Even though the Hyper-V drivers were available for a while now, they did not meet up the requirements of the kernel developers’ until few months back. And probably this was why the Red Hat developers were unwilling to add them in Linux. In addition to Microsoft’s Hyper-V, they have also updated the ESX virtualization solution’s drivers of VMware.

Some Improvements have been made to the SSSD (System Security Services Daemon), which are designed in order to improve the interoperability of the system with Active Directory services of Microsoft. Red Hat also states that they have made improvements to the performance of the Parallel network file system (pNFS), yet the support agreement still excludes the use of the pNFS.

The release of RHEL 6.4 is expected between late January and early February 2013.

To the surprise of many, these issues are not related to the much older machines that were upgraded to Windows 8. The principal analyst of Enderle Group, a research firm in Calif, Rob Enderle, stated that the majority of the applications of Windows 7 are running just well on Windows 8. Any user has the ability to install a copy of Windows 8 on their existing PC, and the brand new operating system would identify all the installed applications already installed by the user.

The problem arises for most of the IT shops when they try to move the existing applications from an older machine to a new PC that runs Windows 8, devoid of the requirement of reinstalling them.

Philip Moss, the managing partner of NTTX, an IT solutions provider based in the UK, stated that some of the Windows shops are using homebrewed application migration methods as “it’s never a one-box-fits-all approach”.

For the most part that is true; especially for the big companies that have hundreds of business-critical apps.

And many other administrators seem to turn into the application migration tools in order to get this job done.

Some of the IT shops that already upgraded to Windows 8 have reported running into some problems along the process, mainly with the process of migrating applications from the existing PCs into the new ones.

All businesses need reliable and secure data storage, yet not everyone can pay the heavy price of dedicated NAS (network attached storage) devices. So the best option for small and medium sized businesses is to go “virtual”.

So SoftNAS, the self titled virtual storage software for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon EC2, from Houston, Texas based SoftNAS is going to be very good news for all the small to medium sized business owners. The software makes it possible for companies to pass by the high price of dedicated NAS hardware.

The company described the SoftNAS platform as a cloud-based, software-deployed virtual storage application, which makes use of the hardware that companies already own in order to securely store their mission-critical data.

In addition to Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESXi and vSphere, SoftNAS also runs on cloud environments such as Amazon EC2, stated the company.

In a press conference, Bill Hood, the CEO of SoftNAS, stated that the company’s technology would help level the playing fields for small and medium sized businesses, and big IT organizations that has huge file storage requirements.

While the beta version of SoftNAS can be downloaded through their website right now, the public commercial version will hit the markets in February 2013.

The new platform has been developed as a method to offer the IT project managers with combined monitoring elements for the integrated stacks such as VCE Vblock, FlexPod and also the diverse underlying technologies like Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen, NetApp, EMC and, Cisco UCS, which are specifically developed to set up private clouds within enterprise IT environments. ScienceLogic has built the new platform focusing on cloud and data center management, especially to manage heterogeneous and dynamic computing environments.

The key feature updates in the new ScienceLogic product consist of:

* Dynamic visualization of the infrastructure components of Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, EMC, Xen, NetApp, and Cisco UCS concurrently and clustered logically according to function, customer or service.

* Automated correlation of the availability and health issues of the infrastructure across the hybrid or private cloud.

* Added support for Vblock and FlexPod stacks.

A free tool was released by Microsoft for beta testing back at the TechEd 2012, which would assist admins of vSphere convert their Windows VMs into Hyper-V. However, now there is a better alternative, V2V Easy Converter by 5nine.

5nine has been developing paid and free tools especially for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. Their Anti-Malware and v-Firewall got a good attention in many sessions at the TechEd, since it was the only firewall option for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V at that time, which used the extensible switch of new Hyper-V 3.0.

Features offered by 5nine’s new VM converter:

• * Converting vSphere virtual machines to Hyper-V while they are running.
• * Support for converting guest virtual machines with shared disks and big virtual disks
• * 10x faster than the Microsoft’s tool.

In addition to Windows guests, the 5nine’s tool also supports CentOS and Ubuntu.

The latest edition of the VM acceleration software, V-locity 4, optimizes writes and reads, which enables rapid applications and much more VMs (Virtual Machines) on one physical server, and do it without needing to add any extra storage hardware.

V-locity 4 can increase the performance of the VMs up to 50 percent without having to put up with the cost having to add additional or new storage hardware.

V-locity 4 also hugely improves the competence and efficiency of a Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtual platform by eliminating the application bottlenecks transparently and proactively at its source.

The benefits of using V-locity 4, which comes at a fraction of the cost:

• Increase the VM density per each physical server  - up to 50 percent
• Increase application and VM performance – up to 50 percent
• Improve latency on active data – up to 50 percent

The results of the new calculator are emphasized in a gloating post by Microsoft in its blog. The blog post shows that the vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus edition is 19% more costly than the Hyper-V 3.0 by Microsoft with System Center 2012, when operating 100 VMs (virtual machines) with iSCSI SAN. Some of the other configurations also seem to point out that VMware is more expensive than Hyper-V, like when running 150 virtual machines (6% more expensive than Hyper-V).

While this seems to be embarrassing for the VMware, the new development could be seen as just one of the tiny parts of backbiting, which keeps going on for a while. And Microsoft has also pointed out that even when the complete vCloud Suite’s taken to account, the figures are still off.

However, most of the researchers have stated that the real overall price for both platforms, Hyper-V and VMware, is heavily dependent on the type of virtualized workload and the IT shop’s size.

The user CAL is used by companies which require its employees to access the Microsoft servers or other products via a variety of devices, including laptops, smartphones and tablets. The increase of price will not have an effect on the device client access license, which is to be used for a single device to access a Microsoft server, in spite of the number of users on the device.

Although the customers of user CAL by Microsoft seems to be very frustrated due to the unexpected price hike, they are left with little choice except to take the Microsoft’s way and pay the new increased price.

Microsoft’s new improvements in the product positioning, has enabled it to pitch Hyper-V as a better substitute to VMware. The thing that the virtualization world is looking at is the fact that Microsoft deciding to offer many free features to its customers with Hyper-V, which they will have to pay for if they are going for VMware.

The new features come together with the Windows Server 2012, which is much more agile when it comes to moving the workloads around, and is also more flexible. The other improvements include combining several network adapters in order to handle load balancing, the ability of using direct attached storage and hefty memory support.

In addition Microsoft has made Hyper-V cheaper, making it immensely attractive to medium and small ventures.

Microsoft has announced the release of the beta edition of its BizTalk Server 2013. The BizTalk Server 2013 will add support for the Visual Studio 2012, Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012.

In addition, the company also promised the transaction integration features with the solutions from SAP, Oracle and Microsoft’s own SharePoint and Dynamics technologies. The developers will be able to leverage BizTalk Server 2013 via the Business Connectivity Services capabilities of SharePoint.

Although Microsoft previously stated that it is planning to publish the final product of BizTalk Server 2013 after 6 months from the release of Windows 8, or April, now they have stated that it would be released within the 2nd half of 2013 calendar. The ESB Toolkit will be integrated to BizTalk Server 2013.