Citrix Releases VDI-In-A-Box 5.4

Citrix has announced version 5.4 of its all-in-one VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) soultion VDI-in-a-Box.  this is by far the simplest way I have found to quickly setup and trial VDI and is very well aligned to the SMB/SME market

The major features introduced, leveraging the same technology of XenDesktop 7.1, are the support for Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and VMware ESXi 5.5 (and related vSphere implementations) in addition to Windows 8.1 as virtual desktop guest OS. The Citrix blog post explains all you need to know.

VMware Release ThinApp 5.0

VMware has released version 5 of its application virtualization product ThinApp.  With the release VMware announced that the product lifecycle has been extended to 5 years.

ThinApp is available as a standalone product and part of all Horizon bundles and the Horizon Suite. Since this is a major release, customers must also fulfill their subscription and receive new license keys along with the download of the bits at My VMware.

Version 5 provides the following new options:

• Support for 64-bit applications
• Support for Windows 8.1
• Optimized architecture leveraging NTDLL.DLL for improved application compatibility and performance
• Support for integration of AppSense personalization settings between native and ThinApp versions of applications.
• Ability to run virtualized Internet Explorer 10 (32- or 64-bit)
• Improved ADM and ADMX policy template files for ThinDirect
• Ability to virtualize Office 2013 (keep in mind though that Microsoft most probably doesn’t support this as they do not support virtualizing Office 2013 for App-V either)

Release: Xen 4.3.1

The Xen Project, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) and which is now transferred from Citrix to the Linux Foundation , today announced the release of version 4.3.1 of the Xen hypervisor. This so called Point release is the follow up of version 4.3 which was released in July this year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Besides fixing some vulnerabilities, this release also introduces around 80 bug fixes and improvements, like adjustments to XSAVE management and bug fixes for nested virtualization, other low level system state handling and libxl tool stack.

Paper: App-V 5.0 and Citrix Integration

Post from Virtualization.info

Microsoft has published a paper titled: “App-V 5.0 and Citrix Integration “. The paper which contains 28 pages provides guidance for combining App-V 5.0 and Citrix solutions. It discusses the benefits of App-V 5.0 and Citrix, recommendations for Citrix images, App-V cache management, App-V management with Citrix, factors that impact user experience and administrative effort, and the Citrix XenApp Connector for Configuration Manger 2012 SP1.

The paper contains the following sections:

• Overview of Citrix and App-V
• App-V 5 and Citrix together
• Building images with App-V
• App-V Cache Management
• Managing App-V applications in Citrix Images
• Factors that impact User experience and administrative effort
• Citrix XenApp Connector for Configuration Manager 2012 SP1

Paper: IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure with VMware View

IBM and VMware released a Reference Architecture titled: “IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure with VMware View “. The paper, which contains 52 pages and describes the reference architecture for using VMware View 5.1 on the ESXi 5 hypervisor. It

gives an architecture overview and component model of the VMware View and then describes the deployment model of VMware View using different number of users on a variety of IBM® hardware platforms including IBM Flex System, IBM PureFlex System, IBM System x, IBM networking, and IBM storage.

The paper contains the following sections:

• Introduction
• Architectural overview
• Component model
  • VMware View provisioning
  • Storage model
• Operational model
  • Compute servers for virtual desktops
  • Compute server for hosted shared desktops
  • Management servers
  • Systems management
  • Shared storage
  • Networking
  • Deployment models
• Bill of materials
• Resources

VMware Release Workstation 10.0.1 Update

The following issues are resolved in this release of VMware Workstation.

– Easy Install supports RTM versions of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2
– Workstation or Player on Windows freezes if another application is frozen.
– Virtual machine hangs when powering off
– Improved compatibility with some AMD CPUs

Click the image above to see the release notes, or launch your version  of the Software to autoupdate

V2V Conversion for Free – VMware to Hyper-V

5nine Software has released the 2.0 version of its free V2V conversion tool ‘Easy converter’. It is able to convert VMware virtual machines to Hyper-V. Other conversion types are not supported.

New is this 2.0 release is added support for Hyper-V 2012 R2 as a target. It also supports simultaneous conversions of multiple VMs.

V2V Converter is a simple to use, basic converter tool targeted at the Small and medium business market. During the conversion process the source VMware virtual machine will needs to be shutdown.

The 2.0 version of 5nine V2V Converter supports conversion of VMware Virtual Machines with Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 (x86 and x64), and most of Advanced Server 2000, Ubuntu and CentOS configurations into VHD and VHDX file formats for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1 and Microsoft Hyper-V 2012/R2.

Download 5nine V2V Easy Converter v2.0 from the company website athttp://www.5nine.com/vmware-hyper-v-v2v-conversion-free.aspx.

vSphere Hardening (Updated with General Availability)

One of the more solid cases in the VMware vs Hyper-V arguments is the ‘footprint’ of the hypervisor, VMware wins in terms of sizing and claims a massive advantage in being Linux based with a smaller attack surface.  However, this is often taken as an excuse by admins to leave a default configuration on hosts and within the vSphere components used to make up a virtualisation solution.  VMware have made things a little easier for those concerned that vulnerability in even a single host can mean chaos for your virtual environment, they have now release an updated hardening guide for the following components:

• Virtual Machines
• ESXi hosts
• Virtual Network
• vCenter Server plus its database and clients.
• vCenter Web Client
• vCenter SSO Server
• vCenter Virtual Appliance (VCSA) specific guidance
• vCenter Update Manager

To directly download the guide you can use this link and this one for the change log.

VMware Blog Details Here

Thanks to Mike Foley for confirming the version status of the document being published

What’s new in Virtualisation for Server 2012 R2

Server 2012 marks some long awaited improvements in the virtualisation space (still a different league to VMware, but let’s remember the price makes it a strong competitor for some specific use cases)..

18th October 2013 marked the General Availability of Windows Server 2012 R2.The teams have accomplished an amazing set of features in this short release cycle and Brad’s post @http://blogs.technet.com/b/in_the_cloud/archive/2013/10/18/today-is-the-ga-for-the-cloud-os.aspx captures the investments made across the board. We encourage you to update to the latest version and share your feedback.

This post captures the top 8 improvements done to Hyper-V Replica in Windows Server 2012 R2. We will be diving deep into each of these features in the coming weeks through blog posts and TechNet articles.

Seamless Upgrade

You can upgrade from Windows Server 2012 to Windows Server 2012 R2without having to re-IR your protected VMs. With new features such as cross-version live migration, it is easy to maintain your DR story across OS upgrades. You can also choose to upgrade your primary site and replica site at different times as Hyper-V Replica will replicate your virtual machines from a Windows Server 2012 environment to a Windows Server 2012 R2 environment.

30 second replication frequency

Windows Server 2012 allowed customers to replicate their virtual machines at a preset 5minute replication frequency. Our aspirations to bring down this replication frequency was backed by customer’s asks on providing the flexibility to set different replication frequencies to different virtual machines. With Windows Server 2012 R2, you can now asynchronously replicate your virtual machines at either 30second, 5mins or 15mins frequency.

 

Additional Recovery Points

Customers can now have a longer retention with 24 recovery points. These 24 (up from 16 in Windows Server 2012) recovery points are spaced at an hour’s interval.

 

Linux guest OS support

Hyper-V Replica, since it’s first release has been agnostic to the application and guest OS. However certain capabilities were unavailable on non-Windows guest OS in it’s initial avatar. With Windows Server 2012 R2, we are tightly integrated with non-Windows OS to provide file-system consistent snapshots and inject IP addresses as part of the failover workflow.

Extended Replication

You can now ‘extend’ your replica copy to a third site using the ‘Extended replication’ feature. The functionality provides an added layer of protection to recover from your disaster. You can now have a replica copy within your site (eg: ClusterA->ClusterB in your primary datacenter) and extend the replication for the protected VMs from ClusterB->ClusterC (in your secondary data center).

 

To recover from a disaster in ClusterA, you can now quickly failover to the VMs in ClusterB and continue to protect them to ClusterC. More on extended replication capabilities in the coming weeks.

Performance Improvements

Significant architectural investments were made to lower the IOPS and storage resources required on the Replica server. The most important of these was to move away from snapshot-based recovery points to “undo logs” based recovery points. These changes have a profound impact on the way the system scales up and consumes resources, and will be covered in greater detail in the coming weeks.

Online Resize

In Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica was closely integrated with the various Hyper-V features such as VM migration, storage migration etc. Windows Server 2012 R2 allows you to resize a running VM and if your VM is protected – you can continue to replicate the virtual machine without having to re-IR the VM.

Hyper-V Recovery Manager

We are also excited to announce the paid preview of Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM)(http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/archive/2013/10/21/announcing-paid-preview-of-windows-azure-hyper-v-recovery-manager.aspx ). This is a Windows Azure Service that allows you to manage and orchestrate various DR workflows between the primary and recovery datacenters. HRM does *not* replicate virtual machines to Windows Azure – your data is replicated directly between the primary and recovery datacenter. HRM is the disaster recovery “management head” which is offered as a service on Azure.

VMworld Sessions – VMworld vCenter Deep Dive and vSphere Upgrade series: Part 1 – vCenter Server

Who need’s a ticket and hotel when you have Youtube a week later!

VMworld vCenter Deep Dive and vSphere Upgrade series: Part 1 – vCenter Server breakout sessions from last weeks VMworld in Barcelona where Justin King’s sessions were recorded.

vCenter Deep Dive

vSphere Upgrade series Part 1: vCenter Server