After lots of celebrations around the British monarchy it time to celebrate all things cloud and virtual! This months vNews with Mike Laverick (http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/) and me is now out and includes the following stories to bring you right up to date:
- VMworld voting open
- New books
- Blogger with Sheexy website
- Icons, case studies, exams and videos
- VMware View 5.1
- Open Compute Project
- VMware Insight Magazine
- VMware View Leads the Small and Mid-sized Business
- VMware Acquires Wanova
- SAP for Virtualization
- Hyper-V secret weapons
@podoherty @gabvirtualworld @esloof @andreleibovici
@VMwareEUC @vmwareview @VMwareSMB @Wanova
@Spiceworks @joe_elway @MSLearning
This months vNews is available at Mike Laverick’s blog hosted by Mike and I. The storing we cover this week are:
Gabrie Van Zanten – Auto Deploy Adventures
Alan Renouf’s vCDAudit
New Books & Publications
Brian Madden’s VDI Delusion Book & the new CDL License from Microsoft
Chad Sakac and VSI
Andre Leibovici and Windows8/View5.x
Duncan Epping and vShield App “Excludes” and Stretched HA/SRM Designs
Scott Lowe and TrainSignal Videos
Microsoft Virtual Machine Migration Toolkit
Windows Embedded Device Manager
Citrix acquires Podio
VMware ESX code leak
What’s new in View 5.1
See the link below for download options:
VMware View 5.1 announced
Some of the features which stood out for me are the following:
New features and improvements in View 5.1
- View Storage Accelerator
- Improved management for large scale
- Better end-user experience with PCoIP improvements
- Better USB support for more devices
- More clients available
- PcoIP improvements
- Local mode enhancements
View Storage accelerator details:
Utilities local RAM (between 100mb – 2048mb) for common disk reads. This increases disk performance at peak times which has shown in test the following results:
- 80% reduction in peak OPS
- 45% reduction in average OPS
- 65% reduction in peak throughput
- 25% reduction in average throughput
Management
A faster admin console for large scale environments
The ability to report to a syslog server
Additional language support
Improvements to persona Management
New tools to enable the transition from physical to virtual desktop. It is designed to collect the user information in preparation to switching to a virtual desktop environment.
The ability to pre-populate Active Directory with View machines before creation (composer).
Improvements to 2-factor authentication.
User Experience
USB improvements in the View agent.
The ability to connect:
- iPhone,
- blackberry’s,
- SanDisk cruizer,
- SpeechMike
More improvements for PCoIP
New clients, Mac client, Linux, iOS and Android.
Custom client download page.
See the full report over at:
http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-euc-portfolio-05-02-12.html
A interesting article has popped up on CRN (see link below) with information that VMware View 5.1 will be released on May 9th, along with Horizon Application Manager, Zimbra 7.2.
Not in this article but other rumours are that Vmware View 5.1 will include View Storage Accelerator ,View Composer Array Integration (VCAI), enhanced VMware’s View Persona Management features.
I will be very interested to see and test View’s Storage Accelerator. This could pave the way to more cost effective VDI solutions. Will this annoy storage vendors?
http://www.crn.in/Software-017Apr012-VMware-Memo-Outlines-View-5-1-Project-Octopus-Launch-Plans.aspx
Mike and I have just released this months vNews which cover all things cloud and virtualisation. If you’re looking for a round up of virtualisation news the you’ve come to the right place.
We have changed the format slightly to be more snappy, too the point but still with some discussion!
This month we cover VMware, Teradici, TrainSignal, Cisco, Microsoft, Veeam, Windows 8, and Dell splashing some cash on Wyse.
All the links and download methods are over on Mike website:
There is already a patch to enable Windows 8 to be installed as a guest on ESXi 5.0 (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2006859) but now VMware have released a complete update for the vSphere family. It’s simply vSphere 5.0 Update 1.
The things that excite me the most are that ESXi officially support Windows 8 and MAC OS X “Lion” 10.7.3.
I look forward to cranking up the VMware View environment and bringing the guest operating systems right up to date.
Here’s is the official information:
This release provides the following improvements:
VMware ESXi
- Support for new Intel and AMD processors
- Adding support for Native Storage Drivers for Intel C600 series chipset and upgrades LSI MegaRAID SAS driver to version 5.34
- Now supporting Mac OS X Server Lion 10.7.2 and 10.7.3 guest operating systems
- Numerous bug and security fixes
VMware vCenter
- Guest Operating System Customization Improvements: vCenter Server adds support for customization of the following guest operating systems
- Windows 8
- Ubuntu 11.10
- Ubuntu 11.04
- Ubuntu 10.10
- Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2
- Numerous bug and security fixes
VMware vCenter Update Manager
- Security Update: In Update Manager 5.0 Update 1, the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 database, the Oracle (Sun) JRE package and the certificate that is provided with Update Manager installation package are updated to address security related issues.
- Improved Product Usability: Update Manager 5.0 Update 1 provides upgrade release version information, improved maintenance mode impact differentiation, and a warning message that states a snapshot of fault tolerant virtual machines cannot be created during remediation.
- Improved Product Robustness: In Update Manager 5.0 Update 1, virtual appliance updates and the Update Manager server failure are handled in an improved manner.
Mike Laverick of http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk and @Mike_Laverick and I have produced this months vNews. (yay I hear you all cheer!)
We produce this podcast to inform you of all the latest virtualisation/cloud based news. If you have a hectic life style and don’t have time to read press releases and blogs, or even if you do and want a reminder then check out this podcast! see links below…
Subscription of videos for your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/2012/03/05/vnews-feb-the-hotel-california-edition/
This is just a quick blog post to notify me and others of where to download the HP version of ESXi 5.0 ISO with all the HP tools pre-installed.
The HP ESXi 5.0 Customized Image includes the following:
• HP Management Tools:
◦ HP CIM Providers
◦ HP NMI Driver
◦ HP iLO Driver
◦ HP CRU Driver
◦ HPONCONFG Utility
◦ HPBOOTCFG Utility
• VMware IOVP Certified Device Drivers added to HP ESXi 5.0 installation images for HP device
enablement.
• VMware ESXi 5.0, Patch Release ESXi500-201109001
or
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/software/vmware/esxi-image.html
As a virtualisation admin you maybe tasked with configuring VMware’s vSwitches in a particular load balancing configuration. I have had to do this for link aggregation between the teaming of my vmnic’s and physical Cisco switches. See the link for more info:
Here’s how I did it using PowerCLI.
Connect-VIServer VirtualCenterServerFQDN
Get-VMHost -Name HostName | Get-VirtualSwitch -name vSwitchNumber |
Get-NicTeamingPolicy | Set-NicTeamingPolicy -LoadBalancingPolicy LoadBalanceIP
Just bear in mind you will need to set the, Virtual Center Server, Host Nane and vSwitch name.
I hope this helps!
Stuart
Yay! A GUI! I do have friends out there who are master scripters however VMware’s latest fling is Auto Deploy GUI. Traditionally to manage Auto Deploy images or VIB’s you need to know your way around PowerCLI. Now you can just install the GUI to manage them! See the link for more details:
http://labs.vmware.com/flings/autodeploygui
Stu McHugh's Tech Blog 