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Release: Free ‘Express’ Version Of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V

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Citrix has unveiled a new free Express Edition to its Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V lineup. The new Express Edition is immediately available for download and includes Citrix StorageLink technology. With StorageLink, Windows administrators can dramatically simplify their storage management processes with quick and easy storage configuration and provisioning for their Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center virtual infrastructures. Citrix Essentials helps administrators take full advantage of powerful storage-based features like deduplication, thin provisioning, cloning, snapshots and replication – features that otherwise hide behind layers of proprietary, specialized virtualization storage file systems.

The new free Express Edition of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V is designed specifically for Windows IT professional in the early phases of Hyper-V adoption. It will allow them to take advantage of the benefits of shared storage with Hyper-V and simplify storage management in virtual server environments.
The StorageLink technology featured in all editions of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V provides Windows IT Professionals with the tools necessary to easily manage Hyper-V storage in iSCSI and Fibre Channel (FC) SAN environments, enabling them to leverage advanced storage technologies from leading storage vendors that deliver powerful features for performance, storage efficiency, and business continuity. Industry estimates have shown that by applying storage-saving technologies like deduplication and thin provisioning , Hyper-V customers can often shrink their storage footprint by upwards of 50 percent depending on the nature of their workloads. In cases where virtual machines (VMs) are highly duplicated, like virtual desktop images, many have seen a nearly 90 percent reduction in storage consumption.

The Express Edition of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V supports up to two Hyper-V servers and one storage array. Organizations that download the free Express Edition of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V can easily upgrade to the Enterprise or Platinum Editions. Listed at $1500 and $3000 per server, respectively, the Enterprise and Platinum Editions add dynamic server provisioning, automated lab management, automated stage management, and workflow orchestration.

CA Expands Offerings for Virtualized Data Centers and Private Clouds

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CA recently announced an new strategy for optimizing IT services by improving the management of next-generation virtualized data centers and private clouds. CA’s solution for unified business service assurance and automation will involve coupling comprehensive availability and performance management for VMware vSphere 4 environments and Cisco virtualized network switches.

CA is broadening the scope of CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, CA eHealth Performance Manager and CA Spectrum Automation Manager to encompass in one fully-integrated, end-to-end management solution both physical and virtual server and network environments, as well as databases, voice and unified communications systems, and other networked applications. The products are being enhanced to support VMware vSphere 4 and the Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch, which is an integrated option in VMware vSphere 4. The extensive solution will help enable customers to easily and coherently manage these environments through one user interface and within a powerful unified information model.

CA aims to reduce the complexity of managing fast-growing, dynamic virtual and physical environments by bringing a consistent user experience across end-to-end infrastructure management. Virtualization offers impressive server consolidation-related cost savings, and customers cite the need to reduce management complexities that result from disparate tools and fragmented teams. Moreover, to benefit from hybrid cloud architectures, enterprises and service providers have to enhance network performance visibility in context of server performance.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager’s support for VMware vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V will deliver patented event correlation and root cause analysis that reduces “noise” by suppressing symptomatic alarms. The products will also deliver patented “deviation-from-normal” proactive performance management of virtual environments that helps identify performance issues before users and services are impacted. In addition, they are designed to deliver live interactive reporting for troubleshooting, as well historical trend reports for capacity planning reports.

CA’s object model will include a consolidated hierarchical view of VMware vCenter Server hosts, VMware vSphere 4 hosts, data centers, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines, all integrated with the existing physical infrastructure. This model-based management, resource monitoring approach will help reduce costs and increase staff efficiency by correlating physical and virtual data across the infrastructure to speed time to problem identification and resolution.

An enhanced automated discovery of the integrated physical and virtual network and systems environment will minimize manual efforts and help ensure an accurate understanding of the virtualized infrastructure.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager will also detect and track VMware VMotion migrations, dynamically updating the object model to reflect the most current state of the infrastructure. This feature is designed to provide up-to-date and real-time views of the integrated physical and virtual infrastructure without manual intervention.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager’s patented Inductive Modeling Technology RCA is being extended to isolate faults to physical servers and intelligently suppress symptomatic alarms on virtual machines. This will deliver only actionable alerts to IT operations, while correlating symptomatic alarms to the root cause and identifying virtual entities impacted by physical infrastructure failures.

Customers will be able to gain even more business value by using CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager in conjunction with CA Spectrum Automation Manager, the core of CA’s powerful business-driven automation solution. The ability to utilize real time inputs from CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager to dynamically provision and de-provision physical and virtual assets will be instrumental in customers’ efforts to increase business agility, service quality and control, as well as reduce risk and human error, minimize costs, and improve IT efficiency.

Release: Vizioncore vRanger Pro 4.0 DPP

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Vizioncore has announced the general availability of vRanger Pro 4.0 DPP (Data Protection Platform), the company’s virtualization backup and recovery solution. vRanger 4.0 DPP has been entirely re-designed into a Data Protection Platform to offer organizations of all sizes reduced backup windows, additional scalability and flexibility, and smarter backup options to protect their critical data held on virtual machines (VMs).

The Data Protection Platform introduces two major architectural innovations. First, its Direct-To-Target architecture introduces a Plug-N-Play modularity system that enables backup once, recover many capability over multiple protocols and storage targets. vRanger Pro 4.0 DPP performs image-level backups and restores at the file- or image-level and will restore at the object-level in the future. These activities are “direct to target” flowing directly between hosts and targets without the use of a middleware proxy. Second, its Smart Backup Manager introduces an intelligent job engine that enables real-time and parallel management of jobs in a scalable manner.

Release: Altor VF 3.0 Virtual Firewall

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Altor Networks has announced the Altor VF 3.0 virtual firewall with integrated intrusion detection. Developed using VMsafe APIs, the Altor VF offers robust defense-in-depth virtualization security with mission critical reliability and value through breakthrough fast-path performance.

The Altor VF is the first product to be integrated with VMware VMsafe network APIs in fast-path mode, where security inspections are processed in the hypervisor kernel. As a result, customers deploying the Altor VF will benefit from increased performance, achieving approximately ten times greater throughput than virtual firewalls running in a Virtual Machine (i.e., bridge mode), as well as greater security and reduced complexity.

Security policy is applied at an individual-VM level and enforcement of this policy occurs within the Kernel. VMs are protected without requiring security agents on the guest, complicated network reconfigurations, or performance degrading remapping of network flows.

The Altor VF delivers defense-in-depth with virtual-aware intrusion detection for up-to-date protection against emerging threats with a security-signature update service. Purpose-built for the virtual environment, the Altor VF enables secure usage of unique virtualization features, such as vMotion, and provides ease of administration and tight integration with vCenter.

VMware Makes It Easy For Virtual Iron Customers To Migrate To vSphere 4

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VMware yesterday announced that it is offering existing Virtual Iron customers an easy way to migrate their Virtual Iron deployments to VMware vSphere 4.  In light of news reports that Oracle will discontinue development of existing Virtual Iron products, the VMware offer gives companies a cost-effective way to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4, and provides customers a clear virtualization roadmap that will help meet their needs as their business grows.

The VMware offer gives Virtual Iron end customers who have a current license and support contract compelling savings on VMware vSphere 4 and VMware vCenter Server. More specifically, eligible Virtual Iron end customers receive aggressive discounts off the list price on the below products and services:

  • VMware vSphere 4 Advanced Edition, VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vCenter Server Foundation and VMware vCenter Server Standard
  • Support and subscription (SnS) on VMware vSphere 4 Advanced Edition, VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vCenter Server Foundation and VMware vCenter Server Standard

Proof of a current Virtual Iron license and support contract will be required to qualify for the VMware offer. Promotional pricing is limited to the number of Virtual Iron licenses supported by a current support agreement. The offer is valid through September 30, 2009.

VMware vSphere 4 delivers Virtual Iron customers the unparalleled efficiency and performance   required to run critical applications in large scale environments, uncompromised control over application security and service levels, and unmatched flexibility of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

VMware vSphere 4 also delivers “Always On IT” for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) and remote and branch office (ROBO) IT environments. With VMware vSphere 4, smaller IT environments can achieve zero-downtime application availability, enterprise-class data protection, disaster recovery and simplified management at an affordable price point.

5nine Software Tells You How VMware and Hyper-V Stack Up

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5nine Software today announced the latest versions of its virtualization migration planning solution, 5nine P2V Planner 2.0 and 5nine P2V Planner Free Edition 2.0. The updated software adds P2V VMware planning to the existing P2V Hyper-V virtualization planning capabilities and now delivers side-by-side comparative analysis of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans from the technology, TCO and ROI perspectives.

5nine P2V Planner offers the following features:

— Automated P2V Hyper-V and P2V VMware Migration Planning — Performs sophisticated analysis of the current data center and provides multiple Hyper-V and VMware migration plans depending on particular customer requirements. Optimized placement of virtualized workloads is based on business requirements, technology (memory, storage and CPU utilization, security), and TCO and ROI.

— Side-by-Side comparison of Hyper-V and VMware Migration plans — Enables creation and side-by-side comparison of VMware and Hyper-V virtualization migration plans. It takes into consideration multiple factors including software licensing costs, memory and CPU utilization, clustering and average consolidation ratios for both virtualization technologies.

— Agentless Data Collection — Automatically discovers and collects hardware inventory, utilization data and application performance metrics in a non-intrusive manner without installing agents. It also allows importing this information from an Excel or XML file.

— Simple-to-Use — The product was designed to be used for projects of all sizes — from small virtualization pilots or SMB projects to large enterprise projects with hundreds of servers, hosts and virtual machines (VMs).

— Integrated TCO and ROI Reporting — 5nine P2V Planner creates a variety of technology assessment, workload, and TCO and ROI reports for each migration plan, for easy comparison of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans and decision making.

— Ongoing Value — Whether your P2V migration project is complete or ongoing, the Planner continues to provide value by optimizing the workloads and resource utilization in a virtualized data center.

5nine P2V Planner Free Edition 2.0 is available immediately and is free for any Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX and vSphere environments 5nine P2V Planner is also available immediately, with North American pricing starting at $59.00 USD per physical server.