Recently VMware warned about multiple security holes discovered in versions 4.0 and 4.1 of its ESX enterprise-level computer virtualization product.

Apparently the Service Console in ESX 4.1 on unpatched systems can be exploited by a local user in a guest virtual machine to gain escalated privileges, or by a malicious remote user to cause a denial-of-service condition or compromise a victim’s system. In its advisory, VMware notes that some of these holes, found in previous versions of the libxml2 XML C parser and toolkit used by the ESX Console Operating System (COS), have been closed by updating libxml2 to a newer release.

Versions 4.0 and 4.1 of ESX are affected; vCenter, ESXi and ESX 3.5 as well as hosted products such as VMware Workstation, Player, ACE and Fusion are not vulnerable. Patches are available for ESX 4.1 that correct these problems here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2013057

Further information about the vulnerabilities can be found in the company’s security advisory here: http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2012-0008.html

Eric Sloof ’s blog is one of the sites I always hit each day as he produces a wide range of informative and instructioal videos that can help improve an IT professional’s knowledge.

This one is part of his vCloud Director series.

The cloud consumer resources are dedicated vCenter clusters that host cloud workloads. These resources are carved up by vCloud Director in the form of one or more provider virtual datacenters, which is a vCenter cluster, and one or more attached datastores. Networking for the resource group will encompass vSphere networks visible to the hosts in that cluster. Provider virtual datacenters are further carved up into organization virtual datacenters, which are backed by vCenter resource pools. If you disable Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) on vCenter Clusters level you will lose all resource pools and you’re not able to deploy or power on vApps anymore.  This video will show you such a situation, don’t try this at home.

VMware has produced a new online publication with the purpose of raising the awareness among its customer and prospects about the new R&D areas where the company from Palo Alto is investing.

This first publishing covers distributed resource management, user experience monitoring and a couple of other topics:

1. Introduction
2. VisorFS – A Special-purpose File System for Efficient Handling of System Images
3. A Software-based Approach to Testing VMware® vSphere® VMkernel Public APIs
4. Providing Efficient and Seamless Desktop Services in Ubiquitous Computing Environments
5. Comprehensive User Experience Monitoring
6. StatsFeeder: An Extensible Statistics Collection Framework for Virtualized Environments
7. VMware Distributed Resource Management: Design, Implementation, and Lessons Learned
8. Identity, Access Control, and VMware Horizon
9. VMworld 2011 Hands-On Labs: Implementation and Workflow

VMware will try to publish this journal on a regular basis in the future.

Source: http://labs.vmware.com/publications/vmware-technical-journal

Another great video from virtual-video-master Eric Sloof! This one goes over the new release of VMware View Client for iPad which is the first iPad client with support for the PCoIP display protocol for tight integration with VMware View and increased flexibility for the end-user.

The View Client for iPad also allows end-users to simply and securely connect to their View-Based Windows desktop from an iPad with the best possible user experience on the Local Area Network (LAN) or across a Wide Area Network (WAN).

Check out Eric’s take on it!

This week Antone Heyward has reviewed PHD Virtual Backup for VMware on his website “The HyperAdvisor“.

Along with the review he posted up this video which takes you through the backup and restore process!

The new VMware vCloud Client for iPad app. allow users to view and inspect their VMs, provision environments, and perform basic workload operations from the convenience of the versatile Apple iPad.
Existing vCloud users can quickly install the client from the Apple App Store and immediately access their vCloud environments.

PHD Virtual Technologies have just released PHD Virtual Backup and Replication version 5.4 which includes some exciting new features and improvements that make data protection for virtual IT environments faster, easier and more extensible than ever before.  Version 5.4 delivers a robust application programming interface (API) that makes it easy to integrate backup, recovery and replication into your Enterprise, Public Cloud or Private Cloud infrastructure.

What’s New in Version 5.4:

Extensible API Integration – The new PHD Virtual API and SDK makes it easy to integrate backup, recovery and replication with your existing infrastructure, tools and applications.  It also provides additional flexibility to extend and customize data protection for your virtualized applications.

• Public Cloud, Private Cloud – Integrate data protection with backend systems, management infrastructures and self-service portals.
• Enterprise – Integrate data protection with existing systems, tools, processes and application infrastructures.

License Manager – A new license management interface makes it easy to centrally administer and manage your PHD Virtual Licenses across your entire deployment.

Management Console Performance Improvements – New optimizations improve the interaction and responsiveness of the management console for larger deployments.

Get more information about the new PHD Virtual Backup version 5.4 here: http://www.phdvirtual.com/phd-backup-replication

This is a great package and for a limited time only!

The PHD Virtual Backup Bundle is a combination of industry leading data protection, monitoring and management solutions that makes protecting and managing VMware and Citrix XenServer virtual environments, easier and more cost effective than ever before. The PHD Virtual Backup Bundle brings together the award winning PHD Virtual Backup and Replication and a free edition of PHD Virtual Monitor, providing the technologies and capabilities needed to increase administrator productivity while mitigating the protection and management risks administrators face on a daily basis.

The PHD Virtual Backup Bundle includes the following solutions:

What’s Inside

PHD Virtual Backup Bundle includes two features rich products that help you more effectively protect and manage your VMware and XenServer virtual environments

PHD Virtual Backup and Replication – direct integration with VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer provides the easiest, fastest and most cost effective way to implement reliable data protection and disaster recovery for your virtual environment.

PHD Virtual Monitor – easy, comprehensive monitoring and alerting for your entire virtual and physical infrastructure with both Intelligent Agent and Agent-less monitoring technology.  Consolidated enterprise dashboard, robust reporting and automated remediation without complex coding or scripting.

Bundle Details

PHD Virtual Backup and Replcation is licensed on a simple, cost effective host based model.  Each product license purchased will protect one virtual host along with all of the virtual machines running on that host.  Customers who purchase the PHD Virtual Backup Bundle during this limited time promotion will receive a FREE copy of PHD Virtual Monitor including 6 FREE Monitoring Licenses.  * Limit 1 per customer.  Free Monitoring Licenses can be used to monitor:

• Up to 3 Virtual Machines or Physical Server
• Up to 3 Physical Devices (Storage, Switches, Routers, etc.)

Easily Expand Monitoring

The FREE copy of PHD Virtual Monitor provides complete agent based monitoring for up to 6 licensed systems along with a centralized dashboard and easy, customizable reporting.  PHD Virtual Monitor can easily be extended to monitor additional physical and virtual infrastructure by purchasing additional add-on Agent or Collector licenses for virtual machines, servers, workstations or physical devices.

Take Monitoring to the Next Level With Hypervisor Plug-ins and Save 10%

Add PHD Virtual Monitor Plug-in’s for VMware vSphere or Citrix XenServer and get added insight and visibility into your virtual infrastructure.  Hypervisor plug-ins extend PHD’s Intelligent Agent monitoring with virtualization specific metrics, performance and inventory information obtained directly from vSphere and XenServer API’s.  This gives you a true end to end view of your entire virtual and physical infrastructure in a single, easy to use dashboard.

VMware supports in-place upgrades on 64-bit systems from vCenter Server 4.x to vCenter Server 5.0. You can upgrade VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 or later and vCenter Server 4.0.x to vCenter Server 5.0 by installing vCenter Server 5.0 on a new machine and migrating the existing database.

This upgrade method makes it possible to upgrade from a 32-bit system to a 64-bit system. Alternatively, if the VirtualCenter or vCenter Server database is on a remote machine, you can upgrade the database. vCenter Server 5.0 can manage ESX 3.5.x/ESXi 3.5.x hosts in the same cluster with ESX 4.x/ESXi 4.x hosts.

You cannot upgrade a vCenter Server 4.x instance that is running on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition to vCenter Server 5.0, because vCenter Server 5.0 does not support Windows XP Professional x64. This article provides information about upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0.

VMware KB: Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 best practices

vCenter Chargeback Manager is an end-to-end cost reporting solution for virtual environments that are using VMware vSphere. vCenter Chargeback Manager provides functionality to define unit costs and calculate the overall costs based on the actual usage or reservation of computing resources. This Web-based application interacts with the vCenter Server Database to retrieve usage information, calculates the cost by using the defined chargeback formulas, and generates cost and usage reports.

vCenter Chargeback Manager runs on an Apache Tomcat server instance. Users interact with vCenter Chargeback Manager through a load balancer (Apache HTTP Server). vCenter Chargeback Manager connects to the vCenter Chargeback Manager database that stores application-specific information, such as the defined chargeback hierarchies, cost models, users, roles, and so on. The application interacts with the vCenter Server using VIM APIs and with the vCenter Server database through a data collector. The data collector communicates with the vCenter Server Database using JDBC.

vCenter Chargeback Manager 2.0 new features include:

• Automatic Report Scheduler
• Different methods to charge thin and thick provisioned virtual machines
• Cost variance and cost optimization
• “Showback” Reporting
• The ability to difine fixed costs based on virtual machine state
• Tier-based storage costing
• Support for raw device mapping
• Complete support for vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
• Partial support for IPv6
• VM Instance Cost support for all hierarchies in vCenter Chargeback Manager
• Support for burstable billing or 95th percentile billing for the external network traffic in vCloud Director
• Support for overage charging for org vDCs in the Allocation Pool model of vCloud Director
• New cost models and billing policies for vCloud Director