At VMworld last year Trend Micro already announced their new version Deep Security 8, but now it is finally available.

Deep Security is specifically designed for virtual environments. Its agent-less architecture addresses AV storms, minimizes operational complexity of security and allows organizations to increase VM densities and accelerate virtualization and cloud adoption. Developed in close collaboration with VMware, Deep Security 8 is the first product in its category to offer support for VMware vSphere 5.0 and VMware vShield Endpoint 2.0.

But what’s new in Trend Micro Deep Security 8?
First of all it supports vSphere 5, so customers using Deep Security can finally upgrade their vSphere 4.x environments. Second, DS8 now offers agent-less integrity monitoring for greater virtual server security without added footprint. A third great new feature is a anti-malware agent which extends protection to physical server as well as VMware View environments using local mode.

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More and more applications are supported on the VMware Platform, with the release of VMware vSphere 5 the boundaries of virtual machines have been expanded even more. Often we get questions about which applications are supported on the VMware virtual platform. There is a website page where you can search for specific applications and if they are supported by the software publisher.

You can search for an application by entering its title or the name of the software publisher.  Search results will display all supported software as well as applications that have already been submitted by other users.  If the application is not currently supported, you may Register/Login to vote and help VMware get the application officially supported sooner by the software publisher.

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Recently QNAP gave us the opportunity to review their QNAP TS-459Pro II NAS solution. We gladly accepted this opportunity and we got the NAS shipped to us a few weeks ago.

The TS-459Pro II is a NAS device that is aiming at the SMB market. QNAP also has bigger versions in the TS line that could be used in larger organizations. The TS-459Pro II is certified as VMware and Citrix Ready and is compatible with Windows 2008 Hyper-V and fail-over clustering.

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On December 19th VKernel released version 4.5 of its vOps management software.

vOps 4.5 addresses the increasing volume of routine virtual machine management tasks in virtualized environments. This increase is caused by the enormous growth in the number of virtual machines. Nowadays we provision many more virtual servers than we ever had physical ones because they are easier and cheaper to deploy. All of these virtual machines require management tasks for maintenance.

The next step in virtualization is automation and vOPS 4.5 also cover this with the introduction of some new capabilities, like:

• New Automation Features
  vOPS’ virtual machine management automation capabilities are enhanced with auto-deletion of abandoned virtual machine images, auto-merging of unused snapshots, an additional automated remediation for performance issues and auto-calculation of future resource requirements;
• Automation Controls
  vOPS 4.5 also adds the ability to more finely control some automation processes. For example, virtual machines can be grouped, and then these groups set with minimum and maximum resource amounts that automated right-sizing will respect.

Additionally, vOps 4.5 introduces:

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December 9th was the day of the annual dutch VMUG event in Nieuwegein (NL). It was a great day with many interesting sessions, labs, great people to meet and of course the MonsterVM.

During the day Edwin and I had the chance to talk to Alex, Michal and Lauren from VKernel. Besides a sneak preview of vOps 4.5 we also did an interview with Alex about emerging virtualization management technologies, security resources, VMUG sessions of interest and new products featured.

You can check it out here:

Last month PHD Virtual released version 5.3 of their Backup and Replication and PHD Virtual has really stepped up their game with this new release.

There are a handful of new features and improvements but the biggest improvement is the enhanced scalability and performance.

The performance for virtual machine backup and restore operations has improved significantly because of  a new optimized job processing engine and twice the number of data streams per Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) and the ability to deploy multiple VBA’s. The Enterprise version even has the ability to enable 8 parallel data streams per VBA.

Other new features and improvements are:

• Faster back-up and restore;
• Offsite replication of virtual machines for disaster recovery;
• Replicate without additional snapshots or system impact;

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Today VMware’s partner Teradici announced a significant new releases from their PCoIP zero client and host card firmware and the PCoIP Management Console.

The following releases are now available for download on the Teradici support site (techsupport.teradici.com):

• Firmware 3.5.0 for PCoIP Zero Clients and PCoIP Host Cards.
• PCoIP Management Console 1.7.0

The new firmware update includes the following enhancements:

• USB2.0 with VMware View sessions
• Imprivata OneSign Virtual Desktop Access via proximity cards with VMware View
• IEEE 802.1x network security
• IPv6 support.

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This week Veeam released their latest version of their Backup & Replication software “Veeam Backup & Replication v6“. With their latest release they offer enhanced scalability and performance.

They also add support for Microsoft Hyper-V so you can protect your multi-hypervisor environment with only one product, from a single console.

New features in version 6 are:

• A new distributed architecture for better scalability. Deployment and Maintenance for remote office and large installations are simplified;
• Advanced replication by combining both backup and replication in to one solution;
• Multi-hypervisor support with the new support for Microsoft Hyper-V. The console let’s you manage both VMware and Hyper-V hosts from a single console;
• 1-Click file restore is an enhancement on the existing “Instant File-Level Recovery” reducing the number of steps needed from 10 to 1.

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Just 15 minutes ago I heard the ‘news’ that, last Wednesday, VKernel was acquired by Quest Software.

VKernel will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary of Quest, building, selling and marketing the same performance and capacity management solutions. So, it will be business as usual for VKernel, except the new VKernel will be turbo-charged with the backing of Quest.

For the current customers, nothing changes. The same team that has built, sold, and supported your products is still here. The main difference is that VKernel now has the financial backing and support of Quest Software.

With the release of service pack 3 for Simpana 9, CommVault adds full support for VMware vSphere 5. Many organizations struggle with  rapid data growth, expanding virtual server deployments and increasing data center consolidations because legacy backup and recovery solutions just can’t cope with the demands of new virtual infrastructures.

With vSphere 5, VMware raises the bar again and pushes the limits of performance and scale. Virtual machines can now be up to four times more powerful than previous versions. With full vSphere 5 support, CommVault claims it can keep up with VMware’s pace.

CommVault Simpana 9 with service pack 3 delivers the ability to protect hundreds of VMs in minutes, scale to protect thousands of VMs and provides an off-host backup approach that ensures even the most performance intensive “Monster VM” can be easily backed-up.

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Most companies I visit have spend a lot of money on hardware and software for their primary process.  Operating System software isn’t a problem most of the time, just as the application software.

Management and monitoring software on the other hand is a totally different story. A lot of IT departments have trouble to get their business case positive for management tools. Companies like Veeam and VKernel offer a couple of free tools  for VMware you can install on your desktop.

These tools give you an insight in the health of your environment. When you found out that your environment is less than optimal configured, for example the memory consumption of certain servers, you can fix it with VKernel Optimizer (which costs money, but it  has a 30 day trial). The tools that are freely available from VKernel  are:

• Storage View
• ApplicationView
• CapacityView
• Capacity Modeler

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Yesterday shortly after we posted the review about the StarWind iSCSI SAN software there was a press release by Starwind. The press release announced that they had passed the VMware Certification Program for VMware ESX 4.1 server. The press release can be found here.

In short this means that the Starwind iSCSI SAN software has passed the test labs from VMware and will now be included in the VMware compatibility guide.

Recently Starwind contacted us and asked if we would be interested in doing a review on their iSCSI SAN software solution. The enthusiasts that we are, we quickly replied that we would take the challenge. After some e-mails back and forth and setting up a small test lab we where ready to go.

So what is the Starwind iSCSI SAN solution? The solution enables you to change a Windows server into a iSCSI SAN. With this solution Starwind is mainly aiming for SMB organizations. As far that I could see the Starwind solution offers the same (basic) functionality as you would expect from the hardware counterparts.

Some of the key features mentioned by Starwind are:

• Synchronous Data Replication: Real-time data replication across a 2 node storage cluster.
• High Availability / Automatic Failover: Fault tolerant active-active technology eliminates a single point of failure.
• Remote Replication across a WAN: replicates data to a remote location allowing multi-site disaster recovery in the event of a disaster at the primary site.
• CDP & Snapshots: captures instant, point-in-time volume images, allowing a user to rollback and recover an entire volume or individual files and folders.
• High Speed Caching: accelerates storage I/O by using the server’s memory.
• Server clustering: supports Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, VMware ESX and vSphere 4.0 and other applications.
• Central Management Console / User Interface: allows IT professionals to easily manage all storage from a central management console built on the same tree structure used in Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

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Last week we had a meeting with a McAfee Sales Engineer and he told us something I have been waiting for for a long time.

McAfee now has a product especially for virtualized environments, McAfee MOVE (Management for Optimized Virtual Environments). After Trend Micro, McAfee is now the second anti-virus company, that I know of, which has a product especially for virtual environments.

McAfee’s Management for Optimized Virtual Environments (MOVE) platform is combines speed ad security by significantly reducing the overhead of protecting individual machines in a VMware or Citrix virtual environment. Support for Microsoft Hyper-V is not available yet.

McAfee MOVE does this by offloading all anti-virus tasks to an appliance/server which needs to be installed on each ESX host or XenServer in a cluster. The only McAfee components which needs to be installed on the virtual server or desktop is the McAfee MOVE client and the ePO agent.

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During VMworld Europe 2010 in Copenhagen I will be keeping a diary to show what a blogger’s life is all about.

Thursday 14 October 2010

Alex working very early

6:30

Time to get up my phone is blinking with a reminder for the Zimbra breakfast meeting in the Scandic Hotel. The ritual stuff to be dealt with, washing, shaving and getting dressed. Damn it is early but everything for a good cause.

7:00

Alex and I leave the hotel to the metro station through a light moist dark morning. A lot of activity along the line. Erik and Anne Jan still firm a sleep. We arrive at the metro station in about 15 minutes. Just missed the one on the platform so just will have to wait for the next one in 6 minutes. I must say transportation is very good in Copenhagen. Yes the metro arrived and we get in along the line more and more folks from Denmark join in and get ready for work.

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Today one of my colleagues pointed out some of the changes around the RES Software product suite, which probably will be announced on the Citrix Synergy 2010 in Berlin, tomorrow.

RES Software has restyled there logo and color scheme. They also renamed RES PowerFuse en RES Wisdom into RES Workspace Manager and RES Automation Manager. The new names sound logical to me.

It looks like they pulled out the RES Subscriber feature out of the PowerFuse Enterprise edition and made it an additional product named RES Virtual Desktop Extender (VDX). Also there will be no more different editions to choose from instead you can choose the functionality in modules, based on your needs.

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We recently received an update about the new stuff that is coming from Dell EqualLogic. Because a lot the information was under NDA so I can’t go into details or give you release dates.

What’s here already?

Last year Dell released the 10GB connections for the PS series. This 10GB connection speeds are mostly done because the marketing asked for it, because the customers asked for it. There are rarely used cases where the 10GB connections make sense but in 95% of all cases it doesn’t give you extra performance.

The bottleneck is often not the connection speed but the spindle speeds limits of the disk themselves. Because of the adaptive load balancing of the PS series the 1GB connections are used very efficiently. When used with the MPIO drivers from Dell EqualLogic you can gain a lot extra performance from the network connections.

So what is coming this year:

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When using a Cisco 3750 stack connected through stackwise technology you can add or remove a Cisco switch while the stack stays on. If you are adding or removing a switch from the stack, it is very important that the switch is turned OFF. The rest of the stack can keep doing its business.

For adding a switch to the stack follow these steps:

Step 1) On the new switch give the global command: switch stack-member-number provision type

Type is the type of switch you are adding to the stack.

When adding for example a third Cisco switch to the Cisco stack, use the following command:

switch 3 provision ws3750g-24t

Step 2) Power off the new stack member

Step 3) Connect the new member to the Cisco stack using the stacking cables, 1 loop at a time.

Step 4) Power on the new stack member. The switch will come alive and will receive the Cisco IOS version from the master, when that is completed it will be ready to service network requests.

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Today Scense launched version 7 of their User Workspace management. If you are going to do a full blown VDI install. A product like Scense will give the VDI implementation extra value to your users and easy management of the complete environment.

Scense 7 simplifies management and distribution of the end-user workspace within virtual and physical Windows desktop environments.

The main focus of this release is on the support of Windows 7 and 64 bits Microsoft Windows desktop environments. This release also introduces a new rich, modern and extremely intuitive user interface helping to further simplify user workspace management within MS Windows desktop environments.

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The last few months we where asked several times to reset a password set on the main account for Dell EqualLogic storage, also known as the grpadmin account.

If you really don’t know the password set on the grpadmin but still have physical access to it you can start a recovery procedure to reset the grpadmin account back to the default password: grpadmin.

Important: Because you must power-cycle one group member as part of the password reset procedure, volumes with data stored on that member will be unavailable and active iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted. You may want to warn users of any impending offline volumes and iSCSI disconnections before resetting the password.

To temporarily reset the grpadmin account password to the default factory-set password, follow these steps:

1.) On one group member, connect the appropriate serial cable to serial port 0 (the correct cable will be different on different models of the PS Array) on the active control module. The active control module is indicated by the green control module status LED labeled ACT. The status LEDs are located on the controllers sometimes on the left side or next to the serial port on other controllers.

2.) Turn off power to the member (if you have dual power supplies, turn off both power supplies). Volumes with data located on the member will be offline and iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted.

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