Tuesday, March 10. 2009
NxTop 1.0 scheduled for release at the end of March
According to NxTop beta tester Steve Dale, director of IT at Camiant, “NxTop addresses our organization’s most challenging pain points. Every user here has a notebook PC and like many organizations, managing backups in a notebook-centric environment is a major challenge, now with NxTop it’s a snap. An added benefit of NxTop is the convenience of abstracted hardware which allows me to manage a single image for operating system (OS) deployment rather than many images that are hardware specific. I’m also enjoying the ability to run two OS simultaneously and the security of full disk encryption built into the solution.”
Vyatta Community Edition 5 has officially been released
VC5 greatly expands Vyatta’s security feature set, adding SSL-based OpenVPN, intrusion prevention system (IPS), and web URL filtering among many other improvements.
New features in VC5 include:
- New Web-based Graphical User Interface
- Improved VPN Security with OpenVPN
- Enhanced Security via Intrusion Prevention
- Improved Performance with Web Caching and Ethernet Bonding
- Support for Network Access Policies via URL Filtering
- DNS forwarding and Dynamic DNS
- Improved Virtualization Performance – VMware tools and Xen paravirtualization
- Additional Hardware Support -- Bridged Ethernet over ADSL, wireless modems (3G), and RAID-1.
Vyatta Community Edition Download : VC5 - VMWare Virtual Appliance, March 9, 2009; 174 MB
Sunday, March 8. 2009
Open Source Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) Driver
This driver enables read-only access to files and folders on partitions formatted with the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS). VMFS is a clustered file system that is used by the VMware ESX hosts to store virtual machines and virtual disk files. The VMFS driver comes with a command line interface (CLI) to mount and analyze VMFS volumes. The VMFS driver was tested on Linux and Windows based hosts, but should work on any platform that supports Java. The driver supports VMFS version 3 (VMFS3).
Volumes can now be mounted as a regular file system using a WebDAV client! The webdav command opens a VMFS volume, and serves the contents of the file system as WebDAV/HTTP. The volume can be directly mounted in most operating systems. The WebDAV server binds on localhost (127.0.0.1) and port 50080 by default. This can be changed by optionally specifying the host IP and port to bind to. I’ve tested the driver and was able to browse the VMFS using the Internet explorer.
C:\Users\Eric Sloof\Downloads\VMFS\vmfs_r66>java -jar fvmfs.jar ssh://root:vmware@192.168.178.251/vmfs/devices/disks/vml.010000000053304d554a31335036333831333920202020202053414d53554e:5 dir /
Thursday, March 5. 2009
StarWind Makes IP SAN Solution Free
StarWind Software announced a free version of its iSCSI Target software will be available to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of storage virtualization. Since 2003, StarWind iSCSI Target and StarPort iSCSI Initiator have been used by thousands of companies and users.
StarWind ISCSI Target Free Version installs on any Windows-based server and converts it into a SAN. It can also support virtual environments such as VMware ESX or VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V and can even run inside an individual VM itself. The lightweight version is built on trusted, proven and mature technology of the fourth generation StarWind Server product. One of the key features of the StarWind iSCSI Target is that it supports Server Cluster environments with Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, VMware ESX and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and other server solutions. The manageability, quality and performance of StarWind IP SAN encourage many users to recommend StarWind to others.
Key Features of StarWind Free Version include:
• Support for Server Clusters with VMware ESX and ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V
• Unlimited number of supported concurrent iSCSI connections
• Compression, Encryption and CHAP authentication
• iSCSI RAM disk for network performance tuning
• iSCSI CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD emulation
• Ease of use and simple manageability
• Support for 4 CPUs and CPU cores
The Free Version of StarWind iSCSI Target takes only a few minutes to download and install and is very simple to configure with Windows Server Clusters.
Wednesday, March 4. 2009
CIS-Group's ThinstallHelper will become part of VMware View
Using ThinApp it is possible to run an application shielded on a system without the needs to install it. No files or registry entries* will be stored on the system running the virtualised application. Other applications don't even notice the application is present or even running. This allows to run different applications or the same application with a different version (like Microsoft Office) that normally would not allow such a situation. This works even if you don't have the priviliges to install an application.
Creating a virtualised application however requires extensive knowledge of the configuration files of the Thinstall application. All settings have to be made by hand (in textfiles). As this is a fault-prone operation, CIS-Group created a tool called ThinstallHelper to ease the configuration task. The ThinstallHelper application allows to configure the numerous settings using a graphical environment (GUI).
Initially the ThinstallHelper was developed for internal use only. Soon however the public need for such a solution was detected and CIS-Group decided to release is to everyone.
The following tasks can be performed using the ThinstallHelper:
- Manage your projects.
- Recently opened projects and projects in your configured project locationcan be (re-)opened with just a single click. It's also possible to create a backup of your project (zip).
- Compatible with Thinstall 3.x and ThinApp
- Some of the new introduced features (like AppLink and AppSync) will not work if it is not supported by your version.
- Configure the project settings.
- Configure the settings that influence the build process, generated output (MSI) or run behavior.
- Manage folders using a graphical representation (like isolation mode).
- Manage the registry usign a graphical representation.
- Build the project ...and generate the application(s)
- Completely FREE, Free of cost, advertisement, banners, popups, everything!