Meet an experienced manager with technical expertise in the areas of GIS, international development, and humanitarian aid, John Steed, the director of geospatial services for Tesla Government Inc. runs ArcGIS on Mac using Parallels Desktop for Mac. ArcGIS is a powerful leader in the Windows software sphere for creating maps, web applications, 3D, and data-driven […]
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What you can do with a virtualized operating system Odds are, you’re running Parallels Desktop for Mac because you have that one program, that one holdout that is keeping you from going full native on Mac. Or you have that client that needs to see the work in Windows, or you’re not out of the […]
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At Parallels, we love sharing our customers’ success stories! Recently, Tim Goldstein, a leading business intelligence analyst, database architect, and senior developer specializing in the Microsoft SQL server tool set, implemented a more agile development process with Parallels Desktop for Mac. Goldstein’s new process has been a great success and proven Parallels Desktop to be […]
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‘Tis the season for savings! Here at Parallels we want to how our immense appreciation to our customers by offering a holiday lineup of premium applications to save you some money this season. From now until December 31st we will offer 7 free applications when you buy Parallels Desktop for Mac. That’s a 91% discount […]
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vRealize Operations Manager by VMware, is a monitoring and capacity planning solution that comes with vSOM suite. It helps IT administrators monitor, troubleshoot, and manage their virtual environment and is a very helpful tool to help you accommodate more load and tell you when you are going to need to buy your next host or disk. Here at GreenPages, we use it to tell our customers where they need to go next and it has become a very valuable tool.
Click here to download our recap webinar, “Buzz from VMworld 2016: Key U.S. & Europe Announcements” with GreenPages CTO Chris Ward
To find out more about vRealize Operations Manager, email us here.
By Chris Williams, Enterprise Consultant
Hello All! Another day at VMworld Europe and more information on what’s new in the VMware ecosystem. As their recent press release has made obvious, VMware has gone all in with making their ecosystem more developer friendly: REST-based APIs, Container Support, expanded PowerCLI to name a few.
vSphere 6.5
VMware vCenter Server® Appliance – The new vCSA appliance has made many significant improvements. From the migration path to the ability to now have HA to the new scales of what it can manage. There are now fewer and fewer reasons to stay with the windows version of vCenter, though there are still some use cases.
REST APIs – gives developers, DevOps, and Operations teams greater flexibility and automation options.
VMware vSphere Client – Goodbye flash-based web client, hello HTML5!, VMware listened to customer feedback and created an interface that is more responsive and (hopefully) more resilient.
VMware vSphere Integrated Containers™ – by getting in on containerized applications in a fashion that is consumable by their existing VMware infrastructure/employees, VMware is making it easier for their infrastructure and development teams to work together more cohesively.
VSAN 6.5
iSCSI Support – will enable Virtual SAN storage to be presented as an iSCSI target for external physical workloads including clustered applications such as Microsoft SQL Server with Failover Clustering on a limited number of physical servers.
Containers Support – Virtual SAN will provide persistent data layer for containerized applications via VMware vSphere Integrated Containers.
Two-node Direct Connect – having an option for ROBO sites gives customers more flexibility & options.
Expanded PowerCLI – now that PowerShell is available Linux and Mac, the new PowerCLI integrations will be even more useable.
vRealize Automation 7.2
AWS, Microsoft Azure, and container support will give IT and DevOps teams greater flexibility in deploying cross-cloud, multi-tier applications. In addition, Log Insight 4.0 and vRealize Operations 6.4 were announced and will with all of the aforementioned technologies.
In addition, the vBrownBag Tech Talks that I’ve been helping to create have proved to be a great resource of exposure to new technical topics. We’ve published the VMworld Europe vBrownBag tech talks here. We recorded 21 videos! Next week I’ll be doing the OpenStack Summit Tech Talks, so expect many more videos in the coming week!
More to come! In the meantime, register for our upcoming webinar. CTO Chris Ward will be doing a full deep-dive into all of the biggest VMworld announcements.
Chris Williams – GreenPages Enterprise Consultant
Hello all,
There have been a lot of great announcements coming out of VMworld EU this week. Here are the exciting items that have been announced so far:
vSphere 6.5 vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)
A lot of great changes have happened to the vCSA over the past few years. It can now run significantly more hosts/vms. There are less steps involved in spinning it up as opposed to the Windows version. And NOW (finally!) one of the last reasons for keeping the windows version around has been addressed: vUM! VCSA 6.5 now has Update Manager integrated. You can now upgrade from 5.5 or 6.0 (windows OR appliance) to 6.5, including vDS configuration. It has a brand new HTML5 web client, though it doesn’t yet have feature parity with the old version, that will be addressed.
VMware Cross-Cloud services
This is the thing that I’m the most excited about and the one that has me asking “What took you so long?”. Cross-cloud services will enable connectivity to public cloud providers for the “seamless integration of workloads”. It will enable you to (for example) run your DB on premises, your application tier in AWS, and your web front end in Azure. I asked some of the AWS guys here about the technical details but they haven’t been ironed out quite yet. This offering is slated to be available “Mid 2017” and will be purported to also have “Elastic DRS” – an ecosystem that allows you to burst across clouds. In the event of a workload spike, you would be able to provision more VMs locally via vRA and use Auto-Scale Groups to increase the number of EC2 instances in AWS to handle the increased demand. VMware also announced that NSX micro-segmentation would also function within the public cloud providers – this will give you additional security granularity on top of native firewalls, security groups and network access control lists.
More to come! In the meantime, register for our upcoming webinar. CTO Chris Ward will be doing a full deep-dive into all of the biggest VMworld announcements.
Chris Williams – GreenPages Enterprise Consultant
VMware’s vSphere ESXi 5.0 and 5.1, which is the hypervisor included in vSphere 5.0 and 5.1, is going to end of support (EOS) this summer. Effective August 24, 2016, VMware will no longer offer General Support for these editions. Basically, this means no phone or email support regardless if you are current on your Subscription and Support (SnS) or not.
Now is the perfect time to upgrade. If you are current on our SnS you can upgrade to vSphere 6.0 for free.
vSphere 6.0 has many new changes that include increased stability, network I/O control and vMotion enhancements that are ideal for any cloud environment and make it an attractive upgrade.
Here are some of those new features:
From a compute standpoint, vSphere 6 increases configuration maximus. VMs now support up to 128 vCPUs and 4TB vRAM. Hosts will support up to 480 CPU and 12TB of RAM, 1028 VM per host and 64 nodes per cluster. vSphere 6 can close and deploy VMs 10x faster and the new NVIDIA vGPU offers accelerated graphics to virtualized solutions.
For networking, vSphere 6 offers support for per-VM Distributed vSwitch bandwidth reservations. This allows for the enforcement of bandwidth. With a dedicated network stack, vSphere 6 simplifies IP address management with a default gateway for vMotion traffic.
vSphere 6 has many vMotion enhancements that make it ideal for customers to upgrade. vMotion can now perform more increased long distance, non-disruptive live migration of workloads across virtual switches and vCenter Servers over distances of up to 100ms RTT. That allows datacenters in Boston and Dublin to migrate workloads between one another because the increase is 10 times faster. I know Aer Lingus is fast, but this offers a whole other level of “legging Shenanagans” (translates: fast things going on). With Replication-Assisted vMotion, it allows for active-active replication between two sites performing a more efficient vMotion, resulting in an expanded time and resource savings (which can be up to 95 percent more efficient).
vSphere also has other notable enhancements such as:
Assistance in Upgrading:
With all these enhancements comes significant architectural changes which may involve updating existing designs, specifically around vCenter. There are net new components and capabilities within vSphere 6 which have major architectural considerations.
If you’re not familiar with these changes, mistakes can inadvertently be made in design or deployment which could back you into a corner making it difficult to get out of. The upgrade is not a few clicks. It’s not a simple download the code and run-setup scenario. GreenPages has already mapped out the mine field to be able to help customers with a successful upgrade to a supported version, as well as potentially greatly enhancing the current infrastructure capabilities. If you have already made the upgrade on your own, we can also run a health check to validate your environment. Don’t hesitate to reach out!
By Rob O’Shaughnessy, Director of Software Sales & Renewals
Every investment in major IT transformation arrives with its own set of structural and institutional challenges, not least migrating to a virtualized infrastructure. Get it wrong from the outset and you will be faced with the mother of all headaches. If the issue of performance is not addressed at inception, your data centre and its services – although being able to run – will be increasingly plagued by service problems, poor user satisfaction and inadequate Return on Investment. So, companies looking to transform their virtualised infrastructure should look before they leap and consider three major hurdles.
#1: The heavy lifting of remedial actions
Shift happens. Seasonal traffic spikes, buggy drivers, fluctuating head counts, updated applications, worn out drives and a thousand other factors all contribute to the constantly shifting foundation upon which your infrastructure must stand and thrive. But in any dynamic environment, the unforeseen throttle will inevitably occur and issues will need fixing.
End-user issue remediation actions are exceedingly important, so when a VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface) user calls or files a trouble ticket, IT must have the tools for translating complaints into troubleshooting. Pinpointing problem sources manually can take hours; sometimes even days or weeks, because virtual infrastructure tools tend to be designed for high-level observation, not granular examination of what exactly is, or isn’t, going on. If multiple problems crop up from different sources, the burden of remediation magnifies, potentially risking an organisation’s business continuity.
#2: Isolated end-user experience metrics
Amazon famously publicised how each 1/10th of a second of added site latency sacrificed 1% in sales. Nothing will persuade a worker not to use a cloud-based software tool, particularly on a new rollout, quite like staring through a login hourglass. Of course, management feels the same pain. Aberdeen Research found that poor application performance can slice up to 9% from corporate revenue.
Citrix proposes that there are five key, measurable metrics that constitute the lion’s share of poor user experiences within virtualised environments:
Clearly, most issues will stem from obstructions in resource flow, but determining the root cause or causes of any decline in these metrics can be arduous.
#3: Inefficient allocation of IT resources
Virtual infrastructure resource utilisation wastes mountains of money when it runs too cold and throws up bottlenecks and failures when it runs too hot. Efficiency is the relationship between performance and resource utilisation and maximum efficiency does not mean maximum utilisation. The physical underpinnings of your virtual infrastructure are a mesh of CPU, memory, storage, network and – particularly in VDI and HPC deployments – GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) assets. The key is to deduce not only utilisation levels but overall efficiency within each resource type, network region and entire organisation.
The solution for companies looking to jump these hurdles is to invest in better predictive analytics-driven strategic levers. They enable the reduction or even elimination of persistent IT problems. To prevent the heavy lifting of remedial actions the tool needs to increase real-time prevention of problems and in cases when prevention is not enough, step in with automated remediation. Either way, the end result is massive savings in resolution time as well as a much improved chance for IT, and thus the whole organisation, to meet its SLAs (Service-Level Agreements). The ability to help pinpoint the problem’s source and whenever possible, cross-silo insights for balancing load optimisation to alleviate bottlenecks is crucial to prevent isolated end-user experience metrics.
In order to combat inefficient allocation of IT resources you must be able to monitor the real-time characteristics of these physical resources and how end-points and applications are using them across the network. Clarity of vision is a strategic lever not only to utilisation levels but overall efficiency within each resource type, network region and entire organisation.
Written by Atchison Frazer, CMO at Xangati
Citrix App Center – Where it comes from and what it’s become One of the main challenges in a virtualization environment is the management of the infrastructure. With thousands of VMs and users constantly being dynamically created and terminated, IT administrators have a tough time managing the network. In the early days, they had to […]
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