VMware has recently released an update to its main platform for enterprise virtual and physical desktops infrastructure management – VMware Horizon 7.1. More than six months has passed since the release of the previous Horizon 7.0.2 version, and a whole year since the release of the major Horizon 7.
During this time, VMware managed to carry out a lot of interesting and useful developments, such as Just-in-Time Management Platform (JMP) and Instant Clones technology improvements, so let’s take a look at the list of the main new Horizon 7.1 capabilities, which can come in handy in your enterprise VDI infrastructure:
As administrators of VMs infrastructure based on VMware Horizon 7 well know, the last version of VMware User Environment Manager 9.0 (UEM) solution provides an interesting feature – Smart Policies. This functionality allows customization of user environment on a virtual desktop, depending on various conditions, such as the location from which the user logs in.
As many admins of virtual infrastructures know, for the first time ever, VMware vSphere 6.5 received the long awaited encryption feature of both virtual disks content and vMotion hot migrations.
The VMs encryption works based on AES-NI algorithm, and the key management is carried out based on KMIP 1.1 standard. When I/O operation comes to the disk of the virtual machine, it is immediately encrypted on-the-fly, which provides complete security against data security attack.
As is well-known, VMware has released a new version of virtual VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 in the new version of vSphere 6.5 platform. Now vCSA is Photon OS-based. It works faster; it is provided with built-in high availability tools and has a ready-to-use vCenter Update Manager (VUM).
Due to the numerous changes, many familiar features don’t work anymore, and the information below will help you to get back to the normal use of vCSA.
How to turn on Bash Shell and useWinSCP for vCSA
If you try to access vCSA server with WinSCP to download or upload files there, you won’t be able to do that:
Starting from VMware Tools 10.0 version, VMware has done these packages downloadable separately from VMware ESXi distributions. They are available here. To see the active VMware Tools version installed in your VM, simply look at VM properties in vSphere Client:
Just recently one of the main virtualization conferences VMworld Europe 2016 has finished. Traditionally, it has been held a while after the main VMworld in the USA. While in the USA VMware was speaking about the new technologies and the future of datacenters, in Europe much more attention was paid to the new features of updated VMware products. The main of them is, of course, VMware vSphere 6.5 server virtualization platform. We’ll start our overview with it.
As far back as 2 years ago at VMworld Europe 2014 conference VMware announced the release of the VMware Horizon FLEX solution. It is a virtualization platform for desktops, which allows running virtual machines locally on users’ computers, both on Mac and with Windows, while connection to the company’s datacenter isn’t available. At the same time, the virtual machine utilized by the user can be Windows-based or have guest OS Linux inside.
Many virtual infrastructures administrators still remember that before VMware had VMware ACE and VMware View Local Mode products, which passed long ago and now have been replaced with FLEX technology. Since VMware Horizon FLEX 1.9 version, as well as the new versions of Workstation and Fusion desktop platforms, has been released just recently, let’s look closer at the FLEX solution and consider its key features.
VMware Horizon FLEX isn’t a standalone product, but a mixed technology based on three solutions:
As you know, the main virtualization conference VMworld 2016 arranged by VMware is now being held in Las Vegas. On the first day of the conference several interesting announcements were made. For example, VMware Cloud Foundation, which soon will be available on the IBM platform and later with other vendors, as well, was presented. It allows to get a ready-made infrastructure at customer’s site with both necessary software and hardware components and ready, configured and integrated control and automation tools like NSX, Virtual SAN and vRealize:
As far back as at VMworld 2014, VMware announced VMware Project Fargo technology, also broadly known as VMFork. It allows to make a working copy of a running virtual machine on VMware vSphere platform very fast.
The VMFork technology involves on-the-fly creation of virtual machine clone (VMX-file and process in memory), which uses the same memory (Shared memory) that the parent VM does. At the same time, the child VM cannot write to the shared memory and uses the allocated memory to write its own data. With disks, it is just the same: with the Copy-on-write technology, the changes of the parent VM base disk are written to the child VM delta disk:
Many of you know that VMware has a technology called vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). It involves launch of Docker (and others) virtualized containers in small virtual machines with a lightweight operating system based on Linux distribution.
This operating system is VMware Photon OS 1.0, which has been finally released just recently. This is the first release version of this operating system from VMware, but in the long view it can become the main platform for virtual appliances by replacing the everlasting SUSE Linux.
Virtualization technology professional. 10 years ago he built #1 website on virtualization in Russia. Alex runs his own virtualization-focused company VMC. He is a CEO of a mobile game publisher Nova Games and a CEO of an international dating site
