Shortly after the release of vCenter 5.1, VMware released “vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.0″. With this product you as an administrator are able to manage third party hypervisors like Microsoft’s Hyper-V from within your vCenter installment.

This will give companies more flexibility over what hypervisors they are able to use and thus use the hypervisor they need for each specific situation.

Multi-Hypervisor manager can be installed on the server which also contains the vCenter installation or can be on a separate server. The installation process is pretty straightforward (depending on your installation and security profile, you may have to open up some extra ports). After the installation on the server you will only need to download and install the plugin for the vSphere client (installing the plugin). After the plugin is installed you can open a separate inventory from the vSphere client homepage that will show you all 3th party hosts and their virtual machines.

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During a performance optimizing session this week, with a customer, we found some interesting things to boost specific parts of the environment. While playing a high resolution video with clipping where the whole screen turns black and shows a new screen a split second later.

When we started, we saw the video bump and freeze from time to time. Also we experienced ghost lines on the middle of the screen, where the upper part of the screen moved first while the bottom part tried to keep up. We used the Fast & Furious 6 Official Trailer in an 1080p format for testing. The the business news running in an embedded Windows media player on Internet Explorer 9 didn’t perform well either.

The vDesktop is a Windows 7 Enterprise desktop with 2GB memory and 2 vCPU so it can play native 720p videos when necessary as Erik mentioned in his post. We are running the VMware View environment on an Imtech built Flexpod with NetApp storage, Cisco UCS computing power and Cisco Nexus switching for VMware vSphere and VMware View 5.

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Last week I was able to attend a presentation from Whiptail in which they talked about their flash-based storage array. With their product portfolio they offer storage solutions that deliver high levels of speed for applications which produce high loads on storage.

Whiptail positions itself in the marked as a storage solution for applications like VDI, server virtualization and databases that demand high performance. At this moment they are not trying to compete with storage vendors that deliver high amounts of storage space. high numbers on read and write actions, high bandwidth and low latency times are the current key values of the Whiptail storage solutions.

The Whiptail storage family consists of the:

The Accela which is smallest model in the family. This unit uses 2U of rack space and has a power usage below 200 watts. It can deliver a storage capacity from 1,5 TB up to 12 TB at a write speed of 250k IOPS (based on 4K cryptographically random writes) a bandwidth of 1.9 GB/s and a latency value of 100 µs (0,1 ms).

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Last month we asked to vote for us if you appreciated our blog and apparently a lot of you did.

This year almost 1.300 votes were recorded compared to 1.200 last year, also the total number of blogs on the list increased from 187 to 243 blogs to choose from. There were over 80 new blogs on the ballot and 4 new blogs made it into the top 25. The enormous number of VMware blogs makes it so much tougher to get in the top 25.

So unfortunately we dropped from the 19th to the 31st spot on the list.

Besides that there are tons of bloggers from VMware or VMware/virtualization-related companies which create excellent content, so that a top 25 spot for an independent blogger seems impossible. Luckily Eric created a separate category for that and guess what?

You voted us as 4th Favorite Independant VMware blog! THANK YOU!

As independent bloggers we are very proud and honored that VMGuru.nl finished #4 in this competitive environment. Thanks to Eric Siebert’s for organizing this yearly blogger contest on vSphere-land.com. 

We appreciate your votes and ongoing support and want to thank all who voted for us!!!

So you want to attend TechEd 2013?

In March, Veeam is giving away a free pass to TechEd 2013. All you have to do is register.

The winner will be selected on March 18, so you have two weeks left to win!