Interested in Virtualization? Interested in Security? Then you need to listen to (and participate in) the virtualization security podcast. You can start right now by listening to archived podcasts (there was a great one this week) and put the next one on your calendar to make sure that you are able to watch it live. The TalkShoe URL is at: Virtualization Security Podcast

What happens if your Cisco Nexus 1000V VSM (virtual supervisor module) gets orphaned? Jason Nash over at Varrow Blogs posted this article that tells you what to do, step by step. Jason says that the key to this is an XML “extension key”. Read the full post at: How to Recover an Orphaned Nexus 1000V Switch

Unlike so many other companies, Hyper9 of Austin Texas (my home state) had an awesome 2009! Why?

• Record quarterly profits in the 4th quarter
• Named one of the 10 virtualization vendors to watch in 2010
• New Products - Virtual Environment Optimization Suite and Virtualization Mobile Manager
• Other accolades such as being named to Gartner’s Cool vendor in IT Operations and Virtualization for 2009

Besdies these achievements, I think that you will find the guys at Hyper9 great to work with.

Here is their latest press release:

Hyper9 Named One of 10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2010

AUSTIN, Texas – Jan. 20, 2010 – Despite a tough economy and increased competition
in the virtualization market, Hyper9, Inc. today announced the close of a banner year in
2009, capped off by a fourth quarter that was the company’s strongest quarter to-date.
Demonstrating positive momentum across all areas of the business, Hyper9 won
numerous industry accolades in 2009, most recently landing on CIO.com’s third-annual
list of intriguing innovators in virtualization management, 10 Virtualization Vendors to
Watch in 2010.

“Virtualization is no longer a buzzword that people just talk about,” said Bill Kennedy,
CEO of Hyper9. “In 2009, more enterprises embraced virtualization as an effective way
to optimize IT operations. As organizations continue to face the challenge of doing more
with less, virtualization will play a strategic role in enhancing the performance and agility
of key business initiatives.”
Hyper9 attributes its success to several key factors, including new product innovation, an
expanded customer base across numerous industries, strategic partnerships and
industry accolades. Recent accomplishments include:
Sales – 4Q09 was the company’s largest quarter to-date, with bookings fourtimes
larger than the previous quarter. New contracts came from both private and
public sectors across multiple verticals, including travel, sports and
entertainment, consumer goods and technology. Key customer wins included:
HomeAway, the National Football League, Major League Baseball and Whole
Foods, among others.
Product Innovation – Product innovation continued with the launch of Hyper9’s
Virtual Environment Optimization Suite, a second-generation virtualization
management solution that provides enhanced business insights to address the
growing demands of virtualized applications. The company also unveiled an
open-sourced version of its Virtualization Mobile Manager.
Strategic Partnerships – Alliances with key services providers extended
Hyper9’s reach in Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, while providing
expanded integration and service capabilities for customers. New partners
include: IGI, INX, IVOXY Consulting LLC, Softchoice, Righttrac and DNM.
Industry Accolades – Several industry analyst firms published reports
highlighting Hyper9’s virtualization innovation, including Gartner’s Cool Vendor in
IT Operations and Virtualization and Taneja Group’s whitepaper, Business-
Driven Virtualization: Optimizing Insight and Operational Efficiency in the
Dynamic Datacenter. Additionally, the company kicked off 2010 being named
One of Ten Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2010 by CIO.com, and being listed
as a featured vendor in Gartner’s report Virtualization is Bringing Together
Configuration and Performance Management.
Virtualization has quickly evolved into a strategic enabling technology now widely
deployed at all levels of the IT stack – from servers and desktops to networks, storage
and applications. Hyper9’s flagship product, Virtual Environment Optimization Suite,
helps organizations virtualize more resources, faster, to meet today’s sophisticated
business requirements.
About Hyper9, Inc.
Hyper9 is a privately-held company backed by Venrock, Matrix Partners, Silverton
Partners and Maples Investments. Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded in
2007 by enterprise systems management experts and virtualization visionaries. Since
then, Hyper9 has collaborated with virtualization administrators as well as systems and
virtualization management experts to develop a new breed of virtualization management
products that leverages Internet technologies like search, collaboration and social
networking. The end result is a product that helps administrators discover, organize and
make use of information in their virtual environment, yet is as easy to use as a consumer
application. For more information about Hyper9, visit www.hyper9.com.
###

You may have heard a few terms thrown around in the news lately. Terms like “vBlock” and VCE. So what do these mean and why should you care about them? I’ll answer both.

VCE = the VMware, Cisco, EMC (VCE) Coalition is a partnership between these 3 companies to work together to promote and accelerate the movement to cloud computing and fully virtualized environments.The VCE acronym has also been interpreted as “virtualization changes everything”. The vBlock is the building block offered by VCE to help companies make this move to virtualization easier and faster (discussed below). You should care about VCE because, with the resources they are devoting to this, their solutions may be in your datacenter just around the corner.

vBlock - EMC defined the vBlock as “a pre-architected and pre-qualified environment for virtualization at scale: storage, fabric, compute, hypervisor, management and security.” I think of it more as a “datacenter in a box” with all the pieces being from VMware, Cisco, and EMC. The vBlock is shipped to you and all ready to virtualize your infrastructure. Here is what it might look like:

And, here is a video about vBlocks…

One of the sharpest guys in the world of virtualization is Doug Halezman (who happens to work for Veeam). He’s known as @VMDoug on Twitter and I just finished watching this video where he covers what Veeam Business View is and how it fits into the new Veeam Monitor 4.5.

Watch this video to learn why Veeam Monitor was a finalist at VMworld 2009…

Starwind has some awesome new features in their latest versions. They offer things like sync-mirroring, replication, failover, and much more. In case you aren’t familiar with them, Starwind is one of the leaders of software-based SAN/NAS appliance solutions (you can download free evals at their website).

Also, MVP and vExpert, Greg Shields will be giving a free webinar on Wednesday December 2 covering Starwinds latest offerings! Greg is a great speaker and writer and I plan to listen in. You should too!

To attend Greg’s webinar, register here - Greg Shields - QuickStart / HA Storage for VMware

Duncan Epping of Yellow-Bricks.com and Thomas Bryant just released a new vSphere book:

vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide

This book is definitely on my Christmas list as Duncan is such a guru and I am a sucker for any quick reference guides!

I hope you will pick one up or put it on your Christmas list too!

You may structure your virtual infrastructure inventory very differently than the structure of your business. So how do you match up the business with the virtual infrastructure? You can do it for free with Veeam Business View. Here is what it looks like:

Learn about it and download it for FREE at- Veeam Business View

I have been interested in StarWind iSCSI for a while and they have a new version coming out. It’s called StarWind Enterprise HA 5.0.

It’s a technology that makes sure your data is available and online even in the event of a failure. it allows you to configure an Active-Active 2 Node storage cluster while ensuring a highly reliable and fault tolerant storage. Check out the video and see what you think:

I plan to eval the software myself as a potential replacement to the open-source OpenFiler (not that there is anything wrong with OF, but I am always looking for alternatives)

The guys over at XtraVirt.com announced a new free tool to help you monitor and manage VMware vCenter Alarms. You install this tool on your PC and you can monitor your vCenter alarms without having to install or run the vSphere / VI Client.

You can download vAlarm from XtraVirt here (free registration is required).