Eric Sloof

Engineers, designers, and scientists have traditionally relied on dedicated graphics workstations to perform the most demanding tasks, such as manipulating 3D models and visually analyzing large data sets. These standalone workstations carried high acquisition and maintenance costs, and they required the user to be present in the lab or office. In areas such as oil and gas, space exploration, aerospace, engineering, science, and manufacturing this meant that an organization’s individuals had to be located in the same physical location as the workstation.


Virtualizing the graphics workstation provides immediate benefits by enabling workers to collaborate and be productive from any location, using any endpoint device. This enables organizations to employ the best global talent available and work more easily with valued partners and suppliers. Virtualization also offers both CapEx and OpEx savings, driving down acquisition and maintenance costs.

Innovations in hardware-based graphics acceleration and virtualization technology have made graphics workstation virtualization a reality. With the latest generation of virtualization software, display protocols, and advanced graphics cards, virtual desktops can meet and even exceed the performance expectations of designers and researchers accustomed to working on high-end standalone graphics workstations. The ability of a single physical GPU to support multiple users also has important implications for IT as well as for users who
are increasingly accustomed to mobility.

Get a copy of the technical whitepaper: Deploying Hardware-Accelerated Graphics with View Virtual Desktops in Horizon 6.2 

This free e-book is written by @roie9876 @stretchcloud @michaelahaines  @vConsultant  and Ajit Sharma

Server virtualization has been accepted well in our IT industry over the past decade. As a result, we have seen a completely new way of provisioning and managing workloads in the data center. This concept of server virtualization saved businesses from spending billions of dollars.


However, the way these workloads are connected to the network has not been so agile. The solution that every one is now looking at is to virtualize the network. Because when you virtualize the network layer, it abstracts the physical network and simplifies the provisioning and consumption of networking moving forward. In addition to this, security services are built-in, and do not require purpose-built hardware, and can scale as the network expands.

NSX for vSphere removes the operational barrier the network has become for IT. Programmatic provisioning transforms service delivery times from weeks to a matter of minutes. NSX for vSphere does not change the laws of physics, packets do not move faster through the network. NSX for vSphere transforms the operational model of networking, which combined with compute and storage virtualization delivers never before possible IT speed and agility for the business.

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I had a chance to catch up with Liquidware Labs this week to discuss their new “Micro Isolation” feature in their FlexApp Layering solution. Just the name, Micro Isolation, had me intrigued.
 
The new exclusive technology from Liquidware Labs solves the issue with layering regarding how applications within the layers interact with each other and the host operating system. To date layering solutions have had hit and miss packaging when it comes to applications that may have conflicts, such as trying to use the same .dll file and location or registry conflicts.

To get around this a few of the layering vendors have been suggesting that you package applications with conflicts into the same layer so that the applications are packaged together and are therefore more “aware” of one another. Of course you never really know if you have a conflict until you’ve first found the problem. Citrix has AppDNA which, among many other things it does, can help find these conflicts and make you aware of them. However, wouldn’t it be nice if layering solutions would just handle this automatically? 

FlexApp answers the industry challenge with its new Micro Isolation feature. Liquidware Labs is a leader in Application Layering, having built the FlexApp from the ground up, first introducing the solution in 2011. FlexApp v6.5.1. adds Windows 10 support and architecture optimizations but let’s look more closely into Micro Isolation since that’s the innovative piece.

This eLearning course provides an overview of VMware Identity Manager and explains how it helps IT administrators and end users in business mobility and application security. This course also explains the different solutions that can be integrated with Identity Manager. In addition, it demonstrates how to deploy and administer Identity Manager.

At the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Describe how Identity Manager helps IT administrators and end users in business mobility and application security
• Identify the two offerings of Identity Manager, SaaS and on-premises
• Describe the Identity Manager architecture
• Explain the different solutions that can be integrated with Identity Manager
• Explain how to deploy and administer Identity Manager

VMware vSphere is all the components and operating system that comes together to make VMware’s enterprise virtualization platform unique. When running enterprise-driven application workloads, the VMware vSphere family has become a preference of many developers. The vSphere platform is designed to work with numerous servers and infrastructure core components to create virtualized platforms and/or a complete cloud computing fabrics.

This book will guide you through tuning, tweaking, and optimizing vSphere in order to improve the performance of your systems. It will also help you identify and fix common performance bottlenecks.

Starting with planning high-performance infrastructure setups, the book covers the core concepts of cluster setups such as resource pools, DRS, and availability options, along with CPU virtualization concepts. Next, it covers the management of physical and virtual memory mechanisms, swapping, and ballooning.

Moving on, you’ll get an understanding of how vCenter Server can assist you with recognizing performance issues, and how to utilize advanced technologies such as Storage I/O Control and vSphere Flash Read Cache to tune storage resources. Next, you’ll learn to implement a reliable and high-performance network for virtual infrastructures.

Finally, the book shows you how esxtop and resxtop can provide advanced metrics to detect 

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone provides an easy-to-use solution to automate the process of creating VMware virtual machines from physical machines (running Windows and Linux) and other virtual machine formats.

Through an intuitive wizard-driven interface and a centralized management console, Converter Standalone can quickly and reliably convert multiple local and remote physical machines without any disruptions or downtime.

The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.1 provides:

• Support for additional guest operating systems: Windows 10, Ubuntu 15.
• Offline conversions for HyperV 2012 R2 virtual machines.
• SSH key based authentication for the Linux sources during conversion.
• Support for VMware Workstation 12.

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.1 Release Notes
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Product Download Center

Jason Marshall from the VMware End-User Computing team walks you through a whiteboard session covering the technical architecture of VMware App Volumes.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.1, shipping with vSphere 6.0.0 U1, introduces a new feature called VMware Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster. Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster is a specific configuration implemented in environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a key requirement.


This guide was developed to provide additional insight and information for installation, configuration and operation of a VSAN stretched cluster infrastructure in conjunction with VMware vSphere.

This guide will explain how vSphere handles specific failure scenarios and discuss various design considerations and operational procedures.

This utility is a wrapper for the VMware OVF Tool for deploying the VMware Access Point Appliance. It allows you to input settings in a GUI;  the utility will create and execute the properly formatted OVF Tool input string for you.


It also allows settings to be saved to an XML file and later imported to reduce how much data needs to be manually entered. The utility will take a standard PEM formatted certificate chain and private key and convert them to the proper format for JSON. View settings can also be set at time of deployment with this utility.

This document provides guidance in architecting a Greenfield cloud solution to support Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) based on VMware best practice and real-world scenarios. The platform dramatically simplifies data center operations, delivering enhanced agility, rapid innovation, better economics and scale.

The VMware vCloud NFV platform supports Virtual Network Functions (VNF) workloads that run on a VMware solution. The solution contains components that are aligned to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFVI Architecture Framework1.

These components must be integrated to work ;well together. The components range from compute, storage and network devices to management and monitoring services. Each of the components has numerous potentially valid configurations, but only a few of these configurations result in an integrated, functional system that meets business and technical requirements, and aligns with the ETSI NFVI Architectural Framework.

The following components of the ETSI NFVI Architectural Framework are addressed in this document:

• NFV Infrastructure (NFVI)
• Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM)
• NFVI Operations Management