vCloud Hybrid Service vSphere Client Plug-in released

VMware released the vCloud Hybrid Service vSphere Client Plug-in. This plug-in allows administrators to manage both their on-premise vSphere infrastructure as well as the virtual datacenters running on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). vCHS is the VMware public IaaS platform currently available in the US only, while in the UK a single datacenter is running in beta.

More on the roadmap of vCHS here.

VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 Released

VMware released vCloud Automation Center 6.0 at December 10 2013.
Release notes are here
download here
documentation here

What is new

• Unified Service Catalog for Infrastructure, Desktop, and Application Services
• In addition to its support for heterogeneous infrastructure, vCloud Automation Center now offers a single catalog for publishing and consuming application services. Users can browse the same catalog to request and provision single- or multi-node applications, just as they do for infrastructure and desktop services.
• Catalog requests are now governed by a more flexible and powerful approval policy engine. Approval policies can be based on request criteria, support multiple levels of approvers (requiring one or all approvers at each level), and be enforced both before and after services are provisioned. Furthermore, administrators can set up policies that allow approvers to override specific request fields (for example, the lease duration).
• Enhancements to Application Deployment and Updates (formerly “Application Director”)
  • Users can request applications from the Service Catalog and monitor their overall deployment status.
  • Application enhancements: Users can now roll back failed updates to restore the system. They can also significantly reduce the time to update an application by reusing update profiles that store frequently used update scripts and properties. This enables the promotion of changes across Deployment Environments to facilitate Release Automation, and scale-in of clustered applications to save unused resources.
  • External services: Users can reduce time to deliver workload by connecting to an external or existing service such as a load balancer, an existing database with pre-configured schema, SaaS applications such as Salesforce, an LDAP server, an SSO server and so on.
  • Policy-based provisioning: Administrators can enforce policies across different deployment environments by blacklisting application services or enforcing mandatory services. They can also facilitate policy-based provisioning by setting number of Total Instances (VMs) limits across all nodes in a deployment. Compliance View shows policy violations against currently active and effective policies on deployments and application updates.
• Extensibility to any IT Service
  • In addition to out-of-the-box services, customers can now more easily extend vCloud Automation Center to publish any kind of IT service to the common service catalog. Whether it’s storage-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service, or something as simple as letting users add capacity to their e-mail account, the new Advanced Service Designer lets service architects design rich user forms and provisioning workflows in a matter of minutes.
  • Like out-of-the-box services, custom services leverage the same entitlement and approval policy engine, enabling organizations to enforce a consistent governance layer.
• Integration with IT Business Management Standard Edition

• Provides visibility into the cost and usage of on-premise virtual infrastructure and public cloud infrastructure, including benchmarking capabilities.
• Supports “what-if” cost analysis to determine the best infrastructure type and placement options
• Includes capacity, cost, and budget analysis capabilities for proactive planning
• Improvements in Infrastructure as a Service

• Support for VMware vCloud Hybrid Service: vCloud Automation Center now provides the ability to provision and perform basic administrative tasks on virtual machines deployed in vCloud Hybrid Services.
• Support for OpenStack: In addition to vSphere, vCloud Director, Amazon Web Services, Hyper-V, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Citrix XenServer, and various physical server management interfaces, vCloud Automation Center now provides support for provisioning and performing administrative actions on machines managed by OpenStack.
  • Supports RedHat OpenStack 3.0 (Grizzly)
  • Supports static IP and floating IP
  • Supports attach to VNC console
  • Support for Linux kickstart and WIMimage
• Log in to vSphere machines from the service catalog: After a vSphere virtual machine is provisioned, a user can now access it via the VMware Remote Console.
• Continued integration with vCNS: In previous versions, vCloud Automation Center provided support for placement in existing VXLANs, load balancers and security groups. This release adds support for the dynamic creation of isolated and routed networks and load balancers.
• Support for vSAN as a datastore: vCloud Automation Center now supports storage clusters and allows the selection of a vSAN as a data store for a reservation.
• Puppet Integration
  In this release, support for reuse of Puppet content to build application blueprints in Application Director allows application architects to accomplish the following goals:

• Model multi-tier applications using Puppet modules.
• Mix-and-match Puppet and non-Puppet content in application blueprints.
• Import both Puppet Open Source and Puppet Enterprise Modules
• Manage the application update life cycle while maintaining multi-node dependencies, property bindings, and diverse content types.
• Leverage vCloud Automation Center Service Catalog to publish and request Puppet applications.
• Enhanced vSphere support

• vCloud Automation Center supports Storage DRS (SDRS): SDRS clusters and volumes are discovered as individual storage paths.
• vCloud Automation Center supports storage clusters and recognizes a Storage DRS-enabled storage cluster as a datastore.
• vCloud Automation Center automatically consumes the changes at the next data collection as datastores are added or removed from the storage cluster.
• vCloud Automation Center supports Storage DRS automated mode.
• vCloud Automation Center allows the selection of a cluster, standalone datastore, or a cluster member (datastore from a cluster) in the same reservation. All selections have the same priority and are accessed via round-robin.
• Improved Administration Capabilities

• Support for LDAP services: In addition to Microsoft Active Directory, vCloud Automation Center now provides support for LDAP-based directory services.
• Improvements in multi-tenancy: vCloud Automation Center administrators can easily create multiple tenants with dedicated directory services, service catalog, and portal branding.
• New verb-oriented RESTFUL APIs (BETA): New programmatic interfaces provide a more secure and easier way for external systems to interact with the vCloud Automation Center service catalog and cover operations such SSO authentication, submitting a service request, approving a request, listing provisioned items, and so on. These APIs are available for BETA testing and are expected to evolve in the next vCloud Automation Center release. Older vCloud Automation Center 5.x APIs are still available and have received minor updates for feature enhancements.

VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.8 released

VMware released vCenter Operations Manager 5.8 at December 10. This release was announced at VMworld Barcelona in October. The software is available in the Operations Management Suite 5.8 Standard, Advanced and Enterprise editions.

Read my post about the announcement here.

Main enhancements are:

1. monitor business critical applications
2. monitor fiber channel storage
3. monitor Hyper-V servers
4. monitor Amazon AWS services

release notes are here.

download Operations Manager 5.8 here.

What is new:

vCenter Operations Manager 5.8 is the latest release of VMware’s integrated operations suite, converging performance, capacity, and configuration management. This new release introduces the following enhancements.

Improved Enterprise Readiness

• Optimized query execution to improve performance at scale.
• Enhanced authentication options with new active directory integration for authentication.
• Improved security with upgrades to the OS and runtime environment.

Expanded Integration

• New integration with VMware Log Insight using a vCenter Operations Manager Content Pack that enables you to monitor your vCenter Operations Manager infrastructure.
• Expanded integration with vCenter Hyperic using the vCenter Operations Management Pack for vCenter Hyperic. This management pack provides many new capabilities, such as:
  • Support for Microsoft Hyper-V servers, including out of the box dashboards for troubleshooting and performance analysis.
  • Support for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Servers, with out of the box dashboards for troubleshooting.
• Several new management packs are available for download. Check the Cloud Management Marketplace on the VMware Solution Exchange for more details:https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/vcops.

StarWind Runner-Up in Storage, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing (SVC) Awards 2013

 StarWind Software Inc., a leading provider of software-defined storage solutions for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2, today announced that the company has been named the first runner-up in two categories: Virtualization Management Product of the Year and Storage Virtualization Product of the Year at the SVC Awards 2013, the world’s most important IT awards. Recognized for its storage virtualization solution, StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS, the company demonstrates strong competitive advantages, proven technology, uniqueness and effectiveness in the virtualization and storage fields.

Since 2003, StarWind has pioneered the iSCSI SAN software industry and is the solution of choice for over 30,000 customers worldwide in more than 100 countries and from small and midsize companies to governments and Fortune 1000 companies.

For more information on StarWind Software Inc., visit: www.starwindsoftware.com

StarWind Software offers a 30% discount if you buy  any StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS edition orStarWind Native SAN for Hyper-V edition by the end of the year and get BIG discounts off list price!*

Contact us and take advantage of our special offer now!

* The promo discount cannot be summarized with any other special offers and promotions. The promotional discounts do not apply to renewals, upgrades or Support Plans. Your discount will be that corresponding to the week you send us a Purchase Order. Countries that do NOT qualify for the promotion are: Russian Federation, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Free ebook: Microsoft System Center: Cloud Management with App Controller

Microsoft released a new free ebook titled “Microsoft System Center: Cloud Management with App Controller”. The book has 5 chapters and 106 pages. It describes how to install App Controller, how to manage public, private and hybrid cloud.

The ebook is available in PDF, Mobi en ePub formats. Download here.

Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 App Controller is uniquely positioned as both an enabler and a self-service vehicle for connecting clouds and implementing the hybrid computing model. In Microsoft’s cloud computing solutions, both System Center and Windows Azure play critical roles. System Center can be used to transform enterprise IT from a device-based infrastructure and deployment strategy to a service-based user-centric consumption model based on private cloud computing. Windows Azure on the other hand is a subscription-based public cloud platform that enables the development, deployment, and management of cloud solutions. App Controller is the glue that unifies these two platforms by providing a single interface that enables administrators to perform complex operations without overwhelming them with the underlying technical complexities involved.

This book serves as an introduction to implementing and managing the hybrid computing solutions using App Controller. It describes the basic concepts, processes, and operations involved in connecting, consuming, and managing resources that are deployed both on and off premises. Each chapter provides a concise, self-contained walkthrough for a specific aspect of managing private, public, and hybrid clouds using App Controller.

While cloud computing is still evolving, the hybrid approach will likely continue to emerge as the go-to IT computing model for the foreseeable future. Using App Controller to strategically connect both on-premises System Center private clouds with off-premises deployments in both Windows Azure and third-party cloud hosting providers enables new scenarios, develops new possibilities, and offers exciting new opportunities that can help IT transition better into the next generation of enterprise computing.

VMware releases VSAN Beta refresh update

VMware has released an update for Virtual SAN (VSAN) beta. The software is currently available as a public beta and can be downloaded by anyone. The general availability of VSAN is not made public at the moment. Also pricing and which vSphere 5.5 editions it will support is unknown.

Updated in this Refresh are:

• AHCI fix. There was an issue with VSAN losing data under certain conditions when certain AHCI controllers were used. This has now been fixed.
• New Ruby Virtual Console Commands. For depth analysis of the performance of a Virtual SAN cluster
• A disk group may now contain a single SSD and up to seven HDDs
• a set of VSAN PowerCLi cmdlets have been released as a fling from VMware R&D

More information here.

VMware introduces new Hybrid Cloud competency for partners

VMware partners can differentiate from others on knowledge of VMware solutions by qualifying for compentencies. Besides proof of knowledge, for some solutions a requirement for being allowed to sell those by the partner is being qualified for a certain competency.

VMware offers several  competencies like Desktop Virtualization (covers VMware View), Infrastructure Virtualization (covers vSphere) and Business Continuity (covers Site Recovery Manager).These can be obtained by doing online trainings on VMware Partner Central.

A new competency is Hybrid Cloud. VMware has a lot of  online course material available which educates partners on the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). This is a VMware owned and operated public Infrastructure as a Service offering currently available in the United States. vCHS will rapidly expand to Europe with a UK-datacenter currently running in beta status.

VMware vCHS is not directly sold by VMware. The service does not provide customers the ability to just fill in creditcard details and off you go. Reserved capacity has to be purchased up front by the customer. Selling is done by VMware partners.

The online training has  detailed information covering service onboarding & deployment, migration of workloads, as well as networking and security.

Starting January 2, 2014, the Cloud Hybrid Competency will be a requirement for selling vCloud Hybrid Service. The competence has three different tracks. There is no prerequisite and a customer reference is also not required.

1. sales . This has two on-line courses of 60 minutes each. After watching the videos the partner is qualified as VSP-Hybrid
2. technical sales. 5 courses of 60 minutes each. After watching the videos the partner is qualified as VTSP-Hybrid
3. Operations expert. 7 tracks,  in total 5-hour self-paced e-Learning. Content includes Subscription Ops Overview, Business Considerations, Quote, Order, Invoice Metered Usage, Add-ons Renewal, Pricing. After passing a test qualification of VMware Subscription Operations Expert (VSE)

There is no dedicated technical post training available.

.

Release of 5nine Security for Hyper-V Standard 3.7

5nine Software released version 3.7 of 5nine Security for Hyper-V Standard edition. This software product provides agentless anti-virus and anti-malware protection for Windows Server as well as for virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V.

5nine Security Standard has an agentless anti-virus specially designed for Microsoft Hyper-V. Incremental scans, a proprietary technology, allows reduction in scan time by 99% compared to the full system scan.

New in version 3.7 is Antivirus Active Protection. This feature scans disk, files and memory of Hyper-V VMs in real-time. For this to work an agent, called the VM Active Protection Agent must be installed though. Customers can choose between VIPRE or Sophos as their anti-malware engines.

An overview of the features and benefits of 5nine Security for Hyper-V Standard can be found here.

An overview of features of all three editions can be found here. 

 

VMware Horizon View 5.3 is now generally available

At November 21 VMware released VMware Horizon View version 5.3.0.

This release has some interesting features like support for Virtual SAN, and Windows 8.1 & Windows Server 2008 as desktop operating system.

It also features  a new storage overcommit option for linked-clone desktop pool storage.
When customers select the Unbounded overcommit option, they can place as many linked clones on the selected datastore as they desire. This feature is beneficial to customers who use third-party storage technologies (for example, Atlantis Computing VSA), which optimize the space consumed by the virtual disks of the individual virtual machines.

More on the storage optimization features in View 5.3 in this blogpost. 

Release notes are here
Documentation can be downloaded here.
Download the software from MyVMware

What is new in View 5.3? 

VMware Horizon View 5.3 delivers important features and enhancements and resolves some known problems in the previous release. This release of VMware Horizon View adds the following new features and support.

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Desktop Operating System Support
  Windows Server 2008 R2 (Datacenter edition) is now supported as a desktop operating system. For installation instructions and limitations, see KB 2057605: Using Windows Server 2008 R2 as a desktop operating system in VMware Horizon View.
• Windows 8.1 Desktop Operating System Support
  Windows 8.1 is now supported as a desktop operating system.
• VMware Horizon Mirage Support 
  You can now use VMware Horizon Mirage 4.3 to manage View desktops. See the VMware Horizon Mirage Administrator’s Guide for complete information about this feature.
• VMware Virtual SAN Datastore Support
  When you create a desktop pool in View Administrator, you can now select a Virtual SAN datastore to store desktop virtual machines. Because Virtual SAN is in Beta, this feature is being released as a Tech Preview, which means that it is available for you to try, but it is not recommended for production use and no technical support is provided. The space-efficient virtual disk format is not available on Virtual SAN datastores. If you use Virtual SAN datastores to host virtual desktops, you will not be able to reclaim allocated unused space on the virtual machines.
• View Connection Server Memory Recommendation Messages 
  If you install View Connection Server with less than 10GB of memory, VMware Horizon View provides memory recommendations by generating warning messages after the installation is complete.
• vDGA Support
  vDGA (virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration) is now supported for View desktops. For linked-clone desktops, vDGA settings are preserved after refresh, recompose, and rebalance operations.
• Linked-Clone Desktop Pool Storage Overcommit Feature Enhancements 
  The linked-clone desktop pool storage overcommit feature includes a new storage overcommit level called Unbounded. When you select Unbounded, View Manager does not limit the number of linked-clone desktops that it creates based on the physical capacity of the datastore. You select the storage overcommit level for a linked-clone desktop pool on the Select Datastores page when you add or edit a linked-clone pool. SelectUnbounded only if you are certain that the datastore has enough storage capacity to accommodate all of the desktops and their future growth.
• View Persona Management Supportability Improvements
  Supportability improvements include new log messages and profile size and file and folder count tracking. View Persona Management uses the file and folder counts to suggest folders for redirection in the Windows event log and provides statistics for these folders.
• Support to Grant Domain Administrators Access to Redirected Folders in View Persona Management
  A new group policy setting, Add the Administrators group to redirected folders, has been added to make redirected folders accessible to domain administrators. For information about the new group policy setting, see KB 2058932: Granting domain administrators access to redirected folders for View Persona Management.
• VMware Horizon View Agent Direct-Connection Plug-in
  You can use VMware Horizon View Agent Direct-Connection Plug-in to connect directly to a virtual desktop. This plug-in is an installable extension to View Agent that allows a View client to directly connect to a View desktop without using View Connection Server. For more information, see VMware Horizon View Agent Direct-Connection Plug-in Administration.
• View Composer Array Integration (VCAI) Support 
  The Tech Preview designation has been removed from VCAI. VCAI appears as an option during pool creation when you select an NFS datastore on an array that supports VAAI (vStorage API for Array Integration) native snapshots. The VCAI feature is now supported with select NAS vendors. For a list of supported NAS vendors, see KB 2061611: View Composer API for Array Integration (VCAI) support in VMware Horizon View.
• Blast Secure Gateway Maximum Connections
  The Blast Secure Gateway (BSG) now supports up to 350 connections to Horizon View desktops from clients using HTML Access. This connection limit applies to a BSG on one View Connection Server instance or security server.

Register for the free Belgium VMUG meeting

The Belgium VMUG will have its first mini VMworld event at Thursday December 5. This whole day event has some great speakers of for example VMware, Nutanix and EMC. The location of the event is at Schelle near Antwerp so also conveniant located for Dutch people as well (1,5 hour drive from Utrecht).

The event is free. Registration closes at December 4.

Below the program of the day.

 

 

Nutanix announces 5 new models including NX-7110 optimized for graphics performance

Nutanix today announced that it will extend its line of converged storage and compute platforms with a new model optimized for heavy graphical usage like 3D and CAD. Also the current NX-3000 and NX-6000 line of servers is extended with 4 new models.

One of the use cases of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is VDI. Because disks (Nutanix used SSD and HDD) are in the same box as the CPU’s performance of storage is improved compared to the traditional way of presenting storage like SAN and NAS. VDI is notorious for being dependant on storage performance. When storage does not perform, end users will complain about bad performance.

New is the Nutanix NX-7110 platform. This server further enhances the VDI user experience by enhancing video performance. This server has three PCIe slots which can be used by NVIDIA K1, NVIDIA K2 and Teradici APEX cards for  server offload..

The Teradici card offloads the PCoIP image encoding tasks thus reducing the server CPU utilization. This enables a better user experience and also allows a better VM to CPU consolidation. More VM’s per CPU reduces costs. PCoIP is only supported by VMware View.

The NVIDIA cards allow GPU virtualization which means the graphical processor can be virtualized and shared by multiple users. This greatly enhances the user experiences of Server Based Computing (Micrsoft RDS and Citrix XenApp) as well as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solutions like Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View.

Using the Nutanix NX-7110 usage of AutoCAD, Autodesk, SolidWorks CAD and 3D software is possible on VDI and SBC.

The image below shows the hardware specs of the NX-7110. Mind there is only one node per 19″ appliance. Other Nutanix appliances/enclosures allow up 4 nodes per enclosure. Also NVIDIA K1 and K2 cards cannot be mixed.

Nutanix also announced four new models in the current NX-3000 and NX-6000 series. The NX-3060, NX-3061, NX-6060 and NX-6080 have two Intel Ivy processors with 10 cores each per socket. Also the nodes can have up to 512 GB of internal memory. This allows an up to 30% greater VM density per node

Veeam announces new certification : Veeam Certified Engineer VMCE

Veeam will launch a new program in January 2014 (launching first in North America and EMEA) that will educate and certify partners and end-user engineers as Veeam Certified Engineers (VMCE). The designation of VMCE establishes a level of expertise required to implement and configure Veeam software correctly and most effectively. The designation also verifies the engineer has the necessary knowledge and experience to be hired as a Veeam Expert.

Distribution partners of Veeam will be selected as Veeam Authorized Education Centers (VMAEC) to deliver fee-based education courses with a curriculum developed by Veeam. For those who cannot attend the three-day instructor-led live training, Veeam is piloting a Video on Demand Learning (VODL) module in North America. Every class includes both lecture and hands-on elements that allow the students to learn about the technology and its configuration, and then experience the configuration in labs based on real-world customer scenarios. All VMCE candidates must pass a proctored exam as the final step in earning their certification. Veeam expects 1,000 – 2,000 engineers to earn the VMCE distinction within the next year.

“Our new training and certification programs will create a more empowered and enabled channel and end-user ecosystem,” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO at Veeam Software. “We expect our ProPartners to see growth in revenue as these certified Veeam experts become more engaged, motivated and knowledgeable. This training will support our partners’ ability to offer additional services to their customers and establish an extra revenue stream, while also offering a higher level of support to their customers. As a channel-centric organization, our regional teams will work alongside our partner community to help them take advantage of the hot growth opportunities Modern Data Protection™ is creating in the enterprise market.”

This new certification program is designed to support the systems engineers of Veeam customers, as well as the pre-sales engineers of Veeam’s network of ProPartners, with high-level technical competencies through delivery of technical courses required to achieve VMCE certification.

Veeam will empower its North American and EMEA engineers specifically by providing education on Veeam product capabilities, their interaction and alignment with compatible technologies, and both onsite and online instruction on how to most effectively implement Veeam to achieve maximum functionality. This training will include certification programs that will enable the reseller to offer and deliver highly profitable professional services, and enable the customer to further optimize its investment in Veeam solutions for a much higher ROI and improved SLAs (Service Level Agreements).

Veeam releases Backup & Replication 7.0 R2 update supporting vSphere 5.5.

Today Veeam released Veeam Backup & Replication R2. This version has a lot of new features. One of the most interesting is support for VMware vSphere 5.5. The update also contains bugfixes.

Veeam has named this release a patch. To obtain the patch please download it from: Download

More information here

What is new:

VMware

• vSphere 5.5 support, including support for 62TB virtual disks and virtual hardware v10 virtual machines.
• vCloud Director 5.5 support.
• Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 as guest virtual machines (VMs).
• Added ability to limit maximum amount of active VM snapshots per datastore to prevent it from being overfilled with snapshot deltas. The default value of 4 active snapshots can be controlled with MaxSnapshotsPerDatastore (REG_DWORD) registry key.

Microsoft

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 support, including support for Generation 2 virtual machines.
• Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 as guest virtual machines (VMs)
• Support for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)
• Support for the installation of Veeam Backup & Replication and its components on Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1.

Built-in WAN acceleration

• Increased data processing up to 50% with hard drive based cache, and up to 3 times with SSD based cache. Multi-core CPU on source WAN accelerator is recommended to take full advantage of the enhanced data processing engine.

Replication

• Added ability for source and target proxy servers to reconnect and resume replication when network connection between source and target site drops for a short period of time.

Tape

• Added support for a number of enterprise-class tape libraries with partitioning functionality that allows presenting multiple tape library partitions to the same host.
• Import/export slot interaction has been redesigned to add support for a number of IBM and Oracle tape libraries.

Application-aware processing

• Added ability for application-aware processing logic to detect passive Microsoft Exchange DAG database present on the VM, and process it accordingly.
• Added support for Exchange CCR clusters.

User interface

• User interface should now remember size and positions off the main window, as well as all panels and columns.

 

 

Maxta presents software defined storage for vSphere challenging traditional SAN/NAS. Software eats storage!

Software defined storage (SDS) is hot. Today Maxta came out of stealth mode and presented the world their software defined storage solution for VMware vSphere which looks like a perfect mix of VMware Virtual SAN and Nutanix capabilities. No SAN or NAS needed but  resilient local storage for caching (consumergrade SDD) and persistent storage (HDD). Through its software-only solution, Maxta turns standard servers into a converged compute and storage solution

While the Maxta Storage Platform  has been running for over a year in production now at an undisclosed number of customer sites, untill today the company did not do a lot of marketing. The current version of Maxta Storage  Platform or MxSP is 2.2.3.

This skepticism about SDS was part of the reason why Maxta has kept under the radar since its 2009 start. Maxta decided not to announce the company until it had technology validation, and market validation.

The software is installed as a virtual machine running on each hypervisor (vSphere 5.0 Update 1 and higher). This virtual appliance aggregates local storage and presents it over NFS to the hypervisor. Hyper-V and KVM support is currently in Limited Availability)

Because it is a very cost-effective solution and is VM-centric  (cost based on raw storage capacity) Maxta Storage Platform can be used for remote offices/branch offices instead of traditional storage solutions  like Dell EqualLogic, Lefthand, HP StorageWorks 1000 Modular Smart Array, VMware Virtual Storage Appliance, VMware Virtual SAN.

Other use cases are VDI, Disaster Recovery and Test/dev.

Quite a few software defined storage solutions are based on ‘converged storage and  compute’ or ‘datacenter in a box’. It means that storage for virtual machines is located in the same enclosure as compute (cpu+memory). The raw local storage in multiple servers is aggregated, replicated and made available to the server nodes in a resilient way. Storage is presented and managed either in kernel or by a software appliance running on the host. This architecture has many advantages over traditional SAN/NAS solutions.

VMware Virtual SAN or VSAN is a software defined storage solution currently in open beta. It gets a lot of attention from VMware customers as it  reduces costs while enhancing performance & agility  and simplifying management of storage compared to using traditional SAN/NAS solotions.

Nutanix has a packaged software and proprietry hardware solution which gets a lot of attention as well. Other players delivering Datacenter in a Box solutions are SimpliVity and Scale Computing. See my earlier blog in which I compare VMware VSAN with Nutanix.

At November 12 Maxta  showed the world their software defined storage solution which is a hypervisor agnostic, highly resilient, scalable, VM-centric storage platform.

This post will introduce Maxta as a company and will provide all the technical details about their solution. Subjects discussed are:

• The features
• Installation
• The architecture
• Storage features
• Support
• Pricing

For a three minutes introduction showing benefits of Maxta see the video below.

Inside-bigdata.com has a video presentation by Maxta of 21 minutes. Yoram Novick, CEO of Maxta, presents the solution.

VMware releases Network port diagram poster for Horizon View 5.2

VMware released a nice PDF file in poster format showing traffic flow between the components in a VMware Horizon View 5.2 infrastructure. So if you want to know which traffic flows from the View client to the Security Server, the View Agent or the Connection Server etc this poster has the answers.

This poster is very helpfull in understanding traffic, which ports are used etc. It will help to configure the firewall rules.

download here.