Archives for November 2009
Virtualization Round Up 20091120
Today’s the last day before a week long vacation over Thanksgiving and it’s been a continual mad dash for the finish line. The rain is falling, the wind is howling, and I’m not looking forward to a vacation painting project…what better time than to catch up on a few key virtualization links that I have built up over the past…month! Wow, guess I’ve been busier than I remember. 😉 Some of these might be a bit old news (unless you have been living under a virtual rock lately…like me), but still valuable to raise to your awareness.
Have a safe and relaxing Thanksgiving holiday (at least here in the States).
VMware Specific Links
- New Releases over the past Month.5
- The New VMware Website…in case you didn’t notice, it was entirely redesigned and rebranded. More details about Where Did the Boxes Go? and the new holistic and consistent brand
- VMware Fusion 3: all the details on the Team Fusion blog post announcing availability. (Sad to say that I still haven’t build a Win7 VM for my Fusion yet…)
- VMware Workstation 7: again all the details on the Workstation Zealot blog post announcing availability.
- VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1
- VMware View 4.0: Software based PCoIP!
- VMware View Point: Why PCoIP is Ideal for Remote Virtual Desktops
- View 4 Production Info and a collection of View 4 Videos on YouTube
- Video Demo of the power of View 4 PCoIP from down under (great video despite the jerkiness)
- View 4 product download (as of this writing View 4 was being made available for download on the VMware website…)
- VMware vCenter Capacity IQ 1.0: release notes
- VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.0.1: release notes
- VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat 5.5 U2
- SpringSource Spring Framework 3.0
- VMware Opens Next Generation Green Datacenter: VMware opened a new green IT datacenter in East Wenatchee, Washington. Read about how VMware plans to save $5M per year due to it’s design.
- Operation Virtualization: VMware CTO, Steve Herrod, discusses how virtualization changes the way we should think about operating systems.
- Hyperic + SpringSource + VMware = Goodness: Hyperic’s view of the open-source systems management world
- Access your View virtual desktop on your iPhone with Wyse’s PocketCloud. No word on View4 support…yet.
- HP Announced their Converged Infrastructure Architecture recently, a “a blueprint for chief information officers to create elasticity in their technology environments.” Here’s a video from VMware’s VP of Product Marketing talking about VMware and this new architecture.
- Need a local copy of VMware’s product documentation? Then check out xtravirt’s VMware Documentation Downloader.
- Are you still confused about ESX 4.0 compared to ESXi 4.0? Better start getting straightened out as ESXi is the way of the future…
- xtravirt has a great white paper on Tape Backup Integration with VMware Data Recovery (VDR)
General Virtualization & Cloud Links
- Many have wondered, and now we know…What would 6 Million Virtual Machines Look Like?
- Cloud storage market sees continued growth as Hitatchi Looks to the Cloud for Storage.
- EMC Provides Validated Approach for Customers to Apply Virtualization Technology in Oracle Environments. (First you validate, then you…)
- An interesting look from CIO Magazine Inside One Firm’s Private Cloud Journey
- Which 50% Will You Virtualize? Some interesting thoughts on statements made about Hyper-V R2
- As Microsoft heats up their battle with VMware, I think we’ll all be more Layers and Layers of FUD…
- IBM Acts to Enhance Security of Virtualized Environments.
- Liveblog of Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie talking about Azure and more.
VMware vSphere 4 U1 and Server Heartbeat 5.5 U2 Released
Yesterday was a busy day for releases at VMware:
vSphere 4.0 Update 1 Released
Key enhancements:
- VMware View 4.0 support (hint, hint…)
- Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support
- Enhanced Clustering Support for Microsoft Windows
- Enhanced VMware Paravirtualized SCSI Support
- Improved vNetwork Distributed Switch Performance
- Increase in vCPU per Core Limit
- Enablement of Intel Xeon Processor 3400 Series
- HA Cluster Configuration Maximum
- IBM DB2 Database Support for vCenter Server
- Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool
For more details see the ESX release notes and vCenter release notes. Update 1 is currently available for download.
vCenter Server Heartbeat 5.5 Update 2 Released
Surprisingly many people are still not familar with vCenter Server Heartbeat, this add-on availability solution for VMware vCenter Server provides 360 degree protection for vCenter Server against a wide range of failure scenarios, including hardware failure, OS failure, network failure and application service failure resulting from natural occurrence or human errors. In addition to protecting vCenter Server, it also protects VMware vCenter Update Manager, VMware vCenter Converter, VMware vCenter Orchestrator, VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation, vCenter Server Database and VMware License Server. And since it is licensed per vCenter that you want to protect, this protection is extremely cost effective.
Key enhancements:
- Support for the following new vCenter Server platforms:
- VMware vCenter Server 4.0 Update 1
- VMware vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5
- Support for the following new OS platforms relative to vCenter Server:
- Windows Server 2008 SP1 (32-bit and 64-bit)
- Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
- Windows Server 2003 SP2 (64-bit)
- Availability protection for VMware vCenter Management Webservices
- Single-installer (self-extracting) executable for VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat across 32-bit and 64-bit OS platforms
- Built-in 60-day evaluation mode (triggered from the date of installation)
- Compatibility with vSphere based licensing
- Note: Existing vCenter Server Heartbeat (vCSHB) customers will be fulfilled with new unique licenses to be used with vCSHB 5.5 U2 builds. These new licenses are only applicable to vCSHB 5.5 U2 builds and will not work with prior versions of vCSHB 5.5
For more details see Server Heartbeat release notes. Update 2 is currently available for download.