“I see you’re drinking 1%. Is that ’cause you think you’re fat? ‘Cause you’re not. You could be drinking whole if you wanted to.” – Napolean Dynamite
Yup I did it, I put a random quote there – It’s Friday right, laugh a little 🙂
VMware to acquire Virsto
VMware announced on Monday that they have signed an agreement to buy Virsto Software. After aquiring Nicera last year and gaining momentum into the Software Defined Networking world, they have now pulled in Virsto in efforts to push their Software Defined Storage initiatives. There’s a lot of Software Defined everything going on right now. I’m interested to see as to how VMware will pull Virsto into future releases of vSphere. If Nicera didn’t, this acquisition most certainly should, show that VMware’s vision of the datacenter goes far beyond simple server and desktop virtualization.
Zimbra client for Android now Horizon Mail
For all those Zimbra client Android users, your mail application is now called Horizon Mail. Also on Monday VMware has announced the availability of Horizon Mail on the Google Play store. IMO this is one of, if not the best mail client available for Android today. And guess what, you don’t have to connect to Zimbra Collaboration Suite to use it, it’s compatible with any Microsoft ActiveSync server (you know, those Exchange ones :)) If you are an Android user I would for sure check it out! Unless you are in Canada! Google Play is doing the infamous “not available in your country” 🙁
Speaking in Tech goes Topless
Not sure who the winner is on this one but the big bet between Greg Knieriemen and Chad Sakac has been decided and it appears that Greg is the big winner – I guess. The cast and crew from Speaking in Tech will be raffling off chances to win a spot in a Google hangout in which they will record a podcast live, with a topless Chad Sakac and some sort of mystery tattoo Either way, it’s all in good nature as proceeds will be going to the Wounded Warrior program so if topless geeks is your thing be sure to follow the SIT crew for more information (might as well subscribe to the podcast while you’re at it)…That’s really all I got to say about that 🙂
More releases from VMware
In another press release on Tuesday VMware announced a couple of new sku’s and products. The first being VMware vSphere with Operations Management. Nothing really new here, just bundling up some products together to help users get more bang for their buck. A pretty cool option for new customers as well as those who currently don’t have vCenter Operations. vCOPs is a very helpful intuitive application and a necessity for a virtual environment with plans to scale. The second release is a bit more interesting; VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced. This is the big brother of the product that was bundled into vSphere 5.1. Built on an EMC Avamar codebase, the advanced version of vSphere Data Protection adds the necessary backup features such as Application Awareness with support for MS SQL and Exchange Server. On top of that it can now scale up to 400 VMs per appliance and 8TB of deduped storage, whereas the ‘free’ version only supports 100 VMs and 2TB of storage.
Updates to PowerCLI
Also if you missed it VMware has released another update to PowerCLI 5.1. This post here outlines most of the new functionality including support for Virtual Distributed Switches!! What! Yes, finally, the fling has been baked into the product and you can now perform all of those networking based Cmdlet’s from the comfort of your console 🙂 Also provided with this release is support for vCloud Director 5.1 and Powershell v3. Go get it!
