VMware Releases vSphere PowerCLI 5.5 R2

VMware quietly announced the release of vSphere PowerCLI 5.5 R2.  And with it, some great new features are being made available. 
Alan Renouf, a product manager at VMware focusing on automation frameworks and CLI, explained, "In this release we take PowerCLI one step further and allow even more troubleshooting, reporting and automation of vCloud Suite products by introducing easy access to vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) APIs through the core PowerCLI cmdlets."
Some of the new features and enhancements added to vSphere PowerCLI 5.5 Release 2 include:

• Full management of the vCenter SRM Public API - Using the Connect-SRMServer and Disconnect-SRMServer you are now able to connect to vCenter SRM and access all public APIs available
• Support for creating and removing Tags and Tag Categories - create and remove tags and tag categories to complement the tagging functionality offered in existing cmdlets released in the previous version
• Enable/Retrieve information on Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) Mode for Clusters - Adjustments to the Host and Cluster Cmdlets now allow for enabling, disabling and retrieving information for EVC Mode making automated build environments one step easier to accomplish.
• Security policies for vSphere standard switch and port groups - vSphere standard switches and portgoups can be adjusted using the Get/Set-SecurityPolicy cmdelts.
• Added support for Windows PowerShell 4.0
• Added support for IPv6
• Added statistical information - PowerCLI has been updated and we have added the ability to specify all supported types including clusters, datastores, etc and retrieve more statistical information via the Get-Stat and Get-StatType cmdlets.
• 64 bit Support - The New/Set-OSCustomizationSpec cmdlets have been updated to work in 64-bit PowerShell and no longer require running in a 32-bit PowerShell environment.
• Updated the Get-Datastore cmdlet - Filtering can now be done by cluster
• Added support for e1000e network adapter type
• Get-VM cmdlet updated - Allows a virtual machine to be retrieved by virtual switches
  

For a full list of all that has changed, check out the full vSphere PowerCLI 5.5 R2 Release notes here.
And when you are ready, download the latest version here.  

CPLANE NETWORKS Delivers High-Performance OpenStack® Networks to Accelerate Cloud Application Deployments

CPLANE NETWORKS, the leader in high-performance software-defined networking (SDN), today announced the availability of a new network virtualization platform for enterprises and cloud service providers. Dynamic Virtual Networks (DVN) transforms static physical networks into virtualized resource pools that can be allocated on demand, significantly reducing the time and cost to deploy cloud applications.
DVN is Built for OpenStack, the leading open source computing platform for private and public cloud service orchestration. “Our approach has been to unite the ‘divided house’ of the data-center, bringing together cloud application developers and network engineers to deliver agile, automated cloud networks,” said Brandon Williams, CEO of CPLANE NETWORKS. “Enabling application developers and network engineers to work together in a unified DevOps (development/operations) model, DVN and OpenStack significantly simplify and shorten the network services provisioning process.” Zero-touch configuration, reduction of unnecessary network traffic and elimination of external routing services ensure rapid response to service orchestration requests and significantly improve network performance.
Utilizing the power and scale of the CPLANE NETWORKS Cloud Networking Platform in conjunction with industry-standard protocols such as Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), DVN creates high-performance virtual networks that provide secure traffic isolation for applications and customers. A software-only solution, DVN leverages all popular vendor network architectures and products, allowing customers to protect their current infrastructure investment while providing a smooth path to new technologies and eliminating vendor lock-in.
“DevOps and open source orchestration are dramatically transforming the way data centers deliver services. CPLANE NETWORKS is at the nexus of these two revolutions with radically innovative and transformative technology,” said Williams.

CollabNet's CloudForge Available in Cloud Foundry Marketplace

CollabNet, a leading provider of cloud-based Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions for agile software delivery at scale, today announced that its CloudForge® development platform is currently available as an add-on service in Pivotal's on-demand PaaS service, powered by Cloud Foundry and available on-line at http://run.pivotal.io.
CloudForge continues to see strong adoption by organizations that want the benefits of cloud computing with the compliance and traceability CollabNet delivers to enterprises increasingly using open-source tools and cloud-based platforms. CloudForge availability in the Pivotal Web Services add-on marketplace provides developers with an integrated development and PaaS offering. It will accelerate development and deployment of enterprise applications to any Cloud Foundry-based platform, whether it is hosted in a private or public cloud.
"Joining the Cloud Foundry ecosystem is a great fit for CloudForge as both platforms support an open and flexible approach to software development and delivery in the cloud," said Bill Portelli, co-founder and CEO of CollabNet. "The move to develop and deploy applications in the cloud is growing every day, and CloudForge is attracting increasing numbers of developers, teams and organizations that want a practical path to scale without cumbersome restrictions."
Cloud Foundry is an open platform-as-a-service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. It makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale web and mobile applications. Cloud Foundry is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances, including Vmware's vSphere, Amazon Web Services, Open Stack and more.
CollabNet's CloudForge helps developers build websites, mobile/cloud/web applications, and rapidly prototype and deploy business software. Built for the enterprise, it offers a fast and practical path to grow and scale organization-wide, through a flexible role-based framework that makes it easy for developers to use and administrators to scale to thousands of users.
Now, Cloud Foundry users on Pivotal's Web Services (http://run.pivotal.io) can sign up for a CloudForge account from the Add-on Services Marketplace to gain instant access to CloudForge's leading development-based tools that are integrated into a single-user experience. CloudForge lets developers manage their development projects (plan, code, track and collaborate) and deploy code in Cloud Foundry. CloudForge delivers Apache Subversion® and Git, as well as the TeamForge ALM project management platform to all customers.
"We're excited to add CloudForge to the growing Cloud Foundry ecosystem," said James Watters, head of product for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal. "This partnership provides an integrated suite of leading development tools to enable rapid application development, deployment and scalability. CloudForge complements the Cloud Foundry philosophy of choice, flexibility and performance with a proven suite of on-demand, enterprise-grade tools and services."

Puppet Labs Announces Puppet Enterprise 3.2

Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software, announced today the availability of Puppet Enterprise 3.2, which simplifies and accelerates IT organizations' ability to meet the demands of their business and their customers. Puppet Enterprise 3.2 includes new capabilities to help IT organizations provision new hardware and scale infrastructure faster than ever before - and realize the full value of Puppet Enterprise more quickly.
"As organizations struggle with rapidly increasing node counts and the time pressures of meeting customer demands, reducing cycle time is becoming more critical," said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. "Puppet Enterprise 3.2 addresses these challenges by significantly reducing the time it takes our customers to deliver new value, quickly and with confidence."
Key New Capabilities in Puppet Enterprise 3.2
Puppet Enterprise Supported Modules New in Puppet Enterprise 3.2 is the first set of planned supported modules to help IT teams get up and running more quickly, so they can realize the power of the software faster than ever before. The first set of Puppet Enterprise supported modules will help IT teams ensure time synchronization across nodes, set up database services, manage web servers and control Windows components. Hand-selected from more than 2,100 modules on the Puppet Forge, these pre-written, ready-to-run configurations have been rigorously tested and validated by Puppet Labs to ensure they perform reliably and with predictable results in the most demanding production environments. Puppet Enterprise supported modules can be found at forge.puppetlabs.com/supported.          
Simplified Agent Install
Puppet Enterprise 3.2 simplifies the task of deploying and upgrading agents by leveraging native OS packaging systems. With this new capability, the time required to deploy and upgrade puppet agents can be reduced several minutes per node, delivering substantial productivity gains in large environments.
Razor Tech Preview
Razor, a next-generation physical and virtual hardware provisioning solution, lets IT teams improve the speed of provisioning bare metal and scaling infrastructure to meet increased demand, enabled by Puppet Enterprise's rules-based approach. Razor includes the ability to automatically discover bare-metal hardware, dynamically configure OS and/or hypervisors and hand off resources to Puppet Enterprise for workload configuration via policy-based automation.
Razor is available as a Tech Preview in Puppet Enterprise 3.2. The Tech Preview enables customers who want to automate bare metal provisioning and accelerate deployment of compute resources to get early access to upcoming provisioning innovations. Plus, customers can provide feedback and influence future product development.
More New Features in Puppet Enterprise 3.2 ●      Oracle Solaris 11 support. Builds on Puppet Labs' commitment to support platforms critical to enterprise IT, joining a long list that includes Microsoft Windows, IBM, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM AIX, Debian, Ubuntu and others.
●      Ability to run agents as non-root. Enables users who don't have root access to realize productivity gains through automation, extending the capabilities of Puppet Enterprise beyond infrastructure teams to other groups such as app developers and database admins.
●      More than 300 fixes and improvements throughout the platform that improve usability and platform support.
Pricing and Availability
You can download Puppet Enterprise 3.2 today and try it out free for up to 10 nodes. Annual subscription options including license, support and maintenance start at $112 per node. Documentation for installing and using Puppet Enterprise can be found here.

CommVault Software Helps Protect Real-Time Analytics Environments with New Integration with SAP HANA Platform

CommVault today announced that its Simpana 10 software has achieved certified integration with the SAP HANA platform. CommVault’s Simpana software enables companies to more easily and comprehensively manage, protect and recover massive volumes of high-performance transactional and analytical data.
As the consumerization of IT and “Internet of Things” continue to transform how companies engage with their customers, Fortune 500 organizations need to adjust to rapidly changing business requirements to remain competitive. Managing massive data growth and constant change also requires IT organizations to focus on efficiency and ensuring data integrity, protection and availability of mission critical information. Avoiding downtime is key. SAP HANA is being used as an enterprise cornerstone providing streamlined analytics, planning, and predictive and sentiment assessments. Simpana 10 software delivers robust and comprehensive backup and recovery for environments running SAP HANA with the speed, ease of use and performance required in the fast-moving world of real-time, predictive analytics.
“CommVault continues to enable enterprises to increase the business value of their information as a result of our investments in solutions for SAP HANA and our relationship with SAP as a member of the SAP PartnerEdge® program for Application Development,” said David West, senior vice president, worldwide marketing and business development, CommVault. “Companies can speed up their data management by using CommVault software together with solutions based on SAP HANA.”
The new SAP-certified integration with the SAP HANA platform is especially timely because of increasing demand from CommVault customers for deeper protection of enterprise database applications from SAP. In addition, with CommVault’s newly available support for Fujitsu’s FlexFrame, an end-to-end operating platform for infrastructures running SAP solutions, customers can have more confidence that running on Fujitsu technology is highly scalable, fully protected and recoverable.
With its unique single-platform architecture, Simpana software can help companies meet business demands more efficiently and easily. Customers can anticipate reducing the costs, risks and complexities associated with protecting and accessing information for environments running SAP software.
CommVault Simpana 10 takes advantage of the distinctive capabilities of SAP HANA to deliver key benefits, including:

• Simpler administration through integration with SAP HANA studioand policy-based automation.
• Simplified end-to-end backup for a large-scale single-node and multi-node SAP HANA environments.
• Robust and comprehensive backup and recovery with automatic log backups, command line support and efficient job management and reporting.

Live Webinar: Virtualization Backup & Recovery Deep Dive

Virtualization backup is changing rapidly including new developments with hypervisors, features, cloud capabilities and more.  This webinar takes a deep dive into the world of virtualization backup and recovery to answer questions about different types of:

• Cloud backups
• Backup modes
• Replication,
• Deduplication
• Hypervisors
• Scalability issues,
• Agent and agentless backups,
• Recovery testing,
• Mixed virtual and physical environments 

WHEN?  March 19th, 2014 @ 1PM CDT
A deeper understanding of these commonly used terms and capabilities is necessary to help you avoid the pitfalls while ensuring best practices in your ever changing environment. Whether you have been virtualized for years, or are just starting out, you won’t want to miss this informative webinar delivered by the PHD Virtual Team.
WEBINAR BONUS: One lucky attendee of this webinar will be chosen as the winner of a $50 Amazon Gift Card. You must attend the webinar to win, and the sweepstakes is only open to US residents.
Click here to register.

AMD A10-7850K And A8-7600: Kaveri Gives Us A Taste Of HSA

We've spent the days following CES benchmarking two of AMD's new Kaveri-based APUs. Do the Steamroller x86 architecture, GCN graphics design, and HSA-oriented features impress, or do they come up short against Intel's value-oriented Haswell-based parts?

This year’s CES was my most insane to date. I showed up in Vegas two days earlier, stayed a day later, and managed to fit close to 50 different meetings into a schedule that started early in the morning and didn’t end until late at night. But by the end, I had a solid grasp on the technologies we’ll be seeing in 2014. Some of them are decidedly evolutionary. Others, like Oculus’ Crystal Cove prototype, will fundamentally change PC gaming for the better.

For AMD’s part, it spent CES talking about Kaveri—a design that, on paper, should be interesting stuff for enthusiasts. There are the Steamroller-based x86 cores, giving us a new processor architecture to talk about. This is also the first time AMD’s vaunted Graphics Core Next design finds its way into an APU. The company did a ton of work enabling Heterogeneous System Architecture features for better interplay between computing resources and software developers. And it’s using a new 28 nm manufacturing process from GlobalFoundries.

But although this week's introduction focused on the top-end 95 W A10-7850K, the real emphasis of Kaveri is down in the lower-power segments. Company representatives say engineers designed for the 35 to 45 W range, scaling as high as 95 and as low as 15 W. AMD wants to see APUs in desktops, notebooks, embedded environments, and servers. So, it took the middle road in order to better optimize for those targets. AMD also had to make some compromises on the manufacturing side, better balancing transistor density to enable a 512-shader Radeon graphics core, while ultimately sacrificing CPU speed.