History

VKernel today announced the release of vOps Server Explorer version 6.0 suite. Version 6.0 is the follow up of version 5.1 which was released in August this year.

Version 6.0 which is offered as a free download and is now also offered as a Virtual Appliance (VA) which runs on Hyper-V. Besides that vOps Server Explorer already provided appliances for VMware vSphere and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).

In order to run the appliance on Hyper-V, VKernel requires that either Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM) R2 or System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager and System Center 2012 Operations Manager are available as well.

Read more

VMware has released a paper titled:"VMFS File Locking and Its Impact in VMware View 5.1". The paper which contains 16 pages describes what VMware has done in order to extend the support to a maximum of 32 hosts in a ESX cluster when VMware vStorage Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is used. Versions prior to View 5.1 only supported 8 hosts in an ESX Cluster when (VMFS) was used, when NFS storage is used for linked clone replica creation.

Read more

On October 15, McAfee announced a solution of four new Data Center Security Suites designed to offer a combination of security for physical, virtual and cloud-based environments.

The suites offer the ability to protect physical and virtual servers and desktops with merged technologies in a single solution.

McAfee Data Center Security Suite for Server provides a complete set of blacklisting, whitelisting, and optimized virtualization support capabilities for basic security on servers of all types

McAfee Data Center Security Suite for Server–Hypervisor Edition provides a complete set of blacklisting, whitelisting, and optimized virtualization support capabilities for basic security on servers of all types and is licensed per Hypervisor

McAfee Data Center Security Suite for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure provides comprehensive security for virtual desktop deployments without compromising performance or the user experience

McAfee Database Server Protection provides data base activity monitoring and vulnerability assessment in a single suite, for all major database servers in the data center

Read more

Yesterday, November 5th, PHD Virtual Technologies announced their solutions are well-suited for large enterprise environments as well as small businesses with growing data storage, backup and recovery needs.

PHD Virtual, based in Philadelphia USA, provides virtual backup for VMware and Citrix and monitoring solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments.

PHD Virtual features for large enterprise environments include:

• Complete or partial restorations – provides administrators with the ability to restore a complete server from scratch, by simply selecting a restore point and target. No agents, no operating system install, just restore a complete duplicate of the VM.
• TrueDedupe technology – a true source-side deduplication of data, meaning the deduplication and compression of the source data is performed before sending the information across the WAN/LAN and before the data is written to disk. This type of efficient deduplication is critical for enterprises that require disk space to house the backups for massive amounts of data while also being more scalable and pairing down the overall backup window time. PHD performs deduplication by comparing REAL data existing on the backup target while ensuring to eliminate duplicate copies of data across ALL VMs stored on the target making it more robust and preventing unnecessary job management to achieve storage efficiencies.

  Read more

VMware has updated its reference poster for ESXi 5.1. The poster which can be downloaded in PDF format gives an overview of all the features provided by ESXi 5.1, like Name spaces, Host, Virtual Machine, Storage and Network commands and much more.

More VMware posters, like VMware Management with PowerCLI 5.1, VMware vCloud Networking Poster and the VMware Hands-On Labs 2012 Poster are available at the following URL: http://vmware.com/go/posters/

Read more

Yesterday, November 4, dutch hacker “Stun” tweeted a link that allows the download of VMware’s ESX source code files dated between 1998 and 2004.

The source code released is probably related to the leak that VMware itself announced in April and has already patched in May.

Read more

On the official Xen.org Community blog George Dunlap, Senior Engineer at Citrix posted two articles explaining the different types of virtualization, from full virtualization to full paravirtualized virtualization. Dunlap explains what the terms Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM), Para Virtualized (PV), Para Virtualized Hardware Virtual Machine (PVHVM) and PV in a HVM container (PVH) mean and what the differences, advantages and disadvantages of each of them.

With full virtualization the assumption in the early days was that the Virtual Machine (VM) was functionally identical to a real machine, meaning that it provided:

Read more

Libvirt a collection of software that provides a convenient way to manage virtual machines and other virtualization functionality, such as storage and network interface management has reached version 1.0.0. as announced by Daniel Veillard from Red Hat.

These software pieces include an API library, a daemon (libvirtd), and a command line utility (virsh) and is intended to be a building block for higher level management tools and for applications focusing on virtualization of a single node. The projects goal is to to provide a common and stable layer sufficient to securely manage domains on a node, possibly remote. The project is sponsored by Red Hat and started in December 2005.

Read more

Besides releasing version 5 of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) yesterday, Microsoft also released Service Pack 2 for App-V version 4.6.

Service Pack 2 provides support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, but more important allows for coexistence of the 4.6 client together with the App-V 5 client so that the 4.6 App-V packages can work side-by-side with the new 5 APPV packages.

Besides that SP2 also contains a rollup of all hotfixes released after Service Pack 1, which was released in March this year.

Citrix yesterday announced the availability of the tech preview of Excalibur .

Excalibur is part of project Avalon and provides one install, one architecture and one console for both Citrix’s Desktop and Application virtualization platform XenApp and Citrix’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution XenDesktop. Avalon covers the integration of several products which were developed and acquired by Citrix in the last couple of years and its intention is to create a platform to deliver desktops and applications as cloud services as announced in May during Citrix annual Synergy conference by Mark Templeton.

Read more