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Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers
since 2003




ABOUT


RELEASE: VMWARE VREALIZE LOG INSIGHT 4.5

Log Insight is a log aggregation, management and analysis tool, that VMware
first introduced in 2013 and considered a competitor of Splunk.

Yesterday VMware announced the release of version 4.5, available for download
here.
Most of the focus for this release goes to the integration with vRealize
Operations which, in short, means:

 * Direct launch into Log Insight Dashboard
 * Direct launch into Log Insight Interactive Analytics mode
 * Object auto-initiated log management
 * vRealize Operations Alerts auto-initiated log management

The remnant new features are split into 4 areas:

> Server Features
> 
>  * Added API to query alert execution and notification history
>  * Added ability to specify basic authentication for webhooks
>  * New product configuration APIs added
>  * The source field is maintained when forwarding from vRealize Log Insight
>    forwarder to a vRealize Log Insight server
>  * Hosts on the /admin/hosts page can now be exported
>  * Support for external servers has been deprecated
>  * VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) is recommended for vRealize Log Insight.
>    Native AD support is now deprecated.
> 
> General User Interface Items
> 
>  * Dashboard legend mouse-over in one widget now highlights corresponding
>    chart items across widgets
>  * Added ability to show a given time across all dashboard chart widgets
>    simultaneously
>  * Separate options are available for descriptions and recommendations for
>    user alerts.
>  * User alert history for aggregation queries now includes count
> 
> Agent Items
> 
>  * Added ability to send unaltered raw syslog to destination server
>  * Added ability for agent syslog parser to parse structured data (SD), PRI,
>    PROCID, and MSGID syslog fields
>  * Added auto-update checkbox option on MSI user interface
>  * Added support for sending logs to multiple destinations
>  * Added directory wildcard support
>  * Added support for Photon OS
>  * Support for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has been deprecated
> 
> Content Packs
> 
>  * Updated General and vSphere content packs
>  * VSAN and vROps content packs included out of the box

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PAPER: INTRODUCING THE NSX-T PLATFORM

“We see greater potential strategic opportunity in NSX over the next decade than
our franchise product vSphere has had for the past decade.”
said VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger talking about NSX’s capability to reach $1B this
fiscal year.

VMware NSX, launched in August 2013, unifies in a single platform Nicira NVP
(that the company acquired in July 2012 for approximately $1B) and VMware vCloud
Network and Security, covering the entire network and security model from Layer
2 to Layer 7 and integrating in the hypervisor to ability to manage switching,
bridging, routing and firewall.

This month VMware published a technical white paper titled Introducing the NSX-T
Platform to explain its new architecture described as follows:


> The NSX-T architecture has built-in separation of the data plane, control
> plane and management plane. This separation delivers multiple benefits,
> including scalability, performance, resiliency and heterogeneity. In this
> section, we’ll walk you through each layer and its specific role and
> characteristics.

VMware NSX-T is a second platform in the NSX family, focused on emerging
application frameworks and architectures that have heterogeneous endpoints and
technology stacks aka supporting non-vSphere environments.

The 10 pages paper contains the following sections:

 * Introduction
   * Networking and security today
   * How NSX-T addresses these trends and challenges
 * Architecture Overview
 * Management Plane
 * Control Plane
 * Data Plane
   * NSX-T Compute Independent Host Switch
   * Routing Scale and Performance
   * Routing and Convergence
   * Security
   * Services
   * Operations
 * Conclusion
   * Key Takeaways
   * What You Can Do Now

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


PAPER: VMWARE VSPHERE VIRTUAL MACHINE ENCRYPTION PERFORMANCE

Encryption of virtual machines is something that has been requested for years by
the security community. VMware continued to postpone its implementation due to
the negative operational impact that many solutions proved to have, until now.
With vSphere 6.5 VMware introduced an agnostic, policy driven VM Encryption
feature claiming that the impact on I/O performance is very minimal.
To prove that VMware published a 16 pages Performance Study which presents the
results of several I/O experiments aimed to quantify CPU cost and I/O throughput
and latency when enabling a VM with encryption.

The paper contains the following sections:

Executive Summary

 * Introduction
 * VM Encryption Overview
 * Design
 * Key Management
 * Performance Study
 * Experimental Setup
 * Server Hardware
 * Server Storage
 * Workload and Virtual Machine Configuration
 * Metrics
 * Server Software Configuration
 * Results
 * I/O Performance
 * VM Provisioning Operations
 * Conclusion
 * References

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


QUEST SOFTWARE LEAVES DELL

In September 2012 Dell announced to have completed the acquisition of Quest
Software, a Californian company with an history in systems management, security,
business intelligence and, falling back in our own area of interest,
virtualization, cloud automation and backup & recovery.
Today, after 3 years, Quest is announcing its renewed independency thanks to a
new acquisition by Francisco Partners and Elliott Management Corporation.

Dell is currently in the spotlight due to its acquisition of EMC Corporation,
owner (among others) of VMware and Pivotal.

Jeff Hawn, chairman and CEO said:

> As companies continue to embrace business transformation, particularly through
> adopting cloud-centric technology models, they need a trusted partner through
> this critical journey. In relaunching Quest, our products will be
> purpose-built and backed by a level of support and services that will help our
> customers and partners succeed. We’ll take the best of what made Quest a
> market maker for the past 30 years and infuse a renewed focus on security and
> cloud.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


CITRIX ANNOUNCES Q3 2016 RESULTS

Citrix announced its financial results for third quarter 2016.

The revenues for the second quarter were $841 million for an increase of 3%
compared to Q3 2015.

Net income was $132 million and non-GAAP operating income was $208 million, an
increase compared to $168 million for Q3 2015.

Examining the results in contrast with the same quarter 2015:

 * Product and license revenue remained flat;
 * Software as a service revenue increased 9 percent;
 * Revenue from license updates and maintenance increased 5 percent;
 * Professional services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, product
   training and certification, decreased 19 percent;
 * Net revenue increased in the Americas region by 8 percent, decreased 4
   percent in the EMEA region and increased in the Pacific region by less of 1
   percent;
 * Deferred revenue totaled $1.6 billion as of September 30, 2016, compared to
   $1.5 billion as of September 30, 2015, an increase of 7 percent;
 * GAAP operating margin was 18 percent; Non-GAAP operating margin was 30
   percent;
 * Quarterly cash flow from operations of $288 million, up 11 percent
   year-over-year.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


RELEASE: VMWARE VSPHERE 6.5 & VIRTUAL SAN 6.5

2016 edition of VMworld US has been quite turbulent, on the other hand during
VMworld Europe, happening these days in Barcelona, the company announced a few
more products for the joy of its loyal audience.

vSphere 6.5 announced yesterday, for instance, is a release focused on
addressing three main challenges: simplify the user experience, integrate
security capabilities and support traditional and new generation applications
side by side.

To do that this dotted release introduces:

 * A newly optimised vCenter Server Appliance, with a fully integrated vSphere
   Update Manager, file-based backup and recovery, native VCSA high availability
   and a brand new HTML5-based vSphere Client plus a set of REST-based APIs for
   VM Management. To speedup the migration from “traditional” Windows
   deployments VMware also provide a brand new vCenter Server Appliance
   Migration tool.
 * A series of security features such: VM-level disk encryption, encrypted
   vMotion, secure boot model for both the hypervisor and the guest operating
   system and enhanced audit-quality logging capabilities that collect more
   information about user actions.
 * vSphere Integrated Containers now shipped with vSphere bundles.

Alongside vSphere VMware also announced Virtual SAN 6.5, the new dotted release
of its software-defined storage offering that enables pooling of storage
capabilities within exsisting servers.
Key new features are:

 * Virtual SAN iSCSI Service
 * 2-Node Direct Connect
   * Witness Traffic Separation for ROBO
 * 512e drive support

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


RELEASE: VMWARE VREALIZE LOG INSIGHT 4.0

Log Insight is a log aggregation, management and analisys tool, that VMware
first introduced in 2013 and now is usually compared with Splunk.

Yesterday VMware announced Log Insight’s new major release 4.0, scheduled for a
vague “later this year”.
According to VMware’s announcement, this release is focused on delivering a
brand new user interface based on Clarity standard, enhanced alert management
capabilities, with a centralised interface and historical views, and better
integration with vSphere, vRealize, and other VMware products.

In detail the new functionalities introduced by vRealize Log Insight 4.0 are:

New Server Capabilities

 * New Clarity UI
 * vSphere 6.5 compatibility
 * New Admin Alerts Management UI
 * FIPS-compliant deployment
 * Octet-framing over TCP
 * Public Installer APIs

Improved Agent Capabilities

 * Agent Auto-Update

New General UI Items

 * DeviceID to name Aliasing
 * New “field does not exist” filter
 * New gauge chart
 * New “blur” on session timeout

New Tech Preview Features

 * Agent scripted-input
 * vIDM SSO Support

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RELEASE: WINDOWS SERVER 2016 WITH SUPPORT FOR WINDOW SERVER & HYPER-V CONTAINERS

Yesterday Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server 2016
which the company defines as a cloud-ready OS.

Beside fancy definitions, one of the most relevant perks of this release is that
enables windows users to consume container virtualization technologies through
two different technologies: Windows Server Containers & Hyper-V Containers.

The first allowed Docker Engine to be ported on windows, where has been in
technical preview for over a year.
As a consequence Docker and Microsoft announced a commercial partnership during
the Ignite, but, despite this relationship, Docker Engine is not an integral
part of Windows Server setup, nor Windows Update. Though a PowerShell script is
at your disposal to make the magic happen.

Hyper-V Containers comes from Microsoft’s strategy to support containers within
its pre-existing hypervisor ecosystem, a similar (but not identical from a
technology standpoint) approach to VMware’s vSphere Integrated Containers. Using
Microsoft’s own definition:

> multiple container instances can run concurrently on a host; however, each
> container runs inside of a special virtual machine. This provides kernel level
> isolation between each Hyper-V container and the container host

You can give a peek downloading Windows Server 2016 Evaluation from this link.

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RELEASE: ORACLE VM 3.4.2

During Oracle OpenWorld 2016 the company released version 3.4.2 of its
enterprise virtualization solution.

Oracle VM is available for both x86 and SPARC based processor architectures and
uses the Xen hypervisor technology, supporting Windows, Linux and Oracle Solaris
guests.

Some of the changes and new features introduced with version 3.4.2:


>  * Support for NVM Express (NVMe) devices:
>    * Discover NVMe devices and present them to Oracle VM Manager
>    * NVMe devices can be used to store virtual machine disks or create storage
>      repositories
>  * Extended SCSI functionality available for virtual machines
>    * Linux guests can now retrieve vital product data (VPD) page 0x84
>      information from physical disks if the device itself makes it available.
>  * The management domain (dom0) kernel upgraded to Oracle Unbreakable
>    Enterprise Kernel Release 4 Update 2 (4.1.12-61.1.9)
>  * The Xen hypervisor performance and scalability updates:
>    * Improved memory allocation
>    * Improved aggregate performance
>    * Improved performance for Windows, Solaris and Linux guests
>    * Improved workload performance
>    * Guest disk I/O performance improvements
>  * Oracle VM Manager performance enhancements – improved performance under
>    heavy event load
>  * Oracle VM Manager Rule for Live Migration – blocks unsupported Live
>    Migration paths
>  * Hot memory modification for HVM guests with para-virtualized I/O drivers
>    (PVHVM) – modify the memory allocated to running PVM guests as well as
>    PVHVM guests without a reboot.
>  * Package additions and updates
>  * Security updates for the embedded components of Oracle VM Server and Oracle
>    VM Manager.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


VMWORLD US 2016 WRAP-UP

Today was the last day of VMware’s flagship conference VMworld in Las Vegas, an
highly controversial edition which left a good chunk of the audience disoriented
if not properly disappointed.

The debate started during Day 1 Keynote and then proliferated over Twitter in
various strands. Part of the audience commented that the message delivered
during the keynote suggests developers and cloud-native applications (delegated
to Day 2 Keynote) as second-class citizens in VMware’s world.

Others complained that the announcements of VMware Cloud Foundation
and Cross-Cloud Services (moreover in technical preview) are too few and too
late to amend the One Cloud mantra VMware has drummed for an entire year.

Anyway each of these (legit) comments has been addressed by the vast legion of
VMware’s aficionados and you can enjoy the discussion on Twitter with the
hashtag #VMworld and form your own opinion.

Criticism hasn’t ruined the party and here is a compendium of the announcements
that followed:

 * A further development of VMware Integrated Containers with the addition of a
   self-service portal (Admiral) and a registry (Harbor)
 * VMware Integrate OpenStack 3, based on OpenStack Mitaka release
 * A new release of VMware vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager
 * A new set of disaster recovery offerings for vCloud Air: VMware vCloud
   Availability
 * Dotted releases for: Workstation 12.5 Player, Workstation 12.5 Pro, Fusion
   8.5, Fusion 8.5 Pro
 * Enhancements in Blast and new validated appliances for Horizon Air: VMware
   Horizon

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VISIT THE ARCHIVE

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About

Established in 2003, virtualization.info is the most popular news website about
server and application virtualization technologies, including virtual machines
and hypervisors, containers and orchestrators, functions and serverless
computing platforms.

Our mission is tracking the virtualization market evolution and its technology
impact on the IT world, offering ahead of the curve, exhaustive coverage of the
whole industry.

We aim to serve IT decision-makers in large end-user organizations, CTO offices
in tech startups, and analysts in industry research, venture capital and private
equity firms.

Several points differentiated us from any other online media in the space:

 * News digest virtualization.info daily tracks hundreds of news sources,
   verifying information published in every major news magazines, corporate and
   personal blogs, web forum and newsgroups. From thousands of articles per day,
   we published no more than 10 major news per day, cutting away all the
   marketing hype, avoiding waste of time and information overload.
 * The big picture The news we published was enriched with references to the
   companies’ market position, including past and upcoming product releases,
   declared and implicit alliances, expected evolutions and more. So each
   article contributed to detail the overall industry status, giving readers
   always the big picture.
 * Strategic insights Along with daily news, virtualization.info publisheed
   periodic insights about different aspects of the market, covering
   competition, emerging trends, customers and partners relationships. Where
   connections between vendors and their strategies were unclear, our analysis
   helped connecting the dots.

virtualization.info has been recognized as a valuable point of aggregation by
industry leaders and technical communities, achieving over 250,000 page views
per month and more than 11,000 RSS feed readers per day.

Additionally, with almost 6,000 pages, virtualization.info contains the
historical memory of the virtualization industry and its content has been
referenced by more than 100,000 other sites, blogs, forums and newsgroups
talking about virtualization.

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