Virtualization by Davis: “Citrix announces availability of Citrix NetScaler and CloudBridge AMIs on Amazon EC2” plus 5 more

---

• Citrix announces availability of Citrix NetScaler and CloudBridge AMIs on Amazon EC2
• Paper: VMware vSphere VMFS Technical Overview and Best Practices
• Paper: VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI)
• Amazon announces new large instance types for EC2
• App-V 5.0 SQL installation
• Wissenswertes über die Link Definition

Citrix announces availability of Citrix NetScaler and CloudBridge AMIs on Amazon EC2 Posted: 02 Dec 2012 11:48 PM PST During the annual Amazon event AWS RE: Invent, Citrix announced that a Citrix NetScaler Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and a CloudBridge AMI are now available in the AWS Marketplace which can run on Amazons Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform. The AMI for NetScaler uses the same binary as the VPX virtual appliance and MPX and SDX appliances. It supports Layer 4 to 7 technology like load balancing, content switching, global server load balancing, SSL VPN and application firewall. Before this AMI was available most of these technologies had to be implemented in different AMIs providing the necessary functionality. CloudBridge is capable of setting up a WAN-optimized, secure tunnel between EC2 and the on-premise datacenter. Labels: Amazon, Citrix, Release

Paper: VMware vSphere VMFS Technical Overview and Best Practices Posted: 02 Dec 2012 11:55 PM PST VMware has updated its VMFS Technical Overview paper for vSphere 5.1. The Paper titled VMware vSphere VMFS Technical Overview and Best Practices contains 17 pages and details how the VMware File System (VMFS) works. VMFS increases resource utilization by providing multiple virtual machines with shared access to a consolidated pool of clustered storage. VMFS provides the basis for other VMware services like virtual machine snapshots, VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning, VMware vSphere vMotion, VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (vSphere DRS), VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), VMware vSphere Storage DRS and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion. The paper contains the following sections: Introduction, background and VMFS Technical Overview Features and Benefits of VMFS Best Practices for Deployment and Use of VMFS Conclusion Thanks to Eric Sloof for providing the news. Labels: Paper, VMware This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Paper: VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) Posted: 02 Dec 2012 11:52 PM PST VMware has released a paper titled: VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), the paper which contains 19 pages details the current vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) available today. When VAAI was introduced in the vSphere 4.1 timeframe there were three block based storage (Fibre Channel, iSCSI and FCoE) and with the introduction of vSpere 2 VAAI primitives for NAS storage and vSphere Thin Provisioning were introduced. VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), also referred to as hardware acceleration or hardware offload APIs, are a set of APIs to enable communication between VMware vSphere ESXi hosts and storage devices. The APIs define a set of "storage primitives" that enable the ESXi host to offload certain storage operations to the array, which reduces resource overhead on the ESXi hosts and can significantly improve performance for storage-intensive operations such as storage cloning, zeroing, and so on. The goal of VAAI is to help storage vendors provide hardware assistance to speed up VMware I/O operations that are more efficiently accomplished in the storage hardware. Without the use of VAAI, cloning or migration of virtual machines by the vSphere VMkernel Data Mover involves software data movement. The Data Mover issues I/O to read and write blocks to and from the source and destination datastores. With VAAI, the Data Mover can use the API primitives to offload operations to the array if possible. For example, if the desired operation were to copy a virtual machine disk (VMDK) file from one datastore to another inside the same array, the array would be directed to make the copy completely inside the array. Whenever a data movement operation is invoked and the corresponding hardware offload operation is enabled, the Data Mover will first attempt to use the hardware offload. If the hardware offload operation fails, the Data Mover reverts to the traditional software method of data movement. In nearly all cases, hardware data movement will perform significantly better than software data movement. It will consume fewer CPU cycles and less bandwidth on the storage fabric. Improvements in performance can be observed by timing operations that use the VAAI primitives and using esxtop to track values such as CMDS/s, READS/s, WRITES/s, MBREAD/s, and MBWRTN/s of storage adapters during the operation. The paper contains the following sections: Introduction to VAAI VAAI Block Primitives VAAI NAS Primitives VAAI Thin Provisioning Primitives VAAI Implementation Checking VAAI Support Enabling and Disabling VAAI Reverting to the SoftwareMover Differences in VAAI between vSphere 4.x and 5.x VAAI Caveats Thanks to Eric Sloof for providing the news. Labels: Paper, VMware This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Amazon announces new large instance types for EC2 Posted: 02 Dec 2012 11:40 PM PST At its annual Re: Invent developer conference Amazon announced that it will launch 2 new instance types for its Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform, TechCrunch reports. The first new instance type offers Cluster High Memory with 240GB of RAM and two 120 GB SSDs for large-scale in-memory processing. The second one will offer 117 GB of RAM and 48 TB of HDD space provided by 24 hard drives. This news follows recent big-compute addition news from other cloud services vendors, like Microsoft which announced big-compute capabilities for its Windows Azure last week. Labels: Amazon, Release

App-V 5.0 SQL installation Posted: 02 Dec 2012 06:22 PM PST So I've been looking through the the guide obviously: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj713452.aspx And some blogs like this one: http://kirxblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/remote-database-preparation-for-app-v-5/ I can live with running the App-V installer on my SQL Server to let the database pre deployment thing do its bit. But my concerns are as to install on an existing instance or create a new one just for App-V. Will these scripts alter the instance settings in any way or anything that could affect the existing databases on an instance? This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Wissenswertes über die Link Definition Posted: 02 Dec 2012 01:06 PM PST Mit Einführung der Firmware Version 6.x des Repeater wurde eine neue Traffic  Shaping Engine eingeführt. Diese ermöglicht  den gesamten WAN Datenverkehr zu verwalten. In den Versionen davor war es nur möglich ein Qos auf den optimierten Datenverkehr zu realisieren. Ein wesentlicher Bestandteil der neuen Traffic Shaping Eingine ist der Link. Ein Link kann nach folgenden Kriterien definiert werden: Accelerated Port, apA 1/2, apB 1/2 Source… Read More

You are subscribed to email updates from Virtualization by Davis To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610