then deploying a hypervisor to one or more of its blade servers using the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. The paper assumes you have Dell Active System Manager and the Dell Management Plug-in already in place in your environment.
Active System Manager can configure blade servers for many different kinds of operating system deployments. An administrator creates a Deployment Template that includes system variables for a specific set of custom-defined configurations to meet the needs of a deployment environment, and then applies that template to a server.
Dell has released a paper titled: Microsoft Server 2012 for Dell Converged Blade Data Center: Reference Architecture. The paper which contains 25 pages details a reference architecture validated by Dell Engineering for using Windows Server 2012 with Dell PowerEdge Blade Server, Force 10 Switches and EqualLogic Storage.
The architecture defined in this document includes Dell PowerEdgeTM M420 blade servers, Dell EqualLogic Storage, Dell Force10 network switches, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition with Hyper-V Role enabled, and two Dell PowerEdge R620 servers that manage the solution by hosting Dell management tools.
Dell already a while ago released a paper titled: "Dell DVS Reference Architecture for Windows Server 2012 v1.1". The paper which contains 49 pages describes the Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DVS) reference architecture consisting of DELL servers running Windows Server 2012 and DELL networking, – storage, -software and DELL endpoints.
The paper describes the detailed design and its constraints, the hardware requirements, the risks, issues, assumptions and concessions, a breakdown into key elements and a scaling and component selection guidance. For workload testing Login VSI was used as a testing suite, and Stratusphere UX from Liquidware Labs was used to monitor end-user experience.
VMware has updated its VMFS Technical Overview paper for vSphere 5.1. The Paper titled VMware vSphere VMFS Technical Overview and Best Practices contains 17 pages and details how the VMware File System (VMFS) works. VMFS increases resource utilization by providing multiple virtual machines with shared access to a consolidated pool of clustered storage.
VMFS provides the basis for other VMware services like virtual machine snapshots, VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning, VMware vSphere vMotion, VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (vSphere DRS), VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), VMware vSphere Storage DRS and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion.
VMware has released a paper titled: VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), the paper which contains 19 pages details the current vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) available today. When VAAI was introduced in the vSphere 4.1 timeframe there were three block based storage (Fibre Channel, iSCSI and FCoE) and with the introduction of vSpere 2 VAAI primitives for NAS storage and vSphere Thin Provisioning were introduced.
VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), also referred to as hardware acceleration or hardware offload APIs, are a set of APIs to enable communication between VMware vSphere ESXi hosts and storage devices. The APIs define a set of “storage primitives” that enable the ESXi host to offload certain storage operations to the array, which reduces resource overhead on the ESXi hosts and can significantly improve performance for storage-intensive operations such as storage cloning, zeroing, and so on. The goal of VAAI is to help storage vendors provide hardware assistance to speed up VMware I/O operations that are more efficiently accomplished in the storage hardware.
Lanamark last week announced that it has released a new module called the DR Capacity Planning Module, to be included into its Lanamark Suite paid Services Edition. The module allows cloud and virtualization solution providers to design fault-tolerant, multi-site DR solutions for server workloads and virtual desktops across public, private and hybrid clouds.
The DR Capacity Planning module integrates with the Hybrid Cloud Design Module and Desktop Transformation Module. It enables site recovery planning with unidirectional protection from a primary to a secondary site, bidirectional protection between sites and multisite recovery to a shared DR site. Each group of users and machines can be assigned to a recovery site and disaster recovery plans for shutting down low priority server workloads and virtual desktops can be defined to free up resources during failover. These settings are then used to optimize infrastructure capacity and model failover scenarios while meeting specified DR policies and service level agreements.
VMware yesterday released version 5.6 of its performance, capacity and configuration analytics product vCenter Operations Manager. The product which was first released in March last year, combines several products acquired by VMware in the past and is part of the vCloud suite, which besides vCenter Operations Manager also includes vSphere, vCloud Connector, vCloud Director, vCloud Networking and Security, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, vFabric Application Director, en vCloud Automation Center. vCloud Operation Manager functionality is partly available in the vCloud Advanced licensed suite and fully in the Enterprise version as detailed here.
vCenter Operations Manager provides performance, capacity and configuration analytics for management of highly virtual infrastructures and cloud infrastructures. It does so by analyzing and correlating data across the monitored IT infrastructure in a pretty unique way: for each tracked resource, it can identify the normal behavior of every metric (which implies a dynamic adjustment of thresholds) and then automatically recognize an anomaly. Capacity Management is provided to enable users to users to analyze, forecast, and plan the capacity needs of their virtual datacenter environment. Configuration and Compliance Management is provided by collecting, fixing, provisioning and managing configurations.
HP has released a new tool called the HP Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV). The tool is capable of detecting, diagnosing and trouleshooting issues in virtualized environments. The Virtualization Performance Viewer is offered in a free edition which is limited and a Licensed version providing full functionality.
vPV supports the hypervisors from VMware and Microsoft and is available as a CentOS-based virtual appliance (VA), which can be deployed using the vSphere client or as a Linux installer on RHEL version 6.x. The free version is also available for Windows Client Operating Systems.
Three Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), Hans Vredevoort, Aidan Finn and Damian Flynn are conducting a research on Hyper-V adoption. The goal of the survey is to gain insight about if people have learned about Windows Server 2012 and its included Hypervisor Hyper-V 3.0 and System Center. The survey also want to know who is using them, if people are planning on using them and how they are intending to use the products.
You can participate in the survey by filling out 72 questions available here, the survey is available until December 1st. The results will be posted shortly after that.
In 2011, this group also conducted a survey which is still available for download here.