Category: Virtualisation

VMware Releases New Desktop Virtualisation Products
VMware have just released a slew of desktop virtualisation products in the last 24 hours, they have released VMware Workstation 10, VMware Fusion 6, VMware Fusion 6 Pro, VMware Player and VMware Player 6 Plus.

Key new features include:
- The latest operating systems – Support for Windows 8.1, OS X Mavericks (Fusion and Fusion Pro only) as well as new Linux distros. Computers running Windows 8.1 can be converted into virtual machines via VMware Converter.
- Better performance – These products enable virtual machines to be created with up to 16 vCPUs, 64GB of memory, 8TB disks and adds faster USB connections, a new vSATA controller and twice as many virtual networks.
- Expiring virtual machines – Restricted virtual machines can be set to expire at a specified date and time. An expired virtual machine automatically suspends and will not restart without administrator intervention.
- The ability to run a cloud on Your PC – Workstation 10 lets you build a cloud on your PC running popular applications from Pivotal, Puppet Labs and Vagrant.
Pricing and availability

All are now available to purchase in full or as an upgrade.

Please click on the images above to go to the Product, Full product and Upgrade Product pages.
5th September 2013
vCloud Suite 5.5 Announcement
VMware have announced updates to their vCloud Suite product.

VMware have extended the number of products that are included in the vCloud Suite 5.5, this includes vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) availability in all editions rather than just the Enterprise Suite. Prior to this announcement vCloud Automation Center came in a single version, however the announcement let’s us know that we now have Standard, Advanced and Enterprise versions available.
- vCloud Automation Center – Standard Edition offers the basic self service portal feature of vCAC.
- vCloud Automation Center – Advanced Edition offers the same functionality as the existing vCAC product.
- vCloud Automation Center – Enterprise Edition offers full vCAC functionality plus vFabric App Director for Release Automation.
vCloud Director and vCloud Networking and Security are not sold as standalone products anymore.

All editions of the vCloud Suite now include automation features (offered by vCAC) and Operations Management (using vCOPS).
26th August 2013
New VMware Certification Offerings – VMware Certified Associate (VCA)
One of the things that VMware hadn’t followed up was their Associate certification offerings, when they first announced the VCA4 DT exam a couple of years ago there was a hope that VMware would offer further exams but for the last couple of years they haven’t. That’s just changed

VMware have just announced the availability of more VMware Certified Associate level certifications (VCA). Like the earlier VMware VCA4 DT certification there are no mandatory training course or pre-reqs for the VCA exams but there are recommended FREE on-line training courses which can be taken for the exam preparation.

There are currently 3 exams which are available now for registration with the VCA-NV exam coming soon.

Below are the VMware Certified Associate which are available:
More information about the new certification can be found on the VMware Certification page and the VMware Certfication Road Map
26th August 2013
Home Lab 2013 – Storage

With the change to my Home Lab environment recently I decided to take a fresh look at my storage capabilities and came to the conclusion that whilst the home brew solution was nice I now wanted something a little more dedicated to my vSphere environment that would allow me to play with the likes of VAAI because although FreeNAS claims to be looking at implementing this in a future release but there are no current dates on the roadmap for this.

Having looked at the likes of Qnap and Synology I decided to go down the route of Synology for my new home lab storage, there were a couple of deciding factors in this which include the 4x1GB NICs and the nice web interface (so much nicer than the Iomega IX4 interface).

A couple of days spent looking over various blog\forum posts all seem to indicate that this was a good choice and when I discovered that both of my colleagues had gone down this route it made more sense to do the same.

It should be mentioned that the Synology is not a cheap unit with prices ranging from £620 – £700 per unit (excluding disks) so you have to make sure that you’re making the right decision before spending that much money.

In the end I decided to go for a Synology DS1513+ unit, this 5 bay device is expandable to a total of 15 disks with the additional purchase of the DX513 expansion unit so offers a lot of capacity if required.

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9th July 2013
Condusiv V-locity VM Testing

During the recent vForum event at Wembley I had an interesting meeting with Condusiv Technologies (formally Executive Software\ Diskeeper).

They were showing off the latest release of V-Locity VM.

V-locity VM is classed as a Performance Accelerator which offers benefits such as :-
Increase application performance by 50%
Reduce latency by 50% for faster file access
Eliminate bottlenecks without expensive hardware
True "set and forget" management
What struck me was the performance potential for VM’s running on potentially limiting storage (it happens, in fact our storage at work is about on par with the performance one of our guys get’s from a Synology Diskstation 1513+ and yes we have fine tuned and tweaked).

I had a chat with their Technical Director and asked about an NFR or Evaluation license to allow me to do some testing in my home lab to see what kind of performance improvements can be gained from running V-locity VM in my environment.

It should be noted that the V-locity software is limited to the Microsoft platform of OS’s starting with Windows XP (SP2) all the way up to Windows 2012, it also supports both vSphere (ESX\i 4.0 or later) and HyperV as the host virtualisation platform.

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