So, If you’re a VCP4 and don’t want to take the course, or you are a VCP3 and you have taken the ‘What’s new in vSphere 5′ course, hurry you only have three days left.
Finally there’s a second VMware partner who decided to create a third part distributed virtual switch for VMware vSphere. On February 14th IBM announced their IBM 5000V Distributed Virtual Switch. The planned availability date for this product is February 23, 2012.
The IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V, which requires a VMware vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus license, replaces the native distributed virtual switch in a VMware vSphere 5.0 environment and provides managed, advanced networking functionality for virtual machines.
IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V is a manageable, distributed virtual switch for VMware vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus environment. IBM DVS 5000V provides advanced networking features and troubleshooting features, which make it ideal for deployments in large-scale Server Virtualization and Cloud environments.
The IBM DVS 5000V appears as a standard network switch, which enables network administrators to configure and manage the distributed virtual switch as a regular physical switch using familiar IBM switch user interfaces.
Last weekend I received an invitation to attend the Microsoft Techdays 2012 in The Hague (Netherlands).
Because I’d like to keep a broad view and I want to be able to evaluate and judge techniques based on a complete solution, I changed my calender and accepted the invitation.
Unfortunately I missed the keynote session because traffic was a nightmare that morning.
Configuring & deploying a private cloud with System Center 2012
The first session I attended was “Configuring & deploying a private cloud with System Center 2012″. Looking at the demo, System Center Virtual Machine Manager is very much like vCenter Server 5 but with a touch of vCloud Director in it. This requires administrators to use a different, cloud based mindset. Based on my experience with vCloud Director and the fact that cloud based solutions elevate the complexity level, I think this may be an obstacle. Also, because a private cloud is nothing more or less than a private datacenter setup, I don’t prefer a cloud based approach here. On the other hand, this approach eliminates the need for a different method for private or public cloud solutions.
The item I really like is the application template functionality. With this you can create a template for a SQL, Sharepoint or Exchange server, which further reduces service implementation time and quality. This is really an area where Microsoft benefits from being the application owner/developer.
Today Teradici announced the availability of their long awaited Server Offload Card, the Teradici APEX 2800.
VDI implementations are typically constrained by the servers’ CPUs. The many tasks a CPU performs, together with PCoIP® protocol image encoding, limits the number of virtual machines that can run on any one server.
The APEX 2800 card offloads graphics processing from the server CPU which can reduce server CPU utilization by up to 50%, freeing up valuable CPU cycles which can be used to support even more virtual machines, allow existing virtual machines to run more intensive applications, or simply to provide more headroom to your VDI implementation. With 2GB of on-board memory, each Server Offload Card can support up to 64 displays at a resolution of 1920×1200.
The Teradici APEX2800 delivers an even better PCoIP user experience and improves the number of VDI sessions per server. Because of the offloading to the APEX2800 you can deliver a more reliable and consistent level of experience regardless of the overall demand on server CPUs. The APEX 2800 works seamlessly with VMware View (4.6, 5.0 or later).
The new version of OpenStack, which will be released in Q2 of 2012, does not support Microsoft Hyper-V anymore. The developers have had enough with the buggy code.
One of the developers of OpenStack has written a patch with which the Hyper-V code and support will be removed from the cloud platform. The patch has already been approved and constitutes a part ofthe next version of OpenStack, codename Essex, which is expected to be released in Q2.
At the end of 2010 Microsoft announced that they would deliver code which would enable the use of Hyper-V in a cloud solution based on the open-source cloud platform, OpenStack. Microsoft never finished and maintained this, causing the code to be full of errors. After people in the OpenStack-forum suggested to remove the Hyper-V code, Microsoft quickly released a statement saying “Microsoft is committed to working with the community to resolve the current issues with Hyper-V and OpenStack“. However, the OpenStack developers decided not to wait until Microsoft finally fixed their code and decided to remove Hyper-V support with the new release.
OpenStack, Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.
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.
Yesterday VMware announced that it will be supporting RAID 5 and 6 with their Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA).
With the release of vSphere 5, VMware also released their VSA, a shared storage solution for the SMB market. VMware VSA uses the local storage in each ESXi server, presents it to the VSA appliance which in turn serves it back to the ESXi servers as shared storage. Each ESXi server needs to run a VSA appliance, and each will contain a replica of the other’s storage.
Until now the VMware VSA only supported RAID 10, which resulted in very low storage utilization. Running VMware VSA with mirroring between two ESXi server, meant that you could only use 25% of your actual storage capacity.
Now with the added support for RAID 5 and 6, VMware VSA offers a greater storage utilization rate.
The date for VMworld Europe is now final. The 2012 edition will take place from Tuesday 9 to Thursday 11 October in Barcelona.
San Francisco August 27-30 Barcelona October 9-11
The event in Copenhagen last year was a great success. There were more than 200 breakout sessions, over 20 hands-on labs and more than 7,200 visitors. VMworld Europe this year is expected to be larger than the previous edition with the latest in IT innovation.
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.
It is that time of the year again, the last voting was over a year ago where we made it, thanks to you!, to the 13th place. Voting is now open again for the top VMware & virtualization blogs. It would be nice and a great honor to get us in the Top 10 this year. So if you like our blog please vote VMGuru.nl (Various) using the BIG button on the left.
We all know Eric Siebert from his vLaunchPad were he publishes his VMware Top blogs. Your votes will help determine the new top 50 bloggers on vLaunchpad. Votes are weighted so a #1 vote counts as 10 points, #2 vote counts as 9 points etc down to 1 point for a #10 vote. The total points for each blog will be added up and will determine the top 50 order.
New this year there will be voting in special categories to help distinguish certain types of blogs. The categories are independent of the general voting so first pick and rank your top 10 overall favorite blogs and then choose your favorite blog in each category.
Today we received the press release of the new Starwind iSCSI software with the all new VM Backup technology.
Starwind is an innovative company and one of the first to offer an iSCSI initiator on the Microsoft Windows platform without a lot of hassle. Now, this product has come a long way since then and it now is a full blown storage solution, you could call it enterprise grade. The new version incorporates the VM Backup technique
Now, the previous versions already had best VMware support with their own HA technology. This new version also offers this technology for Hyper-V as well. The backup solution performs all operations on host level so no backup agents are needed in virtual machines.
After VMware vSphere and View, VMware vCloud Director is the next big thing to setup and customers start asking for it. But the problem is that the knowledge and available resources are limited. So for real life implementations of vCloud Director we have to rely on VMware employees to show us the ropes.
First of all, what is VMware vCloud Director. In short, VMware vCloud Director gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds as a base for a infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution. Coupled with VMware vSphere, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services.
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.
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.
The past year has been great. The VMGuru.nl-crew posted 105 articles and 7 videos which have and been read by many visitors. This all resulted in 1.3M webpages served, 400.000 visits, 240.000 unique visitors and 556GB of traffic.
Great numbers and steady growth over the whole year.
Here’s a list of the 5 best read article and the 3 best viewed videos of 2011.
This year has almost come to an end and what a year it has been.
During 2011 VMware released a lot of new great products like vSphere 5, View 5, Workstation 8, Fusion 4, Horizon App Manager, vFabric Data Director, etc.
We also visited some amazing events which resulted in great experiences and content. It was the second year VMworld visited Copenhagen and what an awesome VMworld it was. And at the end of the year we had a great dutch VMUG with a suprise visit of the MonsterVM.
Career wise, almost all of us started with our new employer, Imtech ICT, in 2011, bringing us new adventures and opportunities.
This all resulted in some great content which you all appreciate, according to the website statistics. We servered 1.3M webpages during almost 400.000 visits of 240.000 unique visitors, which resulted in 556GB of traffic. Great numbers with steady growth over the whole year.
We will keep up the good work and hope to see you again in 2012 to make it an even better year!
So, from all of us at VMGuru.nl, we wish you all a very happy and virtual new year!
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.
Congratulations to our 2011 Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security winners, Edwin Broeken and Michael Jonker. Thank you all again who joined us at the Dutch VMUG 2011 event and whom retweeted the tweets. Also a big thanks go out to Trend Micro for giving away two copies.
During the Dutch VMUG event lunch the MonsterVM ate two copies of Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2012 for 3 PCs with 1 Year subscription.
During the Dutch VMUG event 2011 the MonsterVM was more or less party crashing on behalf of Steve Herrod. During the keynote Viktor got a call from Steve Herrod announcing that the MonsterVM was about to enter the Dutch VMUG event. During the lunch everyone who had the guts could get his picture taken with the famous MonsterVM.
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;
No, don’t worry. I have not taken the VCP510 exam twice because I wanted to get a higher score.
Last weekend I received an invitation to attend the Microsoft Techdays 2012 in The Hague (Netherlands).
