Thursday, November 29. 2012
VMworld TV - An in-depth demo of VMware Mirage
VMware Mirage offers a unique solution for managing your laptops and desktops that combines centralized management for IT and local execution for end users. Mirage installs directly into Windows- no hyper-visors or formats required. And when Mirage is installed on a PC, it centralizes a complete virtual copy of that end point to the data center and keeps it synchronized. If an end user goes offline, Mirage will simply perform a synchronization when that user comes back online. That synchronization includes changes from the user’s Windows PC getting uploaded to the data center, but also includes changes from IT getting downloaded and applied directly to the user’s Windows PC as well! Since Mirage isn’t VDI, the end users PC isn’t tethered to any network- it is just a normal Windows PC, and the end user is able to enjoy full native PC performance, persistent personalization, and user-installed applications- all while online or offline.
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization/mirage.html
Wednesday, November 28. 2012
VMworld TV - Extensive vCenter Operations Demo
Thursday, November 15. 2012
VMware vSphere Multi-Hypervisor Management Demo
Mike_Laverick says Multi-Hypervisor Manager (MHM), as you might know there’s been a “Fling” on the VMware Labs for sometime, that allows you to manage Windows HyperV hosts from vCenter. That fling is going to be discontinued and supported in the web-client. It will be a free component with Standard vCenter and support Windows HyperV 2008, and will support Windows HyperV 2012 when it finally ships. It will have a little bit more functionality that the original fling – it will be able to create new VMs on the Windows HyperV host and will more seamlessly integrate with vCenter. PMHM will ship as service that you add to your environment if you need it.
VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.0 Release Notes
VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.0 | 19 Nov 2012 | Build 901315 | Product Download
This video was recorded at the VMworld 2012 Europe Barcelona and shows the Multi-Hypervisor Manager in action. (I'm the guy holding the microphone asking nasty questions :-))
Tuesday, November 13. 2012
VMworld 2012 Europe Demo - VXLAN and the vDistributed Switch
Cloud computing services have experienced rapid growth over the past few years because they can keep costs down by allowing multiple tenants to share system resources. One requirement of making this multiple tenancy possible is to provide each tenant with network isolation. Segmenting the traffic using VLAN is a typical solution to this problem. However, service providers also need to keep up with customer demand by being able to move workloads to those servers that have spare resources.
To do so, network traffic needs to be encapsulated so that the workload is not tied to the underlying hardware. This can be a problem because the networking architecture ties the workloads to the underlying hardware, which restricts the movements of these workloads and limits where these workloads can be placed. In addition, segmenting the physical LAN using VLANs does not scale beyond a certain limit.
Virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) is a network encapsulation mechanism that enables virtual machines to be deployed on any physical host, regardless of the host’s network configuration. It solves the problems of mobility and scalability in two ways:
- It uses MAC in UDP encapsulation, which allows the virtual machine to communicate using an overlay network that spans across multiple physical networks. It decouples the virtual machine from the underlying network thereby allowing the virtual machine to move across the network without reconfiguring the network.
- VXLAN uses a 24-bit identifier, which means that a single network can support up to 16 million LAN segments. This number is much higher than the 4,094 limit imposed by the IEEE 802.1Q VLAN specification.
- A virtual machine configured with VXLAN achieved similar networking performance to a virtual machine without VXLAN configured, both in terms of throughput and CPU cost.
- vSphere 5.1 scales well as we add more virtual machines on the VXLAN network.
Monday, November 12. 2012
Demo of the New Features of vSphere 5.1 at VMworld Europe
VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere Web Client
Core platform
Storage
Network
• Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)
VMware vSphere vMotion
• vMotion enhancements
Platform features for VMware vCloud Director and VMware View
• 3D graphics
• VXLAN
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-51-Performance-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf