Release: VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.5

Log Insight is a log aggregation, management and analysis tool, that VMware first introduced in 2013 and considered a competitor of Splunk.

Yesterday VMware announced the release of version 4.5, available for download here.
Most of the focus for this release goes to the integration with vRealize Operations which, in short, means:

  • Direct launch into Log Insight Dashboard
  • Direct launch into Log Insight Interactive Analytics mode
  • Object auto-initiated log management
  • vRealize Operations Alerts auto-initiated log management


The remnant new features are split into 4 areas:

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Paper: Introducing the NSX-T Platform

We see greater potential strategic opportunity in NSX over the next decade than our franchise product vSphere has had for the past decade.
said VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger talking about NSX’s capability to reach $1B this fiscal year.

VMware NSX, launched in August 2013, unifies in a single platform Nicira NVP (that the company acquired in July 2012 for approximately $1B) and VMware vCloud Network and Security, covering the entire network and security model from Layer 2 to Layer 7 and integrating in the hypervisor to ability to manage switching, bridging, routing and firewall.

This month VMware published a technical white paper titled Introducing the NSX-T Platform to explain its new architecture described as follows:

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Paper: VMware vSphere Virtual Machine Encryption Performance

Encryption of virtual machines is something that has been requested for years by the security community. VMware continued to postpone its implementation due to the negative operational impact that many solutions proved to have, until now. With vSphere 6.5 VMware introduced an agnostic, policy driven VM Encryption feature claiming that the impact on I/O performance is very minimal.
To prove that VMware published a 16 pages Performance Study which presents the results of several I/O experiments aimed to quantify CPU cost and I/O throughput and latency when enabling a VM with encryption.

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Quest Software leaves Dell

In September 2012 Dell announced to have completed the acquisition of Quest Software, a Californian company with an history in systems management, security, business intelligence and, falling back in our own area of interest, virtualization, cloud automation and backup & recovery.
Today, after 3 years, Quest is announcing its renewed independency thanks to a new acquisition by Francisco Partners and Elliott Management Corporation.

Dell is currently in the spotlight due to its acquisition of EMC Corporation, owner (among others) of VMware and Pivotal.

Jeff Hawn, chairman and CEO said:

As companies continue to embrace business transformation, particularly through adopting cloud-centric technology models, they need a trusted partner through this critical journey. In relaunching Quest, our products will be purpose-built and backed by a level of support and services that will help our customers and partners succeed. We’ll take the best of what made Quest a market maker for the past 30 years and infuse a renewed focus on security and cloud.

Release: VMware vSphere 6.5 & Virtual SAN 6.5

2016 edition of VMworld US has been quite turbulent, on the other hand during VMworld Europe, happening these days in Barcelona, the company announced a few more products for the joy of its loyal audience.

vSphere 6.5 announced yesterday, for instance, is a release focused on addressing three main challenges: simplify the user experience, integrate security capabilities and support traditional and new generation applications side by side.

To do that this dotted release introduces:

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Release: VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.0

Log Insight is a log aggregation, management and analisys tool, that VMware first introduced in 2013 and now is usually compared with Splunk.

Yesterday VMware announced Log Insight’s new major release 4.0, scheduled for a vague “later this year”.
According to VMware’s announcement, this release is focused on delivering a brand new user interface based on Clarity standard, enhanced alert management capabilities, with a centralised interface and historical views, and better integration with vSphere, vRealize, and other VMware products.

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Release: Windows Server 2016 with support for Window Server & Hyper-V containers

Yesterday Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server 2016 which the company defines as a cloud-ready OS.

Beside fancy definitions, one of the most relevant perks of this release is that enables windows users to consume container virtualization technologies through two different technologies: Windows Server Containers & Hyper-V Containers.

The first allowed Docker Engine to be ported on windows, where has been in technical preview for over a year.
As a consequence Docker and Microsoft announced a commercial partnership during the Ignite, but, despite this relationship, Docker Engine is not an integral part of Windows Server setup, nor Windows Update. Though a PowerShell script is at your disposal to make the magic happen.

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Release: Oracle VM 3.4.2

During Oracle OpenWorld 2016 the company released version 3.4.2 of its enterprise virtualization solution.

Oracle VM is available for both x86 and SPARC based processor architectures and uses the Xen hypervisor technology, supporting Windows, Linux and Oracle Solaris guests.

Some of the changes and new features introduced with version 3.4.2:

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VMworld US 2016 Wrap-up

Today was the last day of VMware’s flagship conference VMworld in Las Vegas, an highly controversial edition which left a good chunk of the audience disoriented if not properly disappointed.

The debate started during Day 1 Keynote and then proliferated over Twitter in various strands. Part of the audience commented that the message delivered during the keynote suggests developers and cloud-native applications (delegated to Day 2 Keynote) as second-class citizens in VMware’s world.

Others complained that the announcements of VMware Cloud Foundation and Cross-Cloud Services (moreover in technical preview) are too few and too late to amend the One Cloud mantra VMware has drummed for an entire year.

Anyway each of these (legit) comments has been addressed by the vast legion of VMware’s aficionados and you can enjoy the discussion on Twitter with the hashtag #VMworld and form your own opinion.

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