Eric Sloof

• Designed for OS X Mavericks
• Mavericks multiple display support
• Ready for Windows 8.1
• Improved Boot Camp support
• Optimized for the latest Macs 
• Dictation in Windows
• Faster performance
• Support for up to 16 vCPUs, 8TB disks and 64GB of RAM 
• Redesigned UI 
• More granular control of resources
• Over 50 new features

Download  VMware Fusion

VMware Workstation 10 continues VMware’s tradition of delivering innovative features that technical professionals rely on every day. With support for Windows 8.1, tablet sensors, and expiring VMs, it's the perfect tool to make your work seamless, intuitive, and more connected.

• Unity mode has been enhanced to seamlessly work with Windows 8.1 UI changes.
• Workstation 10 can now convert a Windows 8.1 physical PC to a virtual machine.
• Support for 16 vCPUs, 8 TB SATA disks and 64GB of RAM
• New Virtual SATA disk controller
• Now supporting 20 virtual networks
• USB3 streams support for faster file copying
• Improved application and Windows VM startup times
• SSD Pass through

Create restricted virtual machines that can expire at a predefined date and time. When powered on, the virtual machine will query the server at specified time intervals, storing the current system time in the restricted VM's policy file as the last trusted timestamp.

Industry first to provide virtual tablet sensors that enable virtual machines to take advantage of the accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, and even the ambient light sensor when running on a tablet.

• Multiple monitor set-ups are easier than ever, whether you are using 2, 3, or 4.
• VMware-KVM provides a new interface for using multiple virtual machines

Download  VMware Workstation 

Nicholas Weaver is the Cloud Automation Architect for VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) platform and the primary architect behind the vCHS automation framework (Project Zombie). He is also a co-creator of the PuppetLabs Razor project and many VMware-specific free tools. He previously worked in the CTO office for EMC, in the EMC field as a vSpecialist, and as a infrastructure engineer in financial, media, and retail companies. Nick loves software-driven control, hacking prototypes together, speaking at user groups, and demonstrating automation innovation to the masses. Nick can be found on Twitter and Github as @lynxbat.

VMware has launched a new website which will help you to get up to speed with configuring the new vSphere and Virtual SAN features. 

This VMware product walkthrough website is designed to provide a step-by-step overview of how to configure several features like Data Protection, App HA, Replication and Flash Read Cache vCloud but also contains a great walkthrough for Virtual SAN and vCloud Director. here's a list with the current topics:

• Direct to Host
• File Level Restore
• Restoring Virtual Machine
• Virtual Machine Backup Job
• Replication to EMC Avamar

• Configuring App Protection
• Planned & Unplanned App Downtime

• New Catalog Features
• vApp Clone
• App Lifecycle Management
• Hot Add and Remove

• Replication Status
• Recovering a VM
• Protecting a VM

• Configuring a VM to Use vFRC
• Configuring Multiple vSphere Hosts
• Interoperability with HA & DRS
• Interoperability with vMotion

• Configuring VSAN
• Deploying VMs using VM Storage Policies
• Changing VM Storage Policies
• Failure Resilience & Availability
• Interoperability - VSAN & vSphere HA

Performance demands of latency-sensitive applications have long been thought to be incompatible with virtualization. Such applications as distributed in-memory data management, stock trading, and high performance computing (HPC) demand very low latency or jitter, typically of the order of up to tens of microseconds.

Although virtualization brings the benefits of simplifying IT management and saving costs, the benefits come with an inherent overhead due to abstracting physical hardware and resources and sharing them. 

Virtualization overhead may incur increased processing time and its variability. VMware vSphere ensures that this overhead induced by virtualization is minimized so that it is not noticeable for a wide range of applications including most business critical applications such as database systems, Web applications, and messaging systems.



vSphere also supports well applications with millisecond-level latency constraints such as VoIP streaming applications. However, certain applications that are extremely latency-sensitive would still be affected by the overhead due to strict latency requirements. In order to support virtual machines with strict latency requirements, vSphere 5.5 introduces a new per-VM feature called Latency Sensitivity.

Among other optimizations, this feature allows virtual machines to exclusively own physical cores, thus avoiding overhead related to CPU scheduling and contention. Combined with a pass through functionality, which bypasses the network virtualization layer, applications can achieve near-native performance in both response time and jitter. 

Briefly, this paper presents the following:

• It explains major sources of latency increase due to virtualization, which are divided into two categories: contention created by sharing resources and overhead due to the extra layers of processing for virtualization.
• It presents details of the latency-sensitivity feature that improves performance in terms of both response time and jitter by eliminating the major sources of extra latency added by using virtualization. 
• It presents evaluation results demonstrating that the latency-sensitivity feature combined with pass-through mechanisms considerably reduces both median response time and jitter compared to the default configuration, achieving near-native performance. 
• It discusses the side effects of using the latency-sensitivity feature and presents best practices

Download White Paper: Deploying Extremely  Latency-Sensitive  Applications in  VMware vSphere 5.5

Recent increases in density and computing needs in data centers are straining power and cooling capacities, dictating the need for host power management. Managing the energy consumed can lower operating costs. 

vSphere Host Power Management (HPM) is a technique that saves energy by placing certain parts of a computer system or device into a reduced power state when the system or device is inactive or does not need to run at maximum speed. The term host power management is not the same as vSphere Distributed Power Management (DPM), which redistributes virtual machines among physical hosts in a cluster to enable some hosts to be powered off completely.

Host power management saves energy on hosts that are powered on. It can be used either alone or in combination with DPM. vSphere handles power management by utilizing Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) performance and power states. In VMware vSphere 5.0, the default power management policy was based on dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS).

This technology utilizes the processor’s performance states and allows some power to be saved by running the processor at a lower frequency and voltage. However, beginning in VMware vSphere 5.5, the default HPM policy uses deep halt states (C-states) in addition to DVFS to significantly increase power savings over previous releases while still maintaining good performance.

Download White Paper: Host Power Management in VMware vSphere 5.5