Eric Sloof

Some of the features previewed in this release:

• Content Gallery – As VMware continues to expand our content pack coverage to security, Networking, Compute and Storage, they have introduced a new way to Import, Export, Share and Manage Content packs for both administrators and users.
• Active Directory – Log Insight is now fully integrated with Active Directory including support for users, groups, profiles and roles.
• Light speed response – Self tuning, predictive analytics engine that ensures immediate response to queries and dashboards even as the data sets grows beyond the terabyte mark.
• In-Place upgrade – Log Insight now supports in-place upgrade from 1.0 GA and from previous technical previews, enabling seamless adoption of new functionality as it becomes available to our technical preview program members without impact on production or test environments.
• Intuitive and self-managing – Featuring a redesigned self-monitoring and archive tracking interface, vSphere integration wizard and enhanced query auto complete.

Download VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5 Technical Preview 2

In this VMworld TV interview, VCDX Josh Odgers explains the Nutanix system reliability. The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is designed and engineered from the ground-up to provide best-in-class reliability, and to efficiently cope with possible hardware and software failures. The distributed software architecture runs a virtual storage controller (Controller VM or CVM) on each node forming a distributed system. 

All nodes actively work together to aggregate individual direct-attached storage resources into a single global namespace that can be leveraged by all hosts. All storage resources are managed by the Nutanix Distributed Filesystem (NDFS) to ensure that data and system integrity is preserved in the event of node, disk or software failure.

Data Protection NDFS uses a distributed Oplog (short for operations log, and analogous to a fault-tolerant journal on a local filesystem) as a staging area to absorb incoming writes onto a fast, low-latency SSD tier. The data is then coalesced and later written (i.e., drained) to back-end storage resources (Extent Store) asynchronously.

The Extent Store is made up of extents, which are variable-sized contiguous regions of a vDisk (i.e., an NDFS file). NDFS implements a fully distributed design that prevents Oplog data loss in the event of a node failure. Before any write is acknowledged to the host, it is synchronously replicated to an Oplog on another adjacent node. All nodes participate in replication. Only after the data – and its associated metadata – is replicated, will the host receive an acknowledgment of a successful write. This ensures that data exists in at least two independent locations within the cluster and is fault tolerant.

Learn more at: Nutanix Tech Note System Reliability

Many organizations have taken advantage of the operational efficiencies that come from server virtualization. These efficiencies have reduced the time to deploy new applications from weeks to days. Until now, however, the process for provisioning the necessary infrastructure services to run those enterprise applications has remained a mostly manual and time-consuming process.

This can diminish the gains initially achieved by server virtualization and can hinder the adoption of cloud computing. The integration of F5 and VMware products helps solve these challenges. VMware NSX transforms network operations and economics in the data center by enabling neverbefore-possible service delivery speed, increasing agility, and dramatically reducing both the capital and operational costs associated with networking and security improvements.

With F5® BIG-IQ™ Cloud, IT administrators can provide the full suite of services offered by BIG-IP® products—such as BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM), BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager™, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager®, and others—directly from within NSX Manager as part of the normal virtual machine deployment sequence. This shortens the all-inclusive application provisioning process from days to just minutes.

VMware has released the VMworld 2013 Hands-on Labs (free for everyone) the following labs are available:

Andrew Hald: Today we are excited to announce that we have released the first four labs from the 2013 Hands-on Labs Content catalog to the HOL Online portal. These four labs were among the most popular at our 10th Annual VMworld US show last week in San Francisco. They demonstrate some of the most talked about new products and features in networking, storage, performance and mobility.

VMware Fusion 6 is optimized for the latest Macs and ready for OS X Mavericks and Windows 8.1 to deliver the ultimate Windows on Mac experience.