Nexus Technologies – IT Company providing Virtualisation Solutions, IT managed Services and IT Consultancy

Cisco, EMC and VMware announced Tuesday a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product called V-Block.

Their venture, called the “Virtual Computing Environment coalition,” will sell and provide maintenance and service support for V-Block, and will combine EMC storage equipment, Cisco virtualized servers and networking equipment and VMWare virtualization technology.

Rumors of the deal — code-named “Alpine” — have been going around since September.

The companies say their coalition offers businesses “dramatic efficiencies” promising “significant reductions” in capital and operating expenses, without forcing organizations’ hands to choose between the companies.

The companies are selling Vblock Infrastructure Packages as “fully integrated, tested, validated, and ready-to-go/ready-to-grow infrastructure packages” that can scale. Together, the venture offers unified presales, services and support.

Citing McKinsey and Company figures that worldwide spending on datacenter infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion annually — half on capital expenses and half on operating expenses — the companies say $85 billion, or 20 percent of the entire market, can be addressed with virtualization and private cloud technology by 2015.

Cisco and EMC currently have a partnership to collaborate around Cisco’s new data center platform, which the company calls “Unified Computing.” EMC owns almost 85 percent of VMWare.

Cisco and EMC also announced on Tuesday a joint venture called Acadia to build, sell and support products for corporate datacenters. The goal? “Accelerating customer build-outs of private cloud infrastructures through an end-to-end enablement of service providers and large enterprise customers.”

The targets? HP and IBM.

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Expanding Windows 7 virtual hard drive. Quick how-to, real easy to do.

You need no tools to achieve this. You just need a copy of VMware Workstation.

When you run into a situation that you under-estimated your prevision for your Virtual Machine Disk size. You installed lot’s of software and you became running out of space. Now you have 2 possibilities:

1. You uninstall not necessary software… -:(
2. You make your VM’s disk larger capacity …  And that’s what we gonna do. You can see the flexibility of Virtual machines? That’s a real case scenario….

Folow this steps:

01. - Start  VMware Workstation and go to  Edit > Settings while you select your Virtual Machine > click on the Hard disk – and you have a button on your right side called Utilities > choose Expand.

02. Enter a value for the new size of your virtual disk. It will take some time for the process to finish.

03. At the end you should have a confirmation message like this one.

04. Go and start your Windows 7 VM and go and right click on My Computer > Manage

05. While you are in computer management, just expand the volume where your system lives.

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06. You just follow the Extend volume wizzard inside of your Windows 7 VM and you’ll end up with your volume extended to a desired size. In our exemple I rezized from 80 to 100 Gigs.

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VMWare

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Parallels introduces Desktop 5 for Mac, a solution for running a virtual PC on a Mac that the company claims is 300 times faster than the previous version. The latest version of Parallels’ Mac virtualization software is competing against VMware’s Fusion 3.

Parallels makes it easy for Macs and PCs to just get along, and on Nov. 4 it introduced Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac, offering an updated way for them to bond more quickly, more easily and with better integration.

Parallels 5, according to the virtualization company, is 300 times faster than the previous version and offers more than 70 new features for consumers and enterprises wanting to run a virtual PC on a Mac.

“Parallels has a long history in the virtualization space, with hosting and cloud computing, and it moved into the consumer space about three years ago, bringing virtualization to the everyday person,” Mary Starman, director of marketing at Parallels, told eWEEK. “With Parallels 5, the focus is on ways to let people work the way they want to work.”

The latter includes several options for viewing Windows. A user can run Windows in a Full Screen mode, so it completely covers over the Mac user interface—with the option of Active Corners that can curl back to expose the Mac desktop beneath it—or a Crystal view mode, which treats Windows like just another Mac application that can be launched from the dock.

Trackpad gestures can be used across both platforms, and the keyboard shortcuts a user is accustomed to can be made to apply to both systems. “We’ve also done a lot of work to make sure copy and paste is seamless between Windows and Mac and that the full formatting of documents stays,” even between Windows and Linux guest operating systems, said Starman.

Parallels 5 is optimized for Apple’s Snow Leopard OS and offers full support for Aero in Windows 7 as well as Windows Vista. It’s said to offer seven times better graphics performance for games and 3D applications than the previous version, with Direct X 9Ex with Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.1 support. Full hardware resources can be utilized with support for eight virtual CPUs, with 64-bit Windows and a Snow Leopard Server 64 bit.

“We’re definitely seeing market data saying consumers are moving [to Macs]. We’re seeing that with PC and Windows share in general, trending is down about 20 percent, while Apple is still growing,” said Starman.

During Apple’s fiscal fourth-quarter financial report, Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, said that approximately half of Mac buyers in its stores were first-time Mac owners.

“There’s definitely a move [toward Macs] in the consumer space, and consumer behavior really drives the enterprise,” Starman continued, offering that she finds Macs are increasingly accepted in the enterprise.

“One contributor to this is the success of the iPod, which exposed a lot of users to what the Mac experience can be like. Then, of course, there’s the iPhone, which is really starting to draw people to Macs for the first time,” said Starman.

“It’s a simple interface and a more secure machine. There are a lot of reasons to believe [Macs] are coming into their own as enterprise devices.”

When it comes to running Windows on Mac, Parallels is facing stiff competition from VMware, which released its Fusion 3 virtualization software on Oct. 27. Much like Parallels, VMware is offering support for Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system and support for Windows 7 features.

Parallels reports that, according to research conducted by the Crimson Consulting Group, Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac performs “22 percent faster than the nearest Windows-on-Mac competitor in standard productivity testing of Windows 7 64-bit on a MacBook Pro.” Testers in eWEEK’s labs, however, preferred VMware’s Fusion 3.

Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac is available in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, with Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish and Russian coming in the next few weeks. It’s priced at $79.99, which the company says includes $175 worth of additional software for free.

Existing customers can update their software for $49.99, and customers who purchased Version 4 on or after Oct. 1, and still have a proof of purchase, are entitled to a free upgrade. The solution can be purchased at Apple stores, Amazon.com, Best Buy, Target and a number of other retailers.

A free trial is available at the Parallels’ Website.

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New VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 Provides Better Protection of Environments With Optimized Control, Expanded Storage Support and Ability to Failover Multiple Sites to One

PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwire – October 5, 2009) – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced the availability of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4, enabling automated, reliable and affordable disaster recovery. Part of the VMware vCenter Product Family, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides automated disaster recovery for virtual environments. Now, with added support for Network File System (NFS) based storage replication, compatibility with VMware vSphere™ 4, and simplified “many-to-one” failover using shared recovery sites, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager makes it even easier for customers to confidently protect all of their virtual environments.

Disaster recovery is critical for companies to protect corporate data, but has typically been difficult to achieve due to costs and complexity. Disasters in the datacenter — whether they are caused by hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages, or other unexpected events — can result in downtime for business critical applications. Extended downtime significantly impacts revenues, service level agreements (SLAs) and business operations. Traditional solutions for disaster recovery require complex, manual recovery processes, and can be very difficult to set up, test and keep up-to-date. Regulatory requirements can also present challenges to disaster recovery solutions. As a result, organizations only provide disaster recovery plans for the most critical applications.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager addresses these challenges by centralizing management of recovery plans and automating the testing and recovery process, resulting in rapid, reliable, affordable disaster recovery. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, originally released in 2008, has become the defacto standard for automating disaster recovery, with more than 2,000 customers and support from 12 leading storage vendorswww.vmware.com/company/news/releases/srm4-partner.html.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 now provides:

• VMware vSphere 4 Support. Customers can now take advantage of the capabilities of VMware vSphere 4, including Fault Tolerance, for better performance and protection of applications.
• Expanded Storage Support. Lets users leverage iSCSI, Fiber Channel, and NFS storage and replication solutions.
• Many-to-One Failover. Protects multiple production sites with automated failover into a single, shared recovery site.

“VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 dramatically simplifies the disaster recovery process for customers so they can meet demanding business needs for disaster recovery, including regulatory compliance issues,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, server business unit, for VMware. “Now with many-to-one failover and expanded storage support, more customers can take advantage of low-cost disaster recovery and gain peace of mind that their data is safe in the event of a disaster.”

“Disaster recovery is one of the most daunting and complicated challenges for IT organizations, and it isn’t getting any easier as applications proliferate and expectations with regard to recovery times shorten,” said Richard Villars, vice president of storage and executive strategies at IDC. “Virtualization of server and storage environments are playing a key role in helping companies reduce the costs and complexities associated with implementing, testing, and executing a full disaster recovery, yet their effectiveness increasingly depends upon solutions that automate the fast expanding disaster recovery process itself.”

“In my 25 years of IT experience, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager is one of the best solutions that I have ever implemented,” said Ed Belliveau, principal systems engineer, Bentley University. “With the latest Site Recovery Manager improvements and features, coupled with integration with VMware vSphere™, disaster recovery preparation is much easier.”

Leading storage vendors have shown strong support for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager with integrations for their storage and replication systems. Visitwww.vmware.com/company/news/releases/srm4-partner.html to view partner support for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4. For more information or to purchase VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, visit: http://www.vmware.com/products/srm.

About VMware

VMware delivers solutions for business infrastructure virtualization that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. With the industry leading virtualization platform — VMware vSphere™ — customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion, more than 150,000 customers and 22,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware and VMware vCenter are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

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Campion Insurance Group, which was established in 1984 from a single office in Urlingford, Co Kilkenny, has evolved to become one of Ireland’s most modern and innovative commercial and personal lines brokers with a staff of more than 100 people and offices in 11 locations around the country.

Campion Insurance has implemented a disaster recovery solution and IT infrastructure upgrade in order to keep pace with the company’s expansion, reduce business risk, deliver high availability and be better prepared for disaster recovery.

“We plan for continued growth and improved customer satisfaction and that increased the pressure to standardise and upgrade our operating platform and IT infrastructure,” explained Stephen Breen, IT manager at Campion Insurance.

“We also wanted a disaster recovery solution to reduce business risk, deliver high availability and be better prepared for disaster recovery,” Breen added.

Datapac was appointed to optimise the business and to provide consultation, installation, implementation, training and on-going support services.

Datapac implemented a solution that links all their offices through an Eircom BIP network via Cisco routers. This has allowed Campion’s to centralise and publish all their critical business applications using Citrix from a central site to all their branch offices.

Campion Insurance can now distribute all services to any location, as well as to their disaster recovery centre in Dublin. This structure has also allowed for ease of business growth and systems support.

Due to Campion’s considerable expansion, Datapac implemented a new Windows Active Directory domain and MS Exchange services to cater for current and further expansion. This has created an integrated and reliable platform that is more easily managed by Campion and increased efficiency for their customer services representatives.

Datapac worked with the company to integrate its DR infrastructure into Campion’s data network by utilising the BIP Wide Area Network.

Campion Insurance can now host virtual replicas of their live environment using technology from VMWare, HP, Microsoft and Citrix. This provides the infrastructure to allow online replication for Campions’ email, file servers and critical applications by mirroring them to a hot site location based in Dublin.

Datapac also implemented Double-Take which, each night, provides an incremental backup for the system state of the remaining servers and rebuilds an updated image of the same in the hot site.

“We have centralised everything, so from a management point of view, it’s all in one place with the security and anti-virus protection that we need,” Breen explained.

“We now have real-time online replication with regard to our email and applications and this allows us to respond quickly in the event of any failure or disaster,” Breen said.

The next phase for Campion Insurance will be to link the phone systems into the BIP network and introduce voice over IP.

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VMware is planning a new virtual desktop service for later this year dubbed PC over IP (PCoIP).

The company already has a virtual PC offering with its view system, which Dell is bundling on certain product lines, but it is developing the PCoIP concept because some users need a more high performance service.

Chief technical officer Steve Herrod outlined the plans behind the new service in his keynote at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco.

He said that one of the problems with virtual desktops was that they could be too slow to handle high performance graphics applications and as such the company was working to develop faster links between the user and the datacentre hosting the virtual PC.

In time he said even mobile phones could be leveraged as thin client systems using virtualisation.

Using such a system would also free up time for IT administrators he said, since it would make handling multiple devices a lot more simple.

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Authentication software vendor Vasco Data Security launched a new version of its client software suite today, featuring a combination of one-time password (OTP) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology.

Digipass CertiID uses PKI to sign transactions or confidential documents, making it ideal for use in banking, enterprise or government environments, according to the firm.

The new technology can be used in the corporate sphere to protect information on laptops and other devices by encrypting data stored in files and on disks, and requiring emails and data transactions to be signed. The OTP functionality, meanwhile, can be employed to authenticate users at log-in.

“Digipass CertiID is a nice example of our continued investment in more secure solutions,” said Jan Valcke, president of Vasco Data Security. “It combines OTP with PKI technology, thus responding to a growing need for user-friendly portable authentication with document signing and file encryption capability.”

Financial institutions may also benefit from the product’s compliance with the IdenTrust Rules Set interoperability standard for digital certificates, according to Vasco.

In addition, Digipass CertiID is available as a software development kit, allowing developers to integrate PKI functionality into their own applications, said the firm.

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VMware has been outlining its strategy for the virtual desktop market, and claimed that the time is right for the sector to take off.

Speaking at VMworld 2009, Patrick Harr, vice president of enterprise desktop marketing at VMware, said that the company already has more than 7,000 customers using its View virtual desktop system for more than a million users.

“We believe we can bring the same skills on the server to the PC,” he said. “Whereas currently a single administrator can support about 50 desktops using virtualisation, we believe we can move that to 500 or even 1,000.”

Moving to a virtual system would also cut the costs of administering a desktop, which the company estimates at about $5,000 (£3,000) a year, by up to half.

The total cost of ownership argument would be a powerful force for change, according to Harr, but there are other drivers, most noticeably Windows 7.

“We are at a fundamental sea change with the Windows 7 launch,” he said. ” Customers have bypassed Vista and now they’ve held off long enough and it’s time to upgrade. They can move to virtual desktops without the need to upgrade their hardware.”

Citrix is the leader in the virtual desktop market, but analysts warned that VMware’s push could spell serious competition.

Tim Stammers, a senior analyst at Ovum, suggested that it is Citrix’s market to lose because it is so big in thin clients.

“What VMware and Citrix are selling now is very different from thin client. Each end user gets access to a personal machine running inside the datacentre,” he said.

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Business continuity software provider Neverfail has unveiled a new tool that it claims quickly repairs faulty applications running on VMware virtual machines.

Neverfail vAppHA uses the company’s Application Management Framework and has integrated this with VMware’s vSphere High Availability and VMware’s VMotion to detect hung or corrupted applications. The vAppHA then automatically restarts the problem components, application or the whole virtual machine.

Organisations making significant investments in vSphere are looking for assurance that Tier-1 applications will be continuously available,” said Andrew Barnes, Neverfail senior vice president of corporate development.

Neverfail vAppHA automatically works with vSphere to switch application services over to other servers to avoid application downtime when an application failure or outage is detected.

vAppHA will be available from October this year.

Neverfail has also launched the next generation of its disaster recovery solution, Neverfail 6.0, which it claims integrates high availability and remote recovery.

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Network Instruments’ virtual taps bring visibility to the otherwise hidden traffic traversing the VMware virtual switch

What’s not to like about virtualization? It’s green, it saves rack space, it even eases remote access issues. Well, one thing virtualization doesn’t do is make troubleshooting easy! For example: If you have an application server, a middleware server, and a SQL server all talking over the virtual network, how in the world can you get a glimpse into their conversations? It’s not like you can slap a tap on the gig port and fire up a protocol analyzer, because the virtual network never pokes its head into the physical world.

I and other members of the Interop NOC team ran into this exact issue when Neal Allen of Fluke Networks started looking at logical places to install network troubleshooting gear during Hot Stage for Interop Las Vegas 2009. He was carrying a bunch of Net Optics taps and suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, a quizzical look on his face. He then started asking around: Just how do you tap the virtual network under VMware? What happens if we have problems between servers that only talk over the virtual network? If you slap a full analyzer into a virtual machine, have you now changed the environment by sucking up a bunch of resources to observe the virtual network?

As I dug deeper into these questions, I remembered a conversation with a friend about the migration of his SaaS application from an internal datacenter to Amazon EC2/S3. He gave me this advice: If your application is well developed and no longer in the troubleshooting stage, clouds can be wonderful. But the cloud isn’t a friendly place for troubleshooting. Trying to track down bugs in the growing cloud-based system was costing him oodles of time and money.

So just how do you get a look inside your virtual network? I stumbled across the answer during an update session by Network Instruments on the Observer product line: virtual taps. If you set a VMware virtual switch (vSwitch) and virtual network adapter (vNIC) to promiscuous mode, the vNIC will receive all traffic that flows through the vSwitch. Network Instruments’ virtual tap, called vTaps, is software that installs inside a VMware virtual machine, collects all of this vSwitch traffic, and directs it to a physical NIC and into a Network Instruments probe.

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