August – 2009 – TechVirtuoso

Gearing up for VMworld, AMD demos 180 virtual servers on one physical server

August 28th, 2009 at 6:46 PM 2 Comments Shane Pitman

Tim Mueting, Product Marketing Manager at AMD, is gearing up for VMworld, the only event completely dedicated to virtualization, which will be held in San Francisco August 31st through September 3rd. In preparation for the event, he’s been spending some time in the labs at AMD, and recently took part in an incredible demo of AMD’s virtualization powerhouse, the Six-Core Opteron 8400 Series processor. Running in an HP DL785 G6 server with VMware ESX 4.0 software they successfully operated 180 virtual machines on one physical server.

The video of Tim in the labs at AMD can be viewed below, as well as on his blog, where you can also find more info on AMD at VMworld.

Intel posts better than expected third quarter results. Is the tech sector picking up?

August 28th, 2009 at 12:36 PM 2 Comments Shane Pitman

Intel_logo_3 Analysts and financiers have been ever so carefully watching quarterly reports from industry leaders for most of the year in an effort to gauge the economy and its effect on technology markets as a whole. The news has been a veritable see-saw of ups and downs, but for Intel at least, things appear to be on the rise, as their third quarter revenue and gross margin expectations have been raised a half a billion dollars from $8.5 billion to $9.0 billion, down from $10.2 billion reported for the third quarter in 2008.

While this news is positive, it doesn’t hold true across the board for the technology sector. Earlier this week Dell reported drops in quarterly sales and profits, but echoed the sentiments of competitor and world’s largest PC maker, Hewlett-Packard, that the technology markets seemed to be stabilizing.

(more…)

Cisco doubles density of 9000 series edge router

August 28th, 2009 at 12:19 PM No Comments Michael Stanclift

Cisco announced Tuesday that it would begin selling an enhanced version of its Cisco Aggregation Services Router 9000 Series, which will double the amount of line cards it can hold by introducing new single-slot cards.

The new configuration will allow 16×10 Gigabit Ethernet line cards, delivering over 100 Gbps of bandwidth. Cisco claims that this new configuration leads the industry in density and scalability, unlike some competitors that only can support 50G today.

The 9000 series router is typically used to deliver TV, video on demand, Internet video and other high bandwidth traffic. It is also used by wireless carriers to support their Internet infrastructure.

Mac OS X 10.6 released today

August 28th, 2009 at 9:56 AM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

Apple has released the latest version of their OS X operating system, version 10.6 or “Snow Leopard” for both desktops and servers. Current 10.5 users can upgrade to 10.6 for $29 per machine for the desktop or $499 for the server. 10.6 is only supported on Intel based Macs.

The desktop version features enhanced Exchange support, enabling programs like Mail, iCal and Address Book to communicate directly with our Microsoft Exchange 2007 servers. Both versions also feature enhanced support for x64 based computing, and have a x64 based kernel.

As we reported earlier in the week, 10.6 also includes built in malware scanning, something not mentioned anywhere on the Apple website.

The server version also includes a new SSL based VPN service, as well as new versions of iCal server and Address Book server, as well as updates to the built in Mail server.

Order: Client | Server

Update: Be sure to check the recently published 10.6 application incompatibility chart before upgrading. A few popular anti-virus programs as well as versions of Parallels Desktop are listed as restricted during install. Aperture 2.1.1. is also listed as unable to load after installing.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 RTM

August 27th, 2009 at 9:50 PM No Comments Shane Pitman

Microsoft has announced the release to manufacturing, RTM, of its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, and scheduled general availability via volume licensing for October 1. System Center Virtual Machine Manager is a unified, multi-vendor management solution for the virtualized datacenter that helps enable centralized administration of physical and virtual assets, increases server utilization, and provides dynamic resource optimization of virtual IT infrastructure.

The initial VMM 2008 release entered beta in the second quarter of 2008, roughly 8 months after the release of VMM 2007. The initial release of VMM 2008 introduced support for technologies like Hyper-V and VMware ESX. Now, a little over a year later, VMM 2008 R2 extends these capabilities to include:

Live Migration — for moving virtual machines between hosts with no downtime
Additional enhanced migration support for SAN migration in and out of clusters
Multiple virtual machines per LUN using Clustered Share Volumes
Hot add of virtual machine storage
Functionality to migrate storage for running VMs
iSCSI target and SAN-based migration across clusters
Template-based rapid provisioning
Maintenance mode to automate the evacuation of VMs off host machines,
Live Migration host compatibility checks

A full list of changes can be found on the What’s New in VMM 2008 R2 page. If you would like to learn more on the new features and capabilities of VMM2008 R2, Microsoft TechNet Technical Product Manager, Kenon Owens, will be hosting a session entitled ‘Technical Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2’ on Wednesday, September 9, at 10:00am Pacific.

Microsoft delivers Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2

August 27th, 2009 at 9:13 PM 1 Comment Don Smith

This, more then likely, last major update for Microsoft’s e-mail server comes a week after the final beta on Exchange Server 2010 and is said to provide the foundation for transitioning to the upcoming, final release of the 2010 version.

The Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 can be downloaded from this page for free and includes the following:

Enhanced Auditing – New Exchange auditing events and audit log repository enable Exchange administrators to more easily audit the activities occurring on their Exchange servers. It allows the right balance of granularity, performance, and easy access to audited events via a dedicated audit log repository.
Exchange Volume Snapshot Backup Functionality – A new backup plug-in has been added to the product that will enable customers to create Exchange backups when a backup is invoked through the Windows Server 2008 Backup tool.
Dynamic Active Directory Schema Update and Validation – The dynamic AD schema update and validation feature allows for future schema updates to be dynamic deployed as well as proactively preventing conflicts whenever a new property is added to the AD schema. Once this capability is deployed it will enable easier management of future schema updates and will prevent support issues when adding properties that don’t exist in the AD schema.
Public Folder Quota Management – SP2 enables a consistent way to manage quotas by improving the current PowerShell cmdlets to perform quota management tasks.
Centralized Organizational Settings – SP2 introduces new PowerShell option that enable centralized management of many of the Exchange organization settings.
Named Properties cmdlets – SP2 enables Exchange administrators to monitor their named property usage per database.
New User Interface for Managing Diagnostic Logging – SP2 enables Exchange administrators to easily configure and manage diagnostic logging from within the Exchange Management Console.

Internet Explorer 8 now on Windows Server Update Services

August 27th, 2009 at 12:17 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

Microsoft has begun pushing out Windows Internet Explorer 8 via Windows Server Update Services, as it announced back in June that it would start doing. The package is published as an update rollup, so WSUS administrators who have their systems set to automatically approve such packages will want to be careful after synchronizing if they’re not ready for a full IE8 deployment.

Only systems with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 will be able to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. Systems still running Windows 2000 will be stuck on Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer 8 was released to the general public in March 2009.

Apple OS X 10.6 to include anti-malware scanning

August 26th, 2009 at 12:43 PM 2 Comments Michael Stanclift

According to a report from The Mac Security Blog, a previously undocumented feature of Apple OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is that it includes a built-in anti-malware scanner. While there are few details on exactly how this works, ZDNet seems to think that it has entered into some type of agreement with a commercial anti-virus company, as they have confirmed that it is not using the open-source ClamAV engine.

Currently the Security page on the Apple website makes no mention of the feature directly, but it does highlight some of the other security measures in place for Snow Leopard, and anti-phishing technologies built into Safari. At the bottom of the page Apple does acknowledge that “since no system can be 100 percent immune from every threat, antivirus software may offer additional protection.”

snow_malware_blocker

OS X 10.6 will be shipping this Friday, August 28.

Microsoft highlights PowerPoint 2010 improvements

August 26th, 2009 at 12:28 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

If you thought Office 2010 was more than just ribbon improvements, you’re in for a surprise.

Microsoft has released, through the PowerPoint Team Blog, a new video and some details about some of the updates PowerPoint 2010 will be receiving. The team says this will be the biggest visual update to the product in the last 10 years. PowerPoint’s graphics engine has been rebuilt to take advantage of 3D accelerated graphics cards by using DirectX. Through hardware acceleration, they’re able to add new transition and animation effects. They’ve also added a new timelines UI, animations choreography and painter.

Another feature which was highlighted last week, is a new Protected View, which allows PowerPoint and other Office applications to run in a sandbox when downloading and opening presentations from the Internet. This allows potential malicious code to be isolated and contained within the file. More information on that feature can be found over at the Office 2010 Engineering Blog.

Older Posts »