History

Today, November 26, CA Technologies published a press release where it is announched that according to a comparative product review made by Network Testing Labs, its product CA ARCserve R16 has beaten Veeam® Backup & Replication™ 6.5 in every category.

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VMware has released version 1.0 of its vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager, an optional module which is capable of managing the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor from vCenter. While vCenter markets the product as a Multi-Hypervisor product this version clearly targets Microsoft because it only supports the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 hypervisors at this time. It’s not clear if VMware is planning to support Windows Server 2012 which contains Hyper-V 3.0 or the Xen Hypervisor any time soon.

Microsoft also provides multi-hypervisor management capabilities in its System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) product, the major difference though is that SCVMM still needs vCenter while this plugin can directly manage Hyper-V hosts without needing an SCVMM infrastructure.

The vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager provides some functionality (management) from the vCenter XVP Manager and Converter on which virtualization.info reported in February last year. This fling, although still in Technical Preview status is still available from VMware as well but doesn’t support vSphere 5 yet.

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Internal VMware’s magazine, called “Innovate”, has been made accessible for everyone to download.

The reachable edition of Innovate is about VMware’s internal R&D Innovation Offsite (RADIO) 2012, a gathering of about people from across VMware’s R&D organization and from around the world, the magazine introduces datas and themes mentioned in the conference.

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VMware last week released version 4.7.3. of its application virtualization product ThinApp. This version is the follow up of version 4.7.2. which was released in July this year. This release adds support for packaging and execution of virtualized applications on the Windows 8 OS from Microsoft.

Besides adding support for Windows 8, the update also resolves some issues, like the JavaScript errors when the EULA screen is displayed while installing the ThinApp application. These resolved issues and known issues can be found in the release notes.

VKernel, now part of DELL has released a paper titled:"Best Practices for Oversubscription of CPU, Memory and Storage in vSphere Virtual Environments". The paper which can be downloaded after registration contains 13 pages and is written by Scott D. Lowe and provides insight in the pros and cons of oversubscription of Processing, Memory and Storage resources. Scott also details how far oversubscription should be taken before it becomes dangerous.

Scott uses vOps Server Explorer, for which VKernel recently released version 6 as the tool to monitor the resources. He details the metrics to watch when oversubscribing and gives some insight in just how far resource overcommitment can be taken.

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Yesterday, November 12, AMD announced AMD FirePro™ S10000, a server graphics card intended to be the most powerful and would be used for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads and graphics intensive applications.

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IBM has released a draft paper titled:"N series Reference Architecture for Virtualized Environments". The Paper which IBM calls Redbook contains 76 pages and is still in draft but not less interesting because of that. The final release is expected at the end of January 2013.

The paper covers how IBM addresses data storage and compute challenges with IBM System Storage N series solutions, in conjunction with IBM servers and networking solutions, by providing deployment guidelines, workload estimates and best practices resulting in a Reference Architecture for virtualized environments using VMware vSphere, IBM System x Server/BladeCenter, IBM System networking and IBM System Storage N series.

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VMware has released version 9.0.1 of its desktop virtualization platform Workstation. This maintenance release can be installed on top of version 9.0 which was released in August this year.

The 9.0.1 update (build 894247) adds support for Ubuntu 12.10 as a host and guest and Solaris 11 as a guest OS. Besides this some issues are resolved, like the ability to mount a .vmdk file as a drive by right-clicking the file in File Explorer and use of more memory on host systems having more than 4 GB of memory as detailed in the release notes.

VMware last week updated its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac to version 5.0.2 (build 900491). This version is the follow up of version 5.0.1 which was released in September this year and is intended to be used on top of the major release version 5 released in August.

Version 5.0.2. is a so called maintenance release, meaning that only issues are solved and no new functionality is introduced. The main issues solved are USB 3.0 stability and graphic improvements when running Microsoft Office 2013 preview, the full list of issues solved can be found in the release notes.

Yesterday Brocade announced the acquisition of Vyatta, a company that delivers a software-based network operating system that leverages x86 servers as well as virtualization and cloud computing platforms.

Data center networking solutions provider Brocade is planning to use Vyatta competence aiming to offer an end-to-end virtualized data center infrastructure solution. Brocade expects to close the acquisition by the end of the calendar year and privately held Vyatta will be acquired in an all-cash transaction.

The merge of the two companies is going to deliver a product which would be the result of Vyatta’s cloud computing platforms, network virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN) with ethernet fabric architecture of Brocade.

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