In November 2008 Microsoft unveiled that the upcoming version of its worldwide popular IDE, Visual Studio 2010, was designed to orchestrate Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to provide a fully integrated virtual lab automation (VLA) environment. Marketed at that time as a stand-alone edition, and called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management, the first beta of this product appeared in June 2009 , while  the second beta went public in November 2009 . Now it finally seems that Microsoft is ready to release the product: earlier this week in fact, during its Visual Studio Live! event, Microsoft announced that its VLA platform will be available for web download at the end of August. There’s a last minute change anyway: the product is no more a stand-alone edition of Visual Studio 2010 but it’s included in Ultimate and Test Professional editions. Labels: Microsoft , Virtual Lab Automation

Go here to see the original:
virtualization.info

During his keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010, Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business division, announced the release candidate of a new add-on for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2: Self-Service Portal 2.0. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Visit link:
Virtualization.com

VMware just published a video demonstrating how the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) feature, part of the upcoming vSphere 4.1, works. SIOC provides the capability to define quality of service prioritization for the I/O activity on a single host or a cluster of hosts. The prioritization, which can be enable or disable on specific datastores, is enforced through shares and limits. The ESX/ESXi hosts monitors the latency in communication with the datastore of choice. As soon such latency exceeds a defined threshold the datastore is considered congested. At that point all VMs accessing that datastore are prioritized according to their defined shares. The administrator can even define the amount of I/O operations per second (IOPS) that each virtual machine can reach. The video shows SIOC in action and it’s really worth watching: A couple of weeks ago virtualization.info published some unreleased, official information from VMware about the performance improvements introduced by vSphere 4.1, and the list includes SIOC . Thanks to Yellow Bricks for the news.

Read the original:
virtualization.info

In October 2007 virtualization.info broke the news that the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies was working to enter the virtualization space with its own hypervisor. The bare-metal virtual machine monitor (VMM), based on Xen and dubbed HyperCore, was officially confirmed one month later but it took more than one year to reach version 1.0 . The vision of Phoenix for that platform has been partially shared by a number of vendors that are offering their client hypervisors (or that are working to do so) at today. The idea was to provide a very low footprint client hypervisor, centrally managed (Virtual Computer approach) and secured out-of-band (Neocleus and Citrix approach), that could serve personal and corporate virtual machines side by side (Citrix and VMware approach). Despite remarkable partnerships ( with SupportSoft , with NEC , with Asus ) the product failed to impact the market in a significant way. Its failure depended on many factors: in part because the adoption of the hypervisor required the adoption of new hardware with a new BIOS, in part because the first release took too much time to hit the market, in part because Phoenix Technologies hasn’t be able to consistently appear as a serious virtualization player. So Phoenix eventually decided to refocus its business development effort elsewhere and dropped the project a couple of months ago, as reported by SeekingAlpha . The HyperCore assets will be bought by HP, for $12M, as Phoenix itself announced . The interesting question is why HP is interested in a Xen-based hypervisor. In November 2009 virtualization.info highlighted how the HP R&D department was already working on a Xen-based hypervisor . And that work was exactly focused on the development of a secure desktop virtualization platform. At this point the HP’s ambition to deliver its own VDI platform is hard to hide, and the acquisition of HyperCore intellectual property and engineers may further accelerate the go-to-market plans. All considered, HP still has its connection broker, its remote desktop protocol and its thin clients to leverage. What if the company would release a new generation of thin clients and laptops sporting a client hypervisor out-of-the-box that supports VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors for online and offline VDI scenarios?

See the original post here:
virtualization.info

Microsoft just published a huge poster showing multiple aspects of the Hyper-V 2008 R2 architecture. It includes the following components: virtual networking, virtual machine snapshots, live migration, storage types, storage locations and paths, import and export, and of course the core architecture elements. Thanks to Virtual PC Guy for the news.

Read the original here:
virtualization.info

Like pretty much every other big vendor in the IT space, VMware has many ways to hit competition. A very efficient one is to criticize other vendors though non-corporate blogs. This allows the company to be way less polite than what customers expect, while not keeping full responsibility for the critics if something wrong is said. This approach has additional benefits: it allows customers to read a brutal (brutal, not necessarily brutally honest) review of products that may be hard to evaluate, it obliges competitors to defend their approach clarifying technical details that wouldn’t be revealed otherwise, and eventually it leads to counter-attacks, which expose additional weaknesses on both sides. Over the long term this turns into a futile marketing skirmish (see the multi-year VMware-Citrix one), but at the beginning the information exposed could be really valuable. This is what is going to (hopefully) happen between VMware and Red Hat now that the former completely smashed the new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform, launched in November 2009 . A VMware Senior Engineer, Eric Gray , in fact recently published on his popular, personal blog, a series of articles analyzing multiple aspects of the new RHEV offering. On RHEV Manager availability: RHEV-M is one seriously mission critical component of the RHEV infrastructure, so it is surprising to see that there are no high-availability options for RHEV-M — no clustering or other redundancy support. Even the approach of protecting RHEV-M by deploying it in an HA VM is also impossible — something that works just fine for vCenter Server and even System Center VMM .

After releasing version 2.1 in December 2009 , Microsoft is preparing to launch a major new version of its virtual machines patch management tool: Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST). VMST 3.0, currently in beta , introduces a number of interesting features like: Patching of offline virtual machines in a System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) library Patching of stopped and saved state virtual machines on a host Patching of virtual machine templates Support for manual copy of update packages into offline virtual hard disks in a SCVMM library Support Hyper-V Live Migration (requires Windows Server 2008 R2 failover clusters)

See the original post here:
virtualisation.info

In June 2008 Veeam acquired nworks , a 14-years old company focused on management plug-ins for major enterprise management platforms. So far Veeam released a couple of updates for the nworks management packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to manage VMware environments, but the company is now extending its focus to System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Earlier this week in fact Veeam announced its first PRO Pack for SCVMM , to automate virtual machines workload distribution across VMware hosts managed by Virtual Machine Manager. The pack leverages the SCVMM support for ESX and the Microsoft Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) technology. The PRO Pack will be part of the nworks management pack 5.5 for SCOM, currently in release candidate and due within the end of this quarter.

Read more:
virtualisation.info

Xsigo Systems, a data center I/O virtualisation company, today announced the technology integration of the Xsigo VP780 I/O Director with the Microsoft System Center suite of IT management solutions. The integrated solution works with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to help IT managers better monitor and control their server connectivity… This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

More:
virtualisation.com

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release of System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010 and System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010. The new version of SCDPM, in beta since October 2009 , introduces the following new capabilities: Support for Hyper-V R2 (including the stand-alone version and the one that comes with Windows) Support for Live Migration scenarios using cluster-shared volumes (CSV) Restore VMs to alternate Hyper-V hosts Individual file-item restore from host-based backups, so you can protect the entire virtual machine from the host (no guest agent required), but selectively restore individual files from inside the VHDs

Read the original here:
virtualisation.info