PHD Virtual today announced the immediate availability of the new PHD Virtual Backup and Replication version 5.3. The new release further extends PHD’s award winning Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) Architecture with integrated virtual machine replication and significantly enhanced performance, delivering the easiest, fastest and most cost effective solution for protecting VMware and Citrix XenServer virtual environments.

PHD Virtual Backup and Replication version 5.3 includes the following new features and capabilities:

• Enhanced Performance and Scalability – PHD Virtual Backup and Replication raises the bar for virtual machine backup and restore performance with a new optimized IO engine for more efficient backup and restore processing and the ability to support twice the number of concurrent data streams per VBA
• Virtual Machine Replication – Replicating virtual machines has never been easier, more flexible or more efficient. Intelligent Data Replication ensures efficient data transfer leveraging CBT, deduplication and compression. Virtual Machines are replicated directly from existing backups and replicated VM’s can be verified using a built-in test mode.
• Enhanced DR Flexibility – Getting your backup data offsite and restoring your virtual environment from backups in case of a DR event is faster and easier than ever before. Mass Restore enables restoration of multiple virtual machines from a single restore job. Open Export enables export of virtual machine backups to standard OVF providing easier and faster backup and restore from tape or other log term storage devices.

“This new release takes backup, recovery and replication performance to a new level while providing the valuable combination of unparalleled ease of use and seamless scalability that PHD Virtual is known for,” said Paul Throldahl, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, PHD Virtual Technologies. “With the new features and enhancements in the 5.3 release, customers now have a better way to protect their virtual environments that is faster, easier and more cost effective than any other solution on the market.”

PHD Virtual Backup and Replication version 5.3 is available immediately. Existing customers with an active maintenance agreement are eligible for a free upgrade to version 5.3. For more information you can go to http://www.phdvirtual.com/phd-backup-replication.

Android tablets can now work with VMware View. This was announced during the vExpert meeting on Thursday and looks pretty cool!

In this video Tedd Fox of VMware demonstrates VMware View Client for Android. Available on the Android Market and Cisco AppHQ, the VMware free Android client enables you to access your virtual Windows desktops, applications and data from anywhere. Addition information can be found on the VMware End-User Computing blog.

This weekend the VMware vExpert 2011 awards were handed out as recognition of work above and beyond the norm within the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities. Early Friday morning the tweets began to roll out and the usual suspects got another year’s recognition for their efforts, and rightly so as there are people out there who do live and breath virtualization and work hard to bring it to others!

Well over the last 3-4 years I’ve been firmly immersed in the virtualization industry and thought I was in with a good shot this year of getting the prized vExpert badge!
Come Saturday night I had seen a lot of tweets and it is truthful to say that I had given up all hope by of getting a vExpert Award this year!

Then I got an email from VMware!

Yes I have been dubbed vExpert 2011 which pretty much made my weekend!

Many thanks to John Troyer and the rest of the people at VMware for this! I’d also like to thank the rest of the VMware community as you are all a top bunch who have made the last 4 years of my career an interesting one!

Keep up the good work everyone and goooo VMware!

Yesterday marked a major milestone for VMware’s End-User Computing vision with the launch of VMware Horizon App Manager, a user-centric management service for accessing cloud applications.

At its core, VMware Horizon App Manager includes an identity-as-a-service hub that securely extends a user’s existing identity in systems such as Microsoft Active Directory or other directory options, into third-party public cloud applications like Box.net, BroadVision, Google, salesforce.com, WebEx and Workday. This dramatically simplifies the management of multiple access credentials, a necessity brought about by the growing number of cloud applications now found in a typical enterprise. Simplification benefits both IT and users by collapsing separate identity silos into a single enterprise identity that secures user access across private and public clouds. In addition, the VMware Horizon App Manager provides an open, user-centric platform for accessing cloud applications within a single portal that is accessible from a wide range of end-user devices.

Horizon will leverage this foundation of enterprise security and policy to help customers manage other services including virtualized Windows Applications, published applications, data services, and some of their own next generation applications like Sliderocket, Zimbra, and Mozy.

This video provides a brief overview of the product:

I’ve been discussing the very idea of a weekly “roundup show” with David Owen for some time, and on Friday I got round to giving it a go.

My aim is to make it as informal and personable as possible while pointing out what items of news and chat in the virtualization community caught my eye each week.
It’s obviously very “British” (me being a Brit!), and I still need to work on the clarity of the Television backdrop! Think of this as one of several “pilot” shows!

Feel free to let me know if you like it, or whether my stage personality is made purely for the radio. Also excuse the bags under my eyes!!

This week I’m talking vExperts, April Fools, The VMwareStig, and what’s new on several of the mainstream community blogs!

Back in September at VMworld I was lucky enough to recieve a private demo of the “new” VMware communities site. Well today this upgrade to the VMTN community platform was rolled out. The new platform has a number of improvements to existing functionality and adds some new features which can help community members share and find content easier.

New features include:

• Social media facilities inctroduced as a integral part of the community. The new layout has tabs for Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube at the top of the page, to present a unified picture of all the goings on in the community.
• Social capabilities: follow people, tags, communities, groups, and social bookmarking
• Groups: with the new release, each user will be able to create private or public groups
• Your view: A personal homepage, which can serve as your Communities dashboard, where the feeds from all the people and content you follow can be aggregated
• More widgets, better rich text editor support, and better support for Microsoft document formats.
• Private Discussions and Documents: People can now create private discussions and documents, with full control over who will be able to see and edit your content.
• Activity updates: Users can subscribe to receive a digest email that summarizes activity of interest, such as who commented on your content, whether there are any unanswered questions in a given community, etc.
• You can read full 4.0 documentation and release notes on the Jive site.

VMware have also supplied two short video demonstrations of what the new platform allows you to do, and more are in the works.

Following people and content

Your view

Last Thursday myself and Alex Mittell from PHD Virtual Technoligies attended the London VMUG (VMware User Group), which was held at the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and sponsored by RES Software.

There were many usual suspects from the vistualization community there, and we got to chat to loads of them including: Simon Seagrave, Steve Chambers, Daniel Eason, Jane Rimmer, Simon Long, Doug Hazelman, Ricky El-Qasem, and Mike Laverick.

One thing Alex focused on in our discussions is the major issue he recently discovered with VMware’s CBT, which corrupts backups done with software packages that have not implemented a specific workaround.

You can find out more about this CBT issue on Tom Howarth’s blog post!

You can also see the pics I took on the VMSpotlight Facebook page!

Yesterday Alex Mittell from PHD Virtual attended the New Jersey VMUG, which was hosted by the people from vKernal.

As soon as he told me he was going I asked him to grab some snaps of the event!

The turnout was about 75 people, many of the attendees also said they wanted PHD Virtual to do technical presentations at one of the next VMUGs, so keep your eyes peeled for usual suspects Alex Mittell and Doug Soltesz presenting at future VMUGs.

You can find the pictures of the NJ VMUG on the Virtualization Spotlight page on Facebook.

On Sunday Eric Sloof wrote a blog post highlighing a potential issue with version 3.1 of Veeam Backup. The main focus of the discussion surrounds drastic reductions in back-up speed with servers upgraded to vSphere 4.

The people at Vizoncore and Veeam have posted on the subject in several online spaces also. One of Veeam’s product managers who runs a blog has posted on this topic here: http://www.vnotion.com/?p=38 explaining testing he has done on the issue.

View the VMTN discussion thread here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1302322

Jason Mattox and Steve Philip also contributed to the discussion (excerpts below from Eric Sloof’s blog):

Jason Mattox :

Putting my differences aside, (I’m from vizioncore) and wanting to see this fixes for all VMware users, here is what it think is going on. I think this is due to the read speeds from VMFS on ESX 4 VS ESX 3. Give this test a try, create a 10 GB VM and run this command, how does it take on ESX 3 vs ESX 4? You have to remember that VCB over the network is using VMware API’s which are going to get more disk/read time. I think VMware has starved the COS reads again. I think this same thing happened from ESX 2.5.x to 3.0 and when 3.0.1 came out it was fixed, I’m not 100% on that ,but I think that’s what happened. time cat JM_10GB_Test-flat.vmdk > /dev/null

Steve Philp :

As the person that posted the original question both on VMware’s forum and on Veeam’s forum, I can tell you that we’re all just waiting for VMware to acknowledge and fix the issue. We have been working with VMware tech support for a few weeks now, providing them with backup and file copy performance data involving the Service Console. We have no idea whether they’re seeing other reports of the issue, they haven’t been very forthcoming with info. I can confirm that the backup speed problem ONLY affects transfers using the Service Console. Using VCB / SAN mode in Veeam Backup allows full backup speed. Here’s the followup posting on my blog with our “lesson’s learned”.

So after months of being guarded, the vSphere 4 code was announced to the world as having reached “gold” status.

The announcement came with a substantial sting in the tail for VMWare’s current large enterprise customers and Cisco. The introduction of the new “Enterprise Plus” license option, allows no existing VMware licensee to be eligible for without further payment.

This has left a lot of users furious at what they describe as “an insult”. The sting has been made even worse as it has come at a time when corporate spending is down across the board and many businesses are struggling.

VMWare’s introduction of a layer above the current top license tier, just doesn’t make any sense. Existing top tier customers are not happy with the prospect of having to cough up more for it.

VMTN “vSphere Enterprise Plus position” Thread