Red Hat has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud in a bid to supercharge legacy infrastructure modernization and cloud migration.

As part of the deal, Red Hat OpenShift will now be integrated with the Google Cloud console, making life easier during onboarding and when managing workloads alongside Google's own native compute.

Similarly, Red Hat said OpenShift Virtualization is now available on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud, letting customers use traditional virtual machines (VMs) and modern containers in the same place.

“Red Hat’s hybrid cloud vision is built on consistency – the ability to run any workload, anywhere, with the same operational model," said Mike Barrett, vice president and general manager of Hybrid Cloud Platforms at Red Hat.

Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud Console

The integration of Red Hat OpenShift with Google Cloud console will help streamline workload optimization on the platform, the company said, and simplify onboarding processes.

"Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated users can natively validate Google Cloud prerequisites before transitioning to a guided cluster provisioning flow within the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console," the company noted.

The integration will also simplify billing and procurement, with pay-as-you-go billing through Google Cloud Marketplace that applies their Red Hat subscription against Google Cloud spend.

Beyond that, the deeper collaboration allows for native service integrations, with support for services including Google Cloud Secret Manager, Certificate Authority Service, and Workload Identity Federation.

“Our customers are constantly looking for ways to simplify their infrastructure and accelerate innovation without sacrificing performance," said Nirav Mehta, vice president of Product Management for Google Cloud Compute Platform at Google Cloud.

"Customers now have a smoother path, enabling them to run both virtualised and containerized workloads consistently on Google Cloud's global, secure, and performant infrastructure."

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is designed to help enterprises modernize legacy infrastructure at their own pace, using modern containers in a way that lets old and new work together.

The tool allows traditional VMs to work seamlessly with more modern containers and serverless workloads on a consistent Kubernetes platform, the company said, letting users have a single interface, toolset and operational practices across workloads.

Additional tools, such as a migration toolkit and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, also aim to make shifting to modern systems easier.

Beyond upgrades and migration, RedHat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud offers easy scaling and more predictable performance, Red Hat said.

"This extended collaboration with Google Cloud further empowers organisations with comprehensive cloud native capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, whether they need to accelerate application development or streamline migration to the cloud," said Barrett.

"Together, Red Hat and Google provide a clear, unified path for organizations to modernize their entire application portfolio, helping them manage both their traditional VMs and containerized applications on a single platform."

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The exodus from VMware after its acquisition by Broadcom may not have been the stampede that was predicted, but customers are working to reduce their footprint regardless.

Customers voiced serious concerns about changes to its operating model in the wake of the acquisition, including rises in licensing costs and the removal of a series of popular licenses and products altogether.

Indeed, research from Civo at the time found more than half (51.9%) of VMware customers said they were considering ditching services while 48.7% said they were actively exploring alternative providers.

Fresh research from CloudBolt now shows that while the shift away from VMware wasn't immediate, organizations are actively unwinding dependence in a measured, workload-by-workload process.

"Two years ago, the market was dominated by knee-jerk speculation and worst-case projections,” said CloudBolt CMO Mark Zembal.

“This latest study separates noise and speculation from reality. The fear has cooled, but the pressure hasn’t — and most teams are now making practical moves to build leverage and optionality — even if for some that includes the realization that a portion of their estate never moves off VMware.”

Some are sticking with VMware because things haven't turned out as badly as feared.

In 2024, 73% of customers expected VMware costs to more than double, CloudBolt found, yet only 5% of respondents to this most recent study have seen that happen.

The majority (88%) are still concerned about future price increases, however, and these worries are shaping decisions now as the real squeeze begins. Around 86% reported they are actively reducing their VMware footprint, but progress is slow as this is a time-consuming and laborious process.

“The process of unwinding a decade of process dependencies is taking 18 to 24 months," commented one survey respondent. "This sideways abstraction is far more complex than a standard cloud lift-and-shift, leading to a significant loss of confidence in our ability to exit quickly enough to avoid the next renewal cliff.”

VMware strategies are all over the place

Notably, more than half (56%) of respondents said they’ve changed their VMware strategy more than once since the takeover. Just over half (54%) are staying with VMware while actively reducing dependence in a phased approach.

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of migrated workloads are heading to public cloud IaaS, with Hyper-V/Azure Stack (38%) and SaaS replacements (34%) also popular components of the mix.

“Enterprises aren’t just asking what they want to do — they’re confronting what they can execute safely,” said Rod Squires, CEO of CloudBolt.

“The panic phase is over. Now it’s execution: reducing dependency, managing dual realities during transition, and building optionality before the next renewal decision tightens the window – and slams the budget.”

A number of big tech vendors have capitalized on the disruption over the last two years by offering VMware alternatives or services aimed at assessing their dependency, such as Pure Storage.

Outright alternatives touted by competitors include Proxmox VE, Microsoft Hyper-V, XCP-ng & Citrix Hypervisor, and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

Earlier this week, Cisco threw its name into the mix with a teaser for NFVIS-for-UC, a hypervisor for running its own applications.

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Ransomware gangs are renting cheap virtual machines (VMs) rather than building their own servers, with thousands effectively sharing the same infrastructure.

Analysis from Sophos found criminals are leasing VMs from bulletproof hosting (BPH) services like MasterRDP, exploiting legitimate ISPsystem infrastructure.

The advantage of this strategy is that it allows hackers to scale operations, remain anonymous, and keep activities running. Even if one server is taken down, hundreds just like it still exist.

Sophos uncovered the practice while investigating multiple WantToCry ransomware incidents. It found that the attacker servers all had the same autogenerated Windows hostnames, which kept popping up across incidents and multiple countries.

The team found more than 7,000 servers in the wild sharing a single hostname, many of which appeared to originate from Russia, Europe, the US, and even Iran and Israel.

"Based on CTU and third-party observations, the two hostnames used in the WantToCry ransomware activity (WIN-J9D866ESIJ2 and WIN-LIVFRVQFMKO) have been used in multiple incidents," the Sophos Counter Threat Unit Research Team said.

"This malicious activity includes cybercriminal attacks involving LockBit, Qilin, and BlackCat (also known as ALPHV) ransomware, and an additional deployment of NetSupport RAT."

This infrastructure is commonly used to support ransomware command and control (C2) servers, malware distribution, phishing campaigns, botnet management, and data exfiltration staging.

The practice appears to have been going on for at least five years, researchers noted.

Cheaper attacks, but easier to track

Crucially, the use of reused VM hostnames is enabling security researchers to track activities more effectively, with thousands of ISPsystem VMs sharing static hostnames, many linked to ransomware and malware campaigns.

Most affected VMs are hosted by a small set of providers, some of which are tied to state-sponsored hacker or cyber criminal activity.

"While there is likely to be some legitimate activity originating from virtual machines with these hostnames from these hosting providers, there is additional data that links the top two providers (Stark Industries Solutions Ltd and First Server Limited) to cybercriminal and Russian state-sponsored operations," the researchers said.

"CTU and third-party researchers have observed multiple state-sponsored and cybercriminal threat groups use Stark Industries Solutions Ltd infrastructure since its founding in February 2022, just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine."

Cyber crime infrastructure takedowns continue

In May last year, the European Council issued “restrictive measures” against Stark Industries Solutions and its operators for enabling various Russian state-sponsored and affiliated actors to conduct destabilizing activities.

Meanwhile, First Server Limited appears to be closely connected to Doppelganger, a Russian disinformation campaign whose operators and associated entities were sanctioned by the UK government in October 2024.

Sophos said it’s highly likely that MasterRDP is just one of many BPH providers leasing ISPsystem virtual machines hosted on abuse-tolerant infrastructure to customers with malicious intentions, including those engaged in ransomware operations and malware delivery.

"ISPsystem VMmanager is a legitimate commercial virtualization management platform widely used across the hosting industry, and the software itself is not malicious," researchers said.

"However, its low cost, low barrier to entry, and turnkey deployment capabilities make it attractive to cybercriminals while its widespread legitimate use provides operational cover among thousands of compliant deployments."

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A trade body representing European cloud providers is continuing its fight against Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.

Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has made a formal statement to the General Court of the European Union, outlining its concerns.

The complaint argues that by approving the merger, the European Commission (EC) enabled Broadcom to monetize VMware’s pre-existing dominance in server virtualization software.

Moreover, CISPE argued the EC ignored the known risks presented by the deal, allowing the firm to exploit its dominant position and massively increase pricing.

In a statement, CISPE pointed out that Broadcom’s CEO publicly committed to lifting VMware’s standalone earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) from between $4.7 and $5.0 billion to $8.5 billion within three years of closing.

This increase of 60 to 80% in a market growing at only 5% to 8% annually couldn't realistically come from organic growth or efficiencies, the trade body noted, but only from the aggressive monetization of VMware’s locked-in customer base through steep price rises and forced bundling.

CISPE is also unhappy about the way the deal is being financed, with Broadcom having raised $28.4 billion in new debt and assuming around $8 billion of VMware’s existing debt to fund the acquisition.

This, CISPE added, created a powerful financial incentive to extract cash rapidly from VMware’s installed base, reinforcing the provider’s market power and incentivizing aggressive pricing strategies.

CISPE claims EC ignored warnings

Notably, CISPE claims the EC ignored repeated warnings from customers and industry associations, failing to examine - or even mention - the risk that Broadcom would use VMware’s dominance to drive substantial price increases and tighten contractual lock-in.

Since the acquisition, prices have skyrocketed, in some cases by as much 1,500%.

Meanwhile, the trade body noted that multi-year subscriptions and bundling of VMware products have been forced on users - with significant cost consequences for European cloud providers and their customers.

“The Commission looked at this merger through half-closed eyes and declared it safe. By rubber stamping the deal, Brussels handed Broadcom a blank cheque to raise prices, lock-in and squeeze customers. Broadcom has, predictably cashed this cheque with interest," said Francisco Mingorence, secretary general of CISPE.

"This was a failure of oversight by the regulator with real world costs for Europe’s cloud sector, and every organization that depends upon it.”

The statement comes in response to the European Commission’s defence of its 2023 decision approving the $61 billion deal.

If CISPE succeeds in persuading the court to annul the acquisition, the Commission will be forced to re-examine it - creating significant legal uncertainty for Broadcom’s shareholders, creditors, customers, suppliers and investors, CISPE pointed out.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• Is a VMware exodus looming? Disgruntled customers are actively seeking alternative providers
• CISPE pushes EU Court to reexamine Broadcom's VMware acquisition
• Broadcom EMEA CTO claims the company has been able to solve most of its customer issues following VMware acquisition

Veeam and HPE have announced an expansion of their strategic partnership in a bid to streamline hybrid cloud operations and minimise risk across the enterprise.

Building on the pair’s initial partnership from earlier this year, the freshly expanded alliance will focus on new integrated solutions to help organizations better protect, recover, and leverage their data.

Additions include protection for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials software, as well as various integrations between HPE products and Veeam’s Data Platform.

“Trust, resilience, and availability are the new currency of business,” commented John Jester, Veeam’s chief revenue officer, in an announcement.

“Our strengthened partnership with HPE gives customers the agility and confidence to protect, recover, and leverage their data, wherever it resides.”

HPE Morpheus plugin

Among the fruits of the partnership is a new Veeam native integration plugin for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, which will offer hypervisor-based image-level backup for virtual machines (VMs) running on the HPE platform.

Currently in beta with expected general availability scheduled for early 2026, the pair said the addition will provide more robust protection for hybrid workloads.

HPE has also validated HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software container services as a Veeam-ready solution to improve protection for containerized workloads.

Veeam Data Platform integrations

The companies have also announced expanded integration between HPE solutions and the Veeam Data Platform.

Businesses will soon be able to deploy HPE Private Cloud Business Edition together with Veeam as a unified alternative to fragmented, do-it-yourself data protection.

Veeam will provide improved data portability and resilience between VMware and VM Essentials, the pair said, as well as accelerated deployment, streamlined support, and a “dramatically simplified experience.”

By leveraging the latest version of HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, Veeam’s Data Platform can also now achieve up to 60:1 data reduction, while reducing incremental backup limits and boosting restore speeds to help drive down cost of ownership.

Additional highlights

Elsewhere, Veeam has introduced NVMe support for HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 with new snapshot integrations for speedier backups and near-instant recovery for critical workloads.

New reference architectures designed to deliver end-to-end immutability across the wider Alletra portfolio are “expected soon.”

HPE and Veeam are also partnering on two new joint services: a Data Resilience and Security Posture workshop and a Disaster Recovery Capability Maturity Analysis offering.

The new additions leverage Veeam’s Data Resiliency Maturity Model (DRMM) to help organizations assess and strengthen their cyber resilience strategies.

“Today’s announcement demonstrates the continuous, deep alignment between HPE and Veeam in removing friction and risk from hybrid cloud and modern application environments,” said Patrick Osborne, senior vice president of hybrid cloud technology acceleration at HPE.

“Together, we’re delivering unmatched resiliency, operational simplicity, and innovation for our customers.”

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• HPE and Nvidia launch first EU AI factory lab in France
• HPE promises “cross pollinated" future for Aruba and Juniper
• Veeam snaps up DSPM specialist Securiti AI for $1.73 billion

Security experts have issued a warning over a new ransomware as a service (RaaS) gang that has been observed targeting VMware ESXi servers.  

Researchers at CrowdStrike said the new group, dubbed ‘MichaelKors’, was first identified operating in the wild in April this year. 

The group was observed providing affiliate groups with ransomware binaries specifically targeting Windows and ESXi/Linux systems. 

The discovery comes amid a period of rising concern over threat actors increasingly targeting ESXi interfaces due to a pervasive lack of security tools, researchers said. 

“More and more threat actors are recognizing that the lack of security tools, lack of adequate network segmentation of ESXi interfaces, and in-the-wild vulnerabilities for ESXi create a target-rich environment,” they said. 

CrowdStrike said it has “increasingly observed big game hunting threat actors” deploying Linux versions of ransomware tools to target VMware’s ESXi vSphere hypervisors. 

This trend escalated significantly in the first quarter of 2023, the company added.

“RaaS platforms including ALPHV, LockBit and Defray – tracked by CrowdStrike Intelligence as ALPHA SPIDER, BITWISE SPIDER and SPRITE SPIDER, respectively – have been leveraged to target ESXi,” researchers at the firm said. 

ESXi vulnerabilities

According to CrowdStrike, the emergence of an aggressive new RaaS group could pose significant risks for organizations leveraging VMware’s hypervisor. 

ESXi by design, researchers said, “does not support third-party agents or antivirus software and VMware states in its documentation that antivirus software is not required”. 

This inherent vulnerability, combined with the popularity of ESXi, makes it a “highly attractive target” for threat actors. 

ESXi is a Type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware that is used extensively by businesses worldwide to run and manage virtual machines (VMs).

“VMware virtual infrastructure products are highly attractive targets for attackers due to the predominance of this vendor in the virtualization field and because VMware’s product line is often a crucial component of an organization's IT infrastructure virtualization and management system,” researchers said. 

ESXIArgs concerns

Earlier this year, organizations globally scrambled to mitigate risks associated with ESXi after vulnerabilities were actively exploited by threat actors. 

In February, the French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-FR) issued a warning over the ESXiArgs ransomware campaign. 

Tracked as CVE-2021-21974, the security vulnerability was caused by a heap overflow issue in the OpenSLP service, and enabled an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code. 

Threat actors were able to target unpatched ESXi servers due to a two-year-old remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. 

Within days of the disclosure from CERT-FR, thousands of organizations spanning both the public and private sectors were impacted by the vulnerability. 

Data compiled by Censys and Shodan revealed that, within two days of the disclosure, more than 2,800 organizations had been affected and were experiencing an onslaught of attacks. 

Microsoft has announced that users running Macs equipped with M1 and M2 Apple silicon chips will now be able to install Windows 11 on apple hardware via Parallels Desktop version 18.

Windows 11 will be limited to the Arm versions of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise, delivered through a virtualised instance of the operating system (OS).

Parallels has been used by Mac owners for years to get virtualised instances of previous Windows OSs working on Apple hardware.

The virtualisation software has been supported on Apple silicon Macs since 2021, but Windows installs have always required unofficial workarounds. Microsoft officially authorised Windows 11 arm installs on Thursday.

Before Apple’s M1 chip was released, its Macs were powered by Intel CPUs and supported Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant - software that allowed users to partition their hard drives to install Windows 10 on the computer natively.

With this method, users could choose which OS to launch when booting. Apple has never suggested it will be bringing Boot Camp Assistant to Macs powered by its own chips.

Parallels was still a viable and popular option for those who wanted to run Windows on Macs, but didn’t want to dedicate substantial space on their hard drive for a disk-partitioned setup.

Windows 11 Arm on Mac: Limitations

One of the main drawbacks for users wanting to run Windows 11 on Mac is that the Arm version occasionally encounters issues where applications built for windows don’t run correctly.

This is because drivers for software need to be developed specifically for Windows 11 for Arm-based PCs, not just for Windows 11 generally.

This could potentially impact the smooth running of antivirus and antimalware products, printing software, other virtualisation software, and various peripherals.

Some software that ‘modifies the Windows experience’ may also encounter issues on Windows 11 Arm.

Microsoft said applications like input method editors (IMEs), assistive technologies, and cloud storage apps may fall under this category.

Applications that require an additional layer of virtualisation aren’t supported either. Windows Subsystem for Android and Windows Subsystem for Linux - software that allows Windows users to run Android and Linux apps from inside Windows respectively, will not work on the Parallels Windows experience.

For cyber security professionals, Windows Sandbox also won’t work, nor will Virtualisation-based Security (VBS).

Windows Fax and Scan won’t be available, and Microsoft also warned that some third-party antivirus software may not work, but assured Windows Security will protect the system from cyber security threats.

Users will still be able to run software that’s built for Windows machines but isn’t available on the Microsoft Store.

Windows 11 Arm on Mac: Licensing

Parallels said that “users can purchase Windows 11 through their normal Windows procurement process”.

A Windows 11 Pro key costs £219.99 directly from Microsoft and Windows 11 Enterprise licenses are purchased through Microsoft 365 Enterprise. It isn’t immediately clear how these licenses will work with Parallels.

“Licensing the Windows 11 operating system that runs on the Mac device is straightforward,” said Parallels in a blog post.

“The same volume licensing system that addresses enterprise licensing, such as Key Management Services, can be used to provide Pro or Enterprise licenses to the Windows 11 guest operating system.”

Windows 11 Arm on Mac: The Windows 365 Cloud PC alternative

Microsoft also highlighted how Mac users can access Windows 11 through their browser on any device with its Windows 365 Cloud PC service.

Business users can access a Windows 11 instance for as little as $31 (approximately £26) per user per month (with a maximum of 300 users).

The Basic plan offers access to a cloud-driven Windows instance with access to two virtual CPUs, 4GB RAM, and 128GB storage. Prices rise in the Standard and Premium tiers, which offer 8GB RAM and 16GB RAM respectively. The Premium tier also doubles the number of virtual CPUs to four.

Google's cloud division has announced its first Arm-based virtual machine (VM) that's set to feature within its Tau VM portfolio.

The move follows rivals AWS and Microsoft, which recently launched similar services with Graviton and Azure VMs, respectively.

Google Cloud's new VMs are now in preview with Arm-silicon set to replace the AMD Milan processors currently being used on the Tau line. The aim is to offer a better price-to-performance ratio.

"We are excited to extend the rich choices we already offer with Intel and AMD and enter the Arm ecosystem to provide our customers with even more choice and flexibility. We have support for a broad ecosystem of operating systems, databases, programming languages and other tools," Sachin Gupta, Google Cloud's VP and GM for infrastructure.

The chips will ship with pre-defined Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) with up to 48 vCPUs and each will have up to 4GB of memory. The VMs they power will offer up to 32 Gbps of networking bandwidth as well as support for a range of storage options within the Google Cloud ecosystem.

With these CPU specs, Google says the machines will be available for a wide range of workloads, such as web servers, containerised microservices, data-intensive applications, and much more.

"In recent years, we have come to rely on Arm-based servers to power our engineering activity at lower cost and higher performance compared to legacy environments," said Mark Galbraith, VP of productivity engineering at Arm. "The introduction of the Arm Neoverse N1-based T2A instance allows us to diversify our use of cloud compute on Arm-based hardware and leverage the Google Compute Engine to build the exact virtual machine types we need, with the convenience of Google Kubernetes Engine for containerised workloads."

In addition to the new VMs, Google will also support their use as part of its Kubernetes Engine, Dataflow Stream and batch processing service.

Security researchers have found a new credit card that uses a browser script to discover antivirus companies’ virtual machines (VM) and sandboxes to avoid detection.

Researchers at Malwarebytes instigated an investigation into a newly reported domain that could be related to Magecart. It found suspicious JavaScript loads alongside an image of payment methods.

They found an interesting function within this skimmer script that uses the WebGL JavaScript API to gather information about the user’s machine. This script checks to see if a user’s device is running a virtual machine.

It does this by detecting if the graphics card driver running on the operating system is a software renderer fallback from the hardware (GPU) renderer. In the script, the skimmer is checking for the presence of the words swiftshader, llvmpipe, and VirtualBox. Google Chrome uses SwiftShader while Firefox relies on llvmpipe as its renderer fallback.

“By performing this in-browser check, the threat actor can exclude researchers and sandboxes and only allow real victims to be targeted by the skimmer,” said Jérôme Segura, head of Threat Intelligence at Malwarebytes.

Researchers noticed if the machine passes the check, the personal data exfiltration process can take place normally. The skimmer scrapes several fields, including the customer’s name, address, email, phone number, and credit card data.

“It also collects any password (many online stores allow customers to register an account), the browser’s user-agent, and a unique user ID. The data is then encoded and exfiltrated to the same host via a single POST request,” said Segura.

While trying to detect if a machine is running a VM, which security researchers use to safely analyze malware, this malware looks for specific values indicating the presence of VMware or Virtual Box, two of the most popular pieces of virtualization software.

“For web threats, it is more rare to see detection of virtual machines via the browser. Typically threat actors are content with filtering targets based on geolocation and user-agent strings. But that feature does exist in modern browsers and can be quite effective,” said Segura.

Researchers added that it is not surprising to see criminals adopt such evasion techniques. “However, it shows that as we get better at detecting and reporting attacks, threat actors also evolve their code eventually. This is a natural trade-off that we must expect,” added Segura.

Google Cloud has announced that its Compute Engine N2 virtual machines (VMs) will be available with Intel's 10 nanometer Ice Lake Xeon processors.

There's no specific date for the release, but Google now joins a list of companies that includes Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle, which are set to use the latest generation of Xeon Scalable chips for their cloud services.

Google claims that using the 10nm chips in the N2 VMs will offer a 30% boost in price-performance compared to the previous generation of Xeons. The current version of N2 uses Intel's 14nm second-generation processors, known as Cascade Lake.

The new N2 VMs will be offered at the same price as the existing Cascade Lake N2, and their usage can be discounted using existing N2 committed use discounts, according to Google.

The news comes just two weeks before Google Cloud Next, the cloud giant's annual conference, where more details of the announcement will likely be shared. This is somewhat behind the rest of the industry, however, with Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle all confirming support shortly after Intel officially revealed Ice Lake in April.

Google's N2 will be available in preview early in the fourth quarter of 2021 in the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia, while availability in additional Google Cloud regions, in line with current N2 machine family regions, is planned for "the coming months", the tech giant said.

The Ice Lake-N2 VMs have already been used by select customers, such as e-commerce firm Shopify, which used them to increase performance and reduce response times for its applications.

"With Google Cloud's new N2-Ice Lake VMs, we were able to achieve improvements on all these areas," said Justin Reid, senior staff engineer at Shopify. "We were able to achieve over 10% performance improvements for one of our compute-intensive workloads by running on the new N2 Ice Lake VMs and also achieve lower request latency for our users as compared to previous generation N2 Cascade Lake VMs."

Red Hat has launched the latest in a series of migration toolkits to help customers move their infrastructure onto its OpenShift cloud environment.

The latest is a virtualization migration toolkit that helps transport virtual machines to its platform at scale, providing customers with an easy way to transfer their virtualized infrastructure.

Customers begin by entering the access credentials for their source and destination environments into the tool and mapping the source and destination infrastructure. The tool lets them filter the virtual machines on the source infrastructure by criteria, including names and folders, to find those serving specific applications. Customers then define a migration plan for the virtual machines.

Before setting the scripted migration in motion, customers can use a built-in migration analytics tool that spots potential migration issues with specific virtual machines and offers recommendations to solve migration problems.

OpenShift is the IBM-owned company's container orchestration system. It offers a layer of extra functionality over the commonly used Kubernetes container management platform, including more graphical user interface and security features.

Containers are an evolution of virtual machine technology that uses a single virtual server operating system to host a range of pared-down containers that share a single kernel. This makes containers smaller and more agile than virtual machines.

Although OpenShift targets containers, Red Hat launched OpenShift Virtualization technology in August 2020 to cover virtual machines. Based on the open source KubeVirt project, OpenShift Virtualization allows companies to run virtual machines, containers, and serverless applications alongside each other on the same platform.

This new migration toolkit joins several others from Red Hat, including its migration toolkit for applications, which handles large-scale application modernization and migration and handles platform upgrades and cloud deployments.

Red Hat also offers a migration toolkit for containers that migrates applications between container clusters, allowing customers to move container applications between OpenShift platforms.

StorageCraft's ShadowXafe is an all-round backup solution with a particular focus on VMware and Hyper-V environments. Hybrid backup comes as standard, with SMB shares and iSCSI targets supported as destinations alongside StorageCraft's own cloud services.

The software can be bought either on a subscription basis or as a one-off purchase; the price above is for a perpetual two-socket host licence covering unlimited VMs, although note that backing up physical systems costs extra. Cloud storage starts at around £120 per VM per year, with the premium service providing full disaster recovery.

ShadowXafe's various functions are all managed from StorageCraft's OneSystem portal. If you want to manage backups for remote workers, you can access this in the cloud or run it privately on a local server – the console is identical either way.

We found ShadowXafe very easy to install on our VMware vCenter host system. The deployment utility can be run from any Windows system, and it swiftly set up a new ShadowXafe VM for us. As we'd opted for a private portal, it loaded this as well. An agent needs to be installed on any desktop systems you want to protect, but that's not needed for VMs.

The OneSystem dashboard shows your system protection status at a glance, along with data usage, throughput and rates of change. It's also where you create your protection policies; for each one you can set a desired backup frequency along with hourly, daily, weekly and monthly snapshot retention requirements.

This is also where you assign a destination and set preferences for on-site backups and off-site replication. For local backups, we simply had to point the software to an SMB share on a Synology NAS appliance and opted to enable the optional compression and password-protection features for our archives.

Cloud storage will normally be provisioned by a StorageCraft partner, but for testing we used our MSP account to create our own cloud repository and then declare it to OneSystem. This worked perfectly, although we noticed that OneSystem can't report on cloud storage usage, so MSPs will need to keep an eye on this from their partner portal.

Once you've created a policy, you simply apply it to the desired systems: we provided details of our vCenter host to OneSystem and our protection started immediately. If you're running a hybrid strategy, ShadowXafe replicates your backups to the cloud once each local job has finished.

Recovery services are as versatile as you could ask for. You can browse available recovery points on both local and cloud repositories, and extract selected files and folders or restore an entire system as a new VM. This is impressively speedy thanks to StorageCraft's VirtualBoot tech, which lets you boot backed-up images without having to go through a full restoration or conversion process. On our Hyper-V host it brought a Windows Server 2019 VM back to life in just 242 seconds.

Cloud recovery is also available to MSPs, allowing you to view a customer's protected systems and recovery points from the partner portal. We selected a cloud-protected machine, chose a recovery point and had a cloud-hosted VM ready in 95 seconds.

While home workers can be protected using the cloud portal, busy branch offices may be better served by StorageCraft's OneXafe Solo unit – a mini-PC that functions as a remote ShadowXafe service node and can be managed from OneSystem.

Any SMB that's reliant on virtual environments will find StorageCraft's ShadowXafe a great choice. It's very easy to manage and provides a wealth of smart data-recovery features.

Lenovo and Nutanix have announced a new solution to help businesses address the growing demands of a remote workforce.

Called Lenovo TruScale for Hosted Desktops with Nutanix, the new solution combines the traditional, on-premises infrastructure with the simplicity and benefits of the cloud.

“Many organizations are modernizing their IT infrastructures to support the growing demands remote work continues to place on their IT systems,” said Kirk Skaugen, executive vice president of Lenovo Group.

“We are seeing a shift where customers are more interested in as-a-service models to help offset the investment associated with upgrading their IT systems quickly. Lenovo’s collaboration with Nutanix provides customers with a more secure, Hosted Desktop as-a-service solution that is easy to secure, deploy and manage with minimal up-front costs.”

A fully managed IT solution, the Lenovo-Nutanix Hosted Desktops service also includes devices, data center infrastructure, and management tools for a reduced up-front investment. Customers may choose to work with Lenovo’s services group to design their migration strategy, added Lenovo. What's more, Lenovo Managed Services makes infrastructure management convenient around the clock, saving IT administrators’ time.

Most notably, Lenovo TruScale for Hosted Desktops with Nutanix reduces operational costs by co-locating compute, storage, and virtualization onto one cluster. Built on ThinkAgile HX systems and Nutanix cloud platform software, the service can tackle increased workload and scale for maximum flexibility.

Fraser Health Authority was an early adopter of the Lenovo-Nutanix hosted desktop solution in response to COVID-19. Through using this service, the Fraser Health Authority raised its IT capabilities to boost patient care during a statewide lockdown.

“We see that remote connectivity is more than just a short-term response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s part of our long-term strategy to ensure we can deliver vital health services no matter what,” said Wesley Kampff, portfolio manager at Fraser Health Authority.

“To streamline maintenance and support, our preference was to engage a single vendor to deliver the workstations and data center solutions. We were confident that replacing our traditional three-tier architecture with the cutting-edge ThinkAgile HX hyperconverged platform, with Nutanix, would offer the performance, availability and scalability we wanted,” added Kampff.

After sixteen major releases, you might think there’s not much left to be added to Parallels Desktop – and for the vast majority of Mac users who are still using Intel CPUs, there isn’t. For them, this update to the popular virtualisation software tidies up a few bugs and adds support for the latest version of the Linux kernel, but that’s largely it. Overall it’s not even consequential enough to warrant a full ticking up of the version number.

Yet arguably, this is the most significant release of Parallels Desktop since it first appeared in 2006. Just as version one unlocked the potential of Apple’s then-recent switch to the Intel architecture, this one breaks new ground by allowing you to install and run Windows 10 on Apple Silicon.

It’s an enticing prospect, but not quite as straightforward as it sounds. It would be a huge technical challenge to get a standard x86 build of Windows 10 running on Apple’s ARM-based M1 chip, and Parallels doesn’t attempt it. Rather, the focus is on Microsoft’s own port of Windows 10 for ARM processors. With Parallels Desktop, you can now run Windows on ARM (WoA) in a VM on the M1 platform – and since the OS itself includes an Intel translation layer, it opens the door to running a huge range of Windows apps on the latest Macs.

The catch is that while Parallels Desktop may be ready for WoA, the OS itself is still a work in progress. Early versions have trickled out on a handful of lightweight laptops – notably Microsoft’s own Surface Pro X – but the only way to get an installer for your Mac is via the free Windows Insider programme, which means you can expect beta-quality code with no guarantees of performance or stability.

Parallels Desktop 16.5 review: Setup

Virtualisation can be a complicated business, but Parallels makes it pretty painless. Once you’ve installed the Parallels Desktop app on an M1-powered Mac, it prompts you to pick a guest OS, with helpful links to ready-to-roll images for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Debian 10.7, Fedora Workstation 33-1.2, and Kali Linux 2021.1. This is a nice spread of options to have, but we doubt many people are really buying Parallels to run Linux, especially inside a host OS that’s already built on UNIX.

Happily, installing Windows is almost as easy. Microsoft provides the WoA installer in the form of a VHDX image file, which you can simply drag onto the Parallels window and boot to kick off the installation. There’s nothing to customise on the OS side; accept the default settings in Parallels and you’ll be looking at a Windows 10 desktop in no more than ten minutes.

Parallels Desktop 16.5 review: Compatibility and features

Once you’ve got past the thrill of seeing Windows boot up on your Mac desktop, the experience is pretty anticlimactic. WoA looks and feels exactly like regular Windows 10, and it works like it too: initial releases were limited to running 32-bit code, but that restriction is now gone, and we were able to install and use a whole stack of industry-standard apps and tools with zero fuss, including Chrome, Office, Photoshop, 7-Zip and Zoom. We’re not saying it necessarily makes sense to run these apps in Parallels, but they illustrate how broadly Windows on ARM can stand in for the x86 edition.

Anything in the Microsoft Store ought to work too, since WoA fully implements the UWP framework, and any other required resources should come bundled into the installation package. In fact, when we tried to set up the Dropbox client, the regular installer detected a platform error and smartly directed me to install the Store edition instead, which worked perfectly.

As usual with VMs, Windows appears as a desktop in a window, but with a click you can enable Parallels’ signature Coherence mode. This lets Windows applications float freely among your Mac windows, and puts their icons in the Dock alongside native apps. Your personal folders in Windows are mapped directly to their Mac equivalents, helping to smooth out cross-platform workflows, and you can even copy and paste text and images between Windows apps and Mac ones.

This being a virtual machine, you can also take snapshots of your Windows system whenever you like, and roll back to previous states at will. This could be useful if you just need to use Windows from time to time to accomplish a specific task, and don’t want to worry about unwanted cruft or malware accumulating over time.

Parallels Desktop 16.5 review: Hitches and hurdles

Parallels makes a good go of integrating Windows apps into the Mac environment, but some dissonance is unavoidable. For example, apps from different platforms have their window controls at opposite corners, and the modifier keys on the standard Mac keyboard are in a different order to Windows, which tends to mess with our brain. We don’t see that there’s a better solution, but it’s not ideal.

And while WoA works remarkably well with modern apps, older software is more hit and miss. For example, we normally use an ageing edition of MAGIX Sound Forge 11 for our everyday audio editing tasks; this works perfectly well on our “real” Windows 10 desktop, but it refused to install in WoA, complaining that a DLL couldn’t be registered. We tried to roll back further to version 9, but this demanded the .NET Framework 2.0, and our attempts to install it were rewarded only with error codes.

The connecting together of the Mac and Windows file systems can confuse some apps too. Macrium Reflect couldn’t handle the fact that our Desktop folder wasn’t located on a real hard disk and crashed at the very start of the installation. On that note, anything that requires bespoke hardware drivers is likely to struggle too.

This sort of thing matters, because one of the most common use cases for virtualisation is to keep alive legacy software that’s not supported on the new OS. It’s not at all surprising if apps from the XP or Windows 7 era don’t work on this whole new architecture, but it is a shame.

And don’t forget that the OS is, at present, an Insider release. This means it receives large, frequent updates, sometimes on a daily basis. It’s possible that new builds will progressively make more apps and devices work in WoA, but they may also unpredictably change and even break things.

Parallels Desktop 16.5 review: Performance

By default, Parallels Desktop allocates two of the M1’s eight processor cores to your virtual WoA machine, along with 3GB of RAM. You can raise it to a maximum of four CPU cores and 8GB of RAM – or higher if you’ve sprung for a Pro subscription – but doing so inevitably leaves fewer resources for macOS. However you slice it, it’s not exactly a recipe for peak performance.

On top of that, most of the programs you’re currently likely to want to run in Windows are going to have to go through Intel emulation, and this drags performance down enormously. We used Parallels Desktop to run our standard benchmark suite on WoA on an 8GB Mac Mini, and while we were pleased to see that the tools installed and ran without a hiccup, it was hard to be delighted about the eventual score of just 23 – a long way off the 223 achieved by the same hardware using ARM-native video tools in macOS. Even if you give Windows four cores to play with, performance only scales linearly to an overall score of 45.

Still, this doesn’t make WoA unusable at all. Performance is about on par with a lightweight Windows laptop from 2015, and while we wouldn’t want to do everything in that environment, it’s perfectly fine for the odd individual task. Since the Windows system itself is running natively on ARM, the whole caboodle feels more responsive than you’d expect anyway – and there’s surely scope to improve translation performance in future builds.

Parallels Desktop 16.5 review: Verdict

Barely six months after the M1 processor was unveiled to the world, Parallels Desktop 16.5 gives it a whole new dimension of potential. For that, it feels absurdly cheap, with the standard edition costing a flat £80. Alternatively, you can sign up for a rolling subscription, but at £70 per year it’s not an obviously great deal. As we’ve mentioned, there’s also a subscription-only Pro edition for £80 a year, which lets you virtualise up to 32 cores and 128GB of RAM as well as adding some advanced developer features, and a business edition at the same price which focuses on centralised deployment and management.

The fly in the ointment is WoA itself. It’s expressly a work-in-progress OS with unpredictable app compatibility – and so far Microsoft hasn’t made any real commitment to its future. In two years’ time it could be a thriving companion to the Intel build, or it could be an abandoned experiment.

For now, therefore, we can say only that Parallels Desktop 16.5 is an impressive proof of concept, and a fun and useful tool for tinkerers. Whether it becomes a true landmark release is down to Microsoft. Parallels deserves praise for what it’s put together, but we’d recommend you wait for the OS to at least reach a first stable public release before you invest in the idea of Windows on Apple Silicon.

Google Cloud has announced a new tool for managing large fleets of virtual machines (VMs).

The VM Manager is a suite of infrastructure management tools which aims to simplify the process of ensuring the security, compliance, and observability of large VM fleets as businesses scale their operations.

The suite supports Windows and Linux operating system environments and comprises a single dashboard to allow real-time tracking of inventory.

It offers services such as configuration management and patch management, with the latter including patch compliance reporting, which provides insights on the patch status of users’ VMs across Windows and Linux distributions. It also includes patch deployment, which automates the OS and software patch update process, the company explained in a blog post on Thursday.

Lastly, VM Manager also includes an inventory management service which is integrated with Google’s Cloud Asset Inventory product, in order to simplify the analysis of customers’ Google Cloud fleet data.

Announcing the new management tool, product manager Ravi Kiran Chintalapudi and product marketing manager Senanu Aggor said that the new suite “reduces complexity, improves security and compliance reporting, and simplifies monitoring resources in a large cloud environment”.

“By taking advantage of automated tools to keep systems up-to-date, reduce the risk of downtime, and improve productivity of internal users, early VM Manager users tell us that it allows their IT administrators to focus on other business critical tasks,” they added.

VM Manager is available for testing in the customers’ environment using a free tier which provides a monthly usage of 100 VMs per Cloud Billing account. Once the free tier is exhausted, for all VMs that have an active OS Config agent, each active agent is charged at a rate of $0.003 (approximately £0,002) per hour per VM.

IT Pro has contacted Google Cloud about the availability of VM Manager in the UK and will update this article when more information becomes available.

Last year, the company announced Confidential VMs – Google Cloud’s first product in its new confidential computing portfolio which allows companies to process sensitive data while keeping it encrypted in memory. The feature is an evolution of its Shielded VMs, a tool launched in 2018 that companies could deploy to strip out most of the potentially vulnerable startup processes that trigger when attempting to create a new environment.

Until then, like many cloud providers, Google offered encryption on data at rest and while in transit, requiring that data to be decrypted before it could be processed.

Confidential VMs will be the first product in Google Cloud’s new confidential computing portfolio, the company has revealed, allowing companies to process sensitive data while keeping it encrypted in memory.

The announcement aims to capitalise on a growing interest in confidential computing, a field that promises to revolutionise cloud computing by providing what is in effect permanent uptime on data encryption.

Until now, like many cloud providers, Google offered encryption on data at rest and while in transit, requiring that data to be decrypted before it could be processed. Through Confidential VMs, Google customers encrypt data while it is being processed inside a virtual machine.

Google’s new feature is an evolution of its Shielded VMs, a tool launched in 2018 that companies could deploy to strip out most of the potentially vulnerable startup processes that trigger when attempting to create a new environment. This is in addition to a few layers of extra protection against external attacks, and monitoring systems that check for unexpected changes to data.

These added layers of security were required given that data is normally decrypted in order to be processed inside the VM – something that not only creates added risk from external attacks, but also forces companies to deploy strict access controls to ensure only the right employees handle the data.

The Confidential VMs feature, available as a beta today, attempts to solve these issues by allowing customers to encrypt their data in memory, meaning encryption can be maintained while it is being used, indexed, queried, or trained on.

This promises to have profound implications for those industries that process highly sensitive or heavily regulated data, such as those in finance and health, or government agencies. Companies in these sectors, which are usually forced to keep most of their data processing in their own private networks, now have a public cloud option, Google claims.

“These companies want to adopt the latest cloud technologies, but strict requirements for data privacy or compliance are often barriers,” Sunil Potti, general manager and VP of Security at Google Cloud. “Confidential VMs… will help us better serve customers in these industries, so they can securely take advantage of the innovation of the cloud while also simplifying security operations.”

Providing confidential computing is largely a question of hardware, something that many vendors have grappled with over the past few years. In this case, Google has turned to AMD and its second-generation EPYC CPUs – these now support a ‘Secure Encrypted Virtualisation (SEV)’ feature, which allows a VM to run with encrypted memory using a unique, non-exportable, key.

“Our deep partnership with Google Cloud on its Confidential VMs solution helps ensure that customers can secure their data and achieve performance when adopting this transformational technology,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Server Business Unit.

“Confidential VMs offer high performance for the most demanding computational tasks all while keeping VM memory encrypted with a dedicated per-VM instance key that is generated and managed by our hardware.”

The company has also confirmed that any customers already running workloads in a VM on Google Cloud Platform will be able to shift these over to a Confidential VM using a checkbox.

Google has also said that VM memory encryption will not interfere with workload output, promising that the performance of Confidential VMs will be on-par with that of non-confidential VMs.

Setting up and running a Windows 7 emulator for Windows 10 can be a rather complicated task. 

Microsoft is notorious for its lack of nostalgia or preserving well-loved systems that many have grown attached to over the years. 

Combine this with the fact that many IT professionals can’t bear to give up Windows 7, one of the most popular operating systems of all time, and this has led some to seek novel ways of sticking with the long-lasting system. 

Luckily, there are ways available to help modernize antiquated systems while still retaining their traditional charm. Virtualization, which involves making a digital copy of Windows 7 that runs inside modern operating systems, is an ideal way to keep your old favorite while enjoying the security features of a newer OS. 

In this article, we’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to set up and run a Windows 7 emulator for Windows 10. 

How to set up a Windows 7 emulator for Windows 10

To do this, you'll need to set up a VMware account. However, like the software, this is free for personal, non-commercial use. 

Also, in our case, we started with a PC that has both Windows 7 and Windows 10 installed on it, but the aim is to virtualize only Windows 7. That needs special consideration, as we’ll explain later.

We’re running it on the machine we want to convert, but the software can also target a remote machine across your LAN – as long as you know the IP address of the computer whose setup you want to clone. 

For our purposes, click the radio button beside “Powered on”, then click the menu beside “Select source type” and pick “This local machine” from the list. Once this is done, you can click Next.

You might also want to change the name of the VM underneath “Virtual machine details”. Initially, this will be populated using the name of your machine as set up in Windows, but for clarity, you might want to set it to something such as “Old Windows 7 system”.

By default, it assumes that you want to include all of the drives attached to your PC in your new virtual system. You can deselect any drives you don’t want or recognize, but make sure that at least the C: drive and any active drives, colored yellow and red, remain selected. 

If you deselect a drive that’s crucial to the running of the VM you’ll be asked to confirm the action.

Make sure it’s selected here, then click “Play virtual machine” in the main part of the window to boot it. Your host environment – Windows 10 – will retain control of the keyboard and mouse; press Ctrl+G to switch these to the VM.

Having followed the steps listed above, Windows 7 should now work exactly as it did when running natively. However, you should be aware that connecting an external drive or USB flash drive will bring up a prompt. 

This will ask you to choose to have your emulation mount within the host operating system (so Windows 10) or the guest OS (Windows 7). You'll need to click Player on the Workstation Player toolbar to enable Unity mode, which will allow you to run Windows 7 applications as though they were installed under Windows 10. 

Virtualization is a fantastic process for salvaging legacy tech, reducing hardware costs, and saving floor space in your office or data center. Click here for more virtualization guides, tutorials, and features.

Cloud computing has swept the world, but it wouldn't be possible without virtualisation and virtual machines (VMs). They've revolutionised both server computing and some desktop computing, too. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to create a virtual machine in the cloud.

VMs evolved because of a problem that sysadmins faced in server environments: They didn't want to run too many apps alongside each other on a single server because these can interfere with each other, causing security issues or performance problems. In the worst case, an app that crashes a server could bring down the other apps sharing the box.

So admins would run one or two apps on a single physical box. That involved them paying for resources they didn't need, including the space and power taken up by each server. A single app rarely used all that server's memory or CPU power, so they sat idle a lot. Managing lots of physical boxes is also cumbersome.

VMs solved many of those problems. They recreate regular hardware machines in software, presenting CPU power, RAM, and other hardware assets as an operating system (OS) would normally see them, but filtered through another piece of software called a hypervisor.

When you install an OS in a VM, you're actually installing it on the hypervisor, which also supports many other VMs running separate OSs. When an OS accesses computing power, disk, or memory, it accesses the real, physical hardware assets but via the hypervisor. The hypervisor coordinates everything so that every OS running in a VM gets its own bit of that resource. The VMs also don't clash with each other when running on the same physical box.

There are two different kinds of hypervisors. A type one hypervisor runs directly on the underlying physical box, replacing the operating system. This is commonly used in server configurations. There are also type two hypervisors, which you install on top of an existing OS. These are common on desktop machines. Examples include Parallels and VMware Workstation, which let you install extra operating systems on top of macOS, Windows, and Linux.

You can run a VM on your own server, but admins are increasingly running them on cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure instead. That way you don't even need your own server hardware. Let's set one up on Azure.

You can set up a VM via the web interface, but doing it via the command line gives you more flexibility. You can access the command line via the cloud shell, which is a browser-based command line interface in your Azure account. Access the cursor icon just to the right of the search bar on your Azure dashboard. That will serve most use cases, but you can also access it from PowerShell, which is what we'll do here because this allows us to access the VM using Remote Desktop Services later.

You'll need a copy of PowerShell installed, along with an Azure account that includes a storage account - this is a sub-account needed to store your data in Azure.

To control Azure from PowerShell, you'll need to install the Azure module for the current user. Run PowerShell as administrator, and type:

Then, we'll log into Azure from PowerShell:

When run in PowerShell on Windows, this will open a login box for you to sign in using your Azure account. After that, you'll see PowerShell list your account in PowerShell, including your Tenant ID.

In Azure, virtual machines exist in a resource group. This is a group of assets that you can grant access to. You might set these up on a per-project or a per-department basis.

We'll begin by creating one:

It'll tell you that it's succeeded (type get-AZResource to find out more about it), but the resource group doesn't have anything in it yet. Let's change that by creating a VM.

We'll start by creating administrative login credentials for the VM. We'll assign these to a variable called $tempcredentials:

Enter that to get a credentials prompt and enter the login details you'll use for that machine.

Now, here's the code to copy and paste:

We're assigning the configuration parameters for the VM to the $vmDetails variable. The first few properties, ResourceGroupName, Name, and Location are self-explanatory.

The virtual network (VNet) is a software-defined network that the VM will use to communicate with other VMs and services in that Azure subscription. VNets have subnets to help separate resource traffic, so that your sales department's VMs can't snoop on your technical development team's traffic, for example. Network security groups provide an extra layer of security by letting you block or allow inbound or outbound traffic from a resource.

Credential gives the VM the temporary credentials that we created, while the PublicIPAddress name maps the VM to an IP address in Azure. OpenPorts lets you expose network ports to other resources on that subnet so that they can access services running on your VM.

Now you've created its parameters, you can create a VM and assign it to a variable called $testVM using this code:

Once this has finished, you can wave hello at your VM by typing get-azvm to list your virtual machines. Pipe this into the format list command (fl) to get more information about those machines using get-azvm | fl.

Because you put this into a variable when you created it, you can easily list the VM's properties by just typing the variable:

This doesn't tell you what the virtual machine's IP address is, though. Get that by typing:

Copy the IP address this returns, and we'll use it to access the machine. This is something that you can do from your local PowerShell instance but not from the Cloud Shell, because it invokes Remote Desktop Services on your local machine. Type this into PowerShell, replacing <IP> with the IP address you copied:

The VM takes a minute or two to go through its setup process, and then you're logged in.

We can manipulate the VM by stopping it:

After a few seconds (the cloud is scalable and flexible but it isn't instant), the VM will stop. Once it's reported success, try starting it again:

Now let's tidy up after ourselves. Removing virtual machines themselves is easy enough but it's more difficult to remove all the other assets that are created along with them. For our purposes, the easiest way is to just delete the whole resource group. Type:

This can take a while to delete, but you can check on its status by typing:

There are many things you can do with VMs, such as moving them between resource groups, resizing them to fit your operating requirements, and querying their runtime conditions, all of which you can do via PowerShell. They're a great resource for everyone from enterprises to enthusiasts who want to set up simple projects without investing in a server.

VMware has announced the launch of a number of new Kubernetes-focused products, including the latest version of its vSphere platform.

Most of the new products fall under the company’s Tanzu portfolio, unveiled at last year’s VMworld.

Tanzu represents VMware’s efforts to integrate Kubernetes container management - which the company is betting big on as the next significant step in enterprise applications - with its existing VM management tools.

Three new Tanzu products are being introduced; first up, Tanzu Mission Control, a tool previewed as part of last year’s announcement which is designed to help enterprises manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across a range of environments, while centralising key functions like security, configuration management and data protection. It also allows businesses to hook VMware’s other management and monitoring tools (such as its Wavefront and CloudHealth products) into its Kubernetes workloads.

Following on from this is VMware’s new Tanzu Application Catalogue, which represents a way for customers to integrate open source components and tools from Bitnami's catalogue into their applications in a safe and secure way, by providing a curated repository of open source products that have been verified as stable and vulnerability-free.

For organisations at the start of their container projects, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is being introduced as a ubiquitous container runtime, combining open source Kubernetes tooling, container images and registry and lifecycle management. Described by VMware as an evolution of its strategy with Enterprise PKS (which will remain as a separate offering), the aim is to make it easier to quickly start using Kubernetes in a consistent way across multiple environments, alongside existing VMware deployments.

Speaking of which, a new version of VMware’s flagship vSphere suite is also being introduced, and it includes a range of Kubernetes-friendly features. Previously teased as Project Pacific, vSphere 7 has been ‘fundamentally modernised’, according to VMware, and re-architected to put Kubernetes management at its heart.

VMs are not being forgotten about, of course - the goal is to enable VMware admins to easily run containers and VMs concurrently. vSphere 7 has also been optimised for simplified lifecycle management, allowing enterprises to manage hundreds or thousands of instances in less time, with fewer tools, including introducing REST and JSON-based APIs for automating lifecycle management tasks.

vSphere 7 also introduces greater security through remote attestation, where a trusted host is used to verify the integrity of other hosts within the network. Elsewhere, vMotion has been improved to allow for easier migration of large VMs with minimal disruption and the Distributed Resource Scheduler now runs every minute as opposed to every five minutes.

GPU virtualisation is now on offer too, thanks to the company’s recent acquisition Bitfusion, which is being touted as a particular benefit for those looking to run workloads using machine learning.

The aforementioned tools are also being rolled into VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu, which includes vSAN 7 for managing virtualised storage.

“Kubernetes is still hard,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said. “We're democratising Kubernetes into the industry, with the most powerful platform, the most powerful infrastructure community across multiple clouds; This for us is an important day, not just for us, but for our customers, and for the industry.”

VMware Tanzu Application Catalog, Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid are available now, while VMware Cloud Foundation 4 and VMware vSphere 7 are scheduled to be available by the start of May.

I think it's fairly safe to say that I picked a good year to visit VMworld US for the first time. While I've been to its European equivalent, this was the first year I went to the main event and it was something of a doozy.

Not only did we get a nice bit of pre-conference sizzle with the news that VMware is acquiring Carbon Black and Pivotal, but the entire show was also a festival of product updates and previews. More than anything else, it felt like a statement of intent from Gelsinger and his comrades, setting out the company's stall for the future.

The big focus of the show and of VMware's main announcements was Kubernetes. The company is betting big on the container technology as the future of application development, with plans to weave it into vSphere with Project Pacific, and use Pivotal and Bitnami's technology to make VMware even more attractive to Kubernetes developers. Virtually every main-stage announcement featured Kubernetes in some capacity, and VMware veteran Ray O'Farrell is being put in charge of getting that side of the business (including the forthcoming Pivotal integrations) running smoothly.

All the new Kubernetes-based products Project Pacific, Tanzu and the like are still in tech preview with no release date in sight and, honestly, that's probably a good thing. I'm really not sure how many of VMware's customers are ready to start deploying containers at scale. Mind you, making Kubernetes management a core part of VMware's capabilities may well go a long way towards encouraging adoption.

It feels like a future-proofing measure more than anything else. Gelsinger is a sharp guy and when he says that containers are the future, he's not wrong. It may not have reached mass adoption yet, but it's growing fast, which isn't surprising given the technology's proven benefits. This isn't a pivot though; VMs aren't going anywhere, as Gelsinger himself has been quick to point out. He notes that all the companies operating Kubernetes at scale Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera operate them inside VMs. More to the point, it'll be a long time yet before Kubernetes gets anywhere close to rivalling VMs in terms of the number of production workloads.

Between the new possibilities promised by Project Pacific, the increasing focus on multi-cloud infrastructures and the forthcoming integration of Carbon Black's technology into the product line, VMware looks like a company at the absolute top of its game, cementing its dominance of the virtualisation market and paving the way for that dominance to continue long into the future. If Gelsinger, O'Farrell and the rest of the team can pull off everything they've promised, then customers and admins have a lot to look forward to.

Last week, VMware threw the tech industry a curveball when CEO Pat Gelsinger announced that not only would it be acquiring Pivotal - as had been announced the previous week - it was also snapping up security firm Carbon Black.

While the deal isn't expected to close until the end of January next year, the company has devoted a substantial chunk of this year's VMworld conference to discuss the acquisition, and what it means for the future of both companies.

For Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley, the acquisition presents a huge opportunity for the company to expand its capabilities, and he sees a number of areas where being part of VMware can help it protect its customers in new ways.

"Pending close, I think there's a number of opportunities," he tells IT Pro. "The biggest one's end-user computing. Management and security go hand in hand, so end-user computing is a huge opportunity for us."

A substantial part of this is integration with Workspace ONE, VMware's desktop virtualisation product. It's one of four key integrations with its existing portfolio that VMware has already identified as priorities once the deal goes through. Not only does it make sense from a customer use-case perspective, VMware COO Sanjay Poonen pointed out that many Workspace ONE customers are also Carbon Black customers, a fact which supposedly influenced the decision to acquire the company.

While both VMware and Carbon Black executives have indicated that the company intends to keep the Carbon Black brand alive once the deal closes, and there are no immediate plans to shutter any of its services, Gelsinger told IT Pro that the goal is eventually to weave Carbon Black's technology into VMware's platform rather than offering it via standalone applications.

"The plans are to bring these integrated solutions together," he says. "You could imagine you're going to buy your Workspace ONE with Carbon Black. And these just end up being features. The thing is, we don't want customers to be buying point products for point use cases' buy a platform that gives you lots of those benefits."

"Customers today will have a Tanium agent, Right? And they'll have a McAfee agent, and they'll have a Qualys agent. They'll also have a Workspace ONE agent for management. So I've got four agents on the client. I have customers literally, who have 17 agents on every PC. 17 agents. What are you talking about? One was our goal, as we collapse all of those use cases into one underlying agent."

Don't wait, integrate

Being owned by VMware will make Carbon Black a de facto part of the Dell Technologies family, which also opens up other avenues for expanding its endpoint protection.

"Obviously, the Dell family is another capability, because Dell increasingly is providing security to its customers, as part of the laptops and other hardware that they're providing. And so if we can build security right into that, it's hugely advantageous too," Morley says. "You will certainly see us work with Dell again, pending close to actually give customers the option to be able to put security right onto the machine, if they so choose."

If Dell's business laptops come preloaded with a free subscription to Carbon Black's endpoint detection and response (EDR) service, this could be hugely beneficial for organisations. The more exciting prospect, however, is the potential impact Carbon Black's technology can have on application security for VMware customers.

"The second piece is the work that's already been done around app defence, which is actually building security hooks right into vSphere," Morley explains.

This integration would enable agentless protection of applications running in vSphere, improving both application performance and detection rates. This would be groundbreaking and, if successfully integrated, has the potential to radically improve the security of organisations running vSphere.

Elsewhere, VMware is planning to integrate Carbon Black's technology into its NSX platform to provide more in-depth network security analytics, as well as partnering it with another recent acquisition Secure State to address security configuration challenges. However, while the acquisition will allow Carbon Black to expand into new kinds of protection, the company executives are also extremely excited about its potential to supercharge its existing services.

One of the linchpins of Carbon Black's technology is the collection and analysis of security data from all of the endpoints that are running its agent. At the moment, that consists of 15 million endpoints, but if Carbon Black's agent is incorporated into vSphere or Workspace ONE, that total significantly increases overnight.

Room for growth

"We're super excited to be able to leverage the reach that Dell EMC and VMware bring to the equation here. I mean, there are 70,000 partners that we're going to be able to tap into," says Carbon Black's senior vice president of corporate and business development Tom Barsi. "That's really where you're talking about adding a zero to the number of customers we're touching."

In addition to improving its protection capabilities, this increase in footprint and telemetry will give more fuel than ever to Carbon Black's Threat Analysis Unit (TAU), which conducts research into security trends as well as analysing new and emerging threat actors and attack methodologies. This research, Morley promises, will most certainly continue and will in fact likely expand once the company joins VMware.

Carbon Black's executives seem to be exceedingly positive about the prospect of joining the VMware family, which should come as no surprise. Carbon Black has been a technically-focused company since its inception Morley notes that the company was founded by a team of actual hackers and this emphasis on technology and engineering is at the core of its new owner's values.

"I'm really excited," Carbon Black CTO Scott Lundgren told IT Pro. "As CTO, it's pretty amazing to have an opportunity to work with a highly technical leadership team. It starts with Pat. As ex-CTO of Intel, he's got a great reputation, and he deserves it. He's fantastically technical, so he understands the problem. He knows what it takes to actually address it, he can act with confidence, because he knows what's going on under the hood. But it isn't just Pat, the whole team is deeply technical [and has] a lot of expertise in a wide variety of technical fields across the board. It's really great to see."

He added: "We're going to have some work to do, obviously, to scale up but it's very tractable, as long as you've got the right mindset at the top and Pat has that."

VMware's attempt to bring the benefits of the 'as-a-service' model to on-premise customers has officially been launched as an open beta at VMworld Europe in Barcelona.

First announced at VMworld in Las Vegas earlier in the year, Project Dimension is designed to leverage VMware's software-defined data centre portfolio to deliver a radically simplified deployment, management and operations experience to organisations who may have been devoid of some of the benefits of cloud-style operating models thanks to their desire to keep their infrastructure on-premise.

The offering will make use of hyper-converged appliances from VMware's parent company Dell EMC, as well as HCI hardware from market challengers Lenovo. This hardware, VMware says, will be 'zero touch', configured at the factory to the customer's specifications and self-connecting and self-configuring once plugged in in the customer's data centre.

"If you look at something like the hyper-converged systems that we have, they're typically redundant," said VMware CTO Ray O'Farrell. "You have three or four servers in there, so were able to deal with some [failures] in that way. Immediately what we need to be able to do is either predict that failure, or when that failure's occurring, to alert the supply chain, or alert the vendor in a way that makes good sense."

These appliances will run VMware's Cloud Foundation software (which has just been updated to version 3.5) combining vSphere compute management, vSAN storage virtualisation and NSX SD-WAN for networking.

This is combined with VMware's Hybrid Cloud Control Plane, which is usually part of Dell's SaaS offering. Infrastructure delivered as part of Project Dimension will be fully managed by VMware, including maintenance, troubleshooting, patch application and firmware updates.

According to O'Farrell, the main focus area for this offering is edge computing - a growing trend that Dell EMC and VMware have both been making a concerted effort to capitalise on in recent years.

"We are a very pragmatic company based on what do the customers want to do. So when we do something like this, it's because we're hearing customers saying 'I want to do something like this'," he told reporters at the conference.

VMware Blockchain goes into Beta

One of the other key announcements from the show was the official launch of VMware's blockchain product, previously teased as 'Project Concord'. First seen earlier this year as an open-source research project under the Apache 2.0 license, VMware Blockchain has been officially unveiled and launched into beta release.

Developed in partnership with parent company Dell, as well as Deloitte and WWT, the product is designed to allow "enterprise consortiums" to deploy fully-permissioned blockchain-based applications without having to rely on public blockchains like Ethereum.

The product will be delivered as a managed SaaS platform and will be integrated with VMware's existing tools and management products. It will also be supported on IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, as well as on-prem VMware installations and VMware Cloud on AWS.

Cloud desktops - also known as virtual desktops, hosted desktops, or Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) - virtualise everything that loads when the user powers up a PC. It presents their whole computer, set up how they need it, on their preferred device.

Organisations usually purchase licenses for virtual desktops hosted by a vendor, and employees can log into their virtual desktop from a device of their choosing, making remote working a more viable option.

Although the principles of providing a desktop experience remotely are similar, there are differences between cloud desktops and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). VDI is served through on-premise servers, with the infrastructure and deployment managed by internal IT teams. VDI has much higher upfront costs as it requires an investment in the servers and storage needed, as well as ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs.

By contrast, cloud desktops use a third-party provider to host in the cloud, meaning that no on-premise servers or costly infrastructure is needed.

Many cloud desktop providers have add-ons such as Microsoft Office licenses, antivirus and data storage which businesses can add or take away when necessary, and customise to their own needs.

Business benefits of cloud desktops

Like most cloud services, there is little or no on-premises infrastructure that a business has to invest in to get started with cloud desktops, and there's no costly hardware to maintain. The as-a-service model also means that costs are usually on a subscription model, making them predictable and easier to manage.

Employees can be given secure access from anywhere on any device, but because the data and desktop are stored elsewhere, even if they lose their laptop, there's nothing to steal from it, so there's no security breach.

Cloud desktops make remote working much simpler, as setup just involves verification and login, without the need for additional hardware. A setup like this is particularly useful when there are interruptions to travel such as snow days or transport strikes, as workers can carry on as normal from home.

Collaboration and file sharing are another benefit to businesses. Cloud desktops are a step further than cloud file sharing applications, in that the entire interface is stored and delivered through the cloud rather than just files, but it brings the same collaboration benefits that many file-sharing services also deliver.

Having a centralised backup of files and data is another benefit of cloud desktops, making disaster recovery much faster through remote back-up. For business use, it's important to choose a service that is strong on security and collaboration, and is designed for intensive business use.

Cloud desktops can be a challenge if applications are resource-intensive and internet connection is patchy. Many cloud desktops also have an option to run offline and work even if there's no internet connection, but this may not meet the needs of every business.

Flexibility and scalability are two major benefits of cloud desktops, as they allow businesses, whether large or small, to grow at their own pace, adding and taking away licenses as they're required. It's also much more straightforward to roll out updates for software or add new applications, without having to worry about updates and security fixes on individual machines.

However, there are sometimes additional costs involved in cloud desktops, so finding a provider which offers a transparent pricing model is vital to avoid unwanted hidden charges.

Although more businesses are moving to the cloud, especially when it comes to running virtual machines, Druva has warned that more than half of those using the cloud are at risk of losing their data because of poorly implemented data management policies.

Research by the firm revealed that 90% of businesses are already using or planning to start using the cloud to power their VMs by the end of this year a significant jump from the 31% of organisations using the cloud for VMs at the end of 2017.

However, 54% of businesses said they have no visibility into how and if data management policies are being applied and enforced, meaning their data could be at risk.

Additionally, more than half of organisations don't have any plans to centralise the protection of their data across multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments. As it stands, data is distributed across the organisations in silos, which causes both confusion within businesses and increases the risk of their data being lost or stolen.

This also means many businesses are not compliant with data laws, as they miss key markers, such as purging data at a later date or retaining information no longer needed.

"What we're seeing from the results is that the momentum of cloud adoption continues to grow for virtualized workloads, but that journey isn't without challenges," said Dave Packer, VP of products and alliances at Druva.

"The cloud forces organizations and vendors to be more disciplined in how they approach consumption of cloud resources. While the benefits of moving to the cloud are huge, the visibility and data management requirements are higher to ensure organizations realize cost savings, which is why more than 53% of respondents are still struggling to hit that target."

Druva also found that most organisations are making the move primarily to reduce management burdens or as part of a "critical IT initiative", rather than just as a cost-cutting exercise. However, the firm warned that many companies are undermining their own efforts by failing to employ data management policies.

Windows remains by far the most popular desktop operating system, but it faces increasing pressure from rival software. Chrome OS, Google's browser-based operating system, is used a lot in schools and is spreading its influence in business environments, not least because the Chromebooks that Chrome OS runs on are secure and cheap, which makes them especially popular with students and IT departments.

Windows 10 S a locked-down version of Windows 10 is Microsoft's attempt to challenge Chrome OS. Here's how you can try it out without needing to fork out for a new laptop.

What is Windows 10 S?

Windows 10 S is, essentially, a more secure version of Windows 10 that can only run apps from the Windows Store. In other words, you can't install regular Windows programs on it. This might seem like a strange idea but the reasoning behind it is sound by controlling what software can be installed on the operating system, Microsoft is safeguarding users from everyday threats. Windows 10 S is, for example, immune from most malware, including ransomware.

Where can you get Windows 10 S?

The new operating system is currently only available pre-installed on certain devices, like Microsoft's Surface Laptop. This will no doubt change in the future, but for now you can't simply download and install it on any PC you like.

Except, that's not strictly true.

Microsoft recently made Windows 10 S available for developers on the MSDN network to download in ISO format, and then released an installer (aimed at the education market) which lets anyone take the new OS for a spin. If you want to try out Windows 10 S, but you don't want to spend money on a new laptop to do so, the easiest solution is to install it in a virtualised environment. The process is a little more convoluted than normal and takes a while longer as a result, but it's easy enough to do.

What you need to know before you start

Unless you have the developer ISO (from the MSDN network) currently the only way to test Windows 10 S is to install it over a copy of Windows 10.

You don't need to own or run Microsoft's operating system to do this, as it's easy enough to get a free (and perfectly legal) copy to use. This is the main reason why the process of installing and running Windows 10 S in a virtual environment takes so long you first need to install Windows 10, and then "upgrade" it to Windows 10 S, which isn't a quick process...

There are some other restrictions to be aware of. Firstly it's not recommended to install Windows 10 S over Windows 10 Home as you won't be able to activate it. You'll also need to be running the Creators Update (1703), or later, which is currently only available as a Windows Insider Preview build.

You don't need to activate Windows 10 S but if you want to, and can't, then the troubleshooting option should solve your problem

While you can install a new version of Windows 10 and convert it to Windows 10 S, without a key, you won't be able to access all of the features including the personalization options without activating it. If you plan on activating the installation, you'll need to activate Windows 10 before starting the upgrade. Windows 10 S may activate once installed, but if not you'll have to click the troubleshoot option on the upgrade page to do this.

Get a Windows 10 ISO

If you don't have a copy of Windows 10 to hand (either on DVD or a digital download) you'll need to get one. In some countries, you can download a Windows 10 ISO direct from Microsoft, but in the UK you need to download and use the software giant's Media Creation Tool. Head here for the tool, then download and run the program.

The Media Creation Tool lets you download a Windows 10 ISO file to use in VirtualBox

Agree to the terms and then select the option to 'Create installation media.' Select the version of the OS you require. If you're running Windows 10 already, the program will automatically select the same version for you. If that's not suitable (perhaps you're running Windows 10 Home but want an ISO for Windows 10 Pro) then untick 'Use the recommended options for this PC' and select the version you do want. Click Next and select 'ISO file.' Download this to your hard drive.

What's new or different in Windows 10 S

You can download software from outside the Windows Store as normal but if you try to install it, you'll be greeted with a message stating 'For security and performance Windows 10 S only runs verified apps from the Store'. You have to use Microsoft Edge in the OS, not only because you can't install Firefox or Chrome, but because Microsoft's browser is the fixed default and there's (currently) no way to change it.

Windows 10 S looks and behaves much like Windows 10, but starts quicker

Microsoft sees this as a big plus, because Edge is designed to work very closely with the operating system, but if you're used to a different browser, Edge will seem rather alien. Many of the extensions you might rely on in your regular browser won't be available to you.

Windows 10 S is tied to Microsoft products, so when you search the web in the operating system you'll be using Bing (unless you browse to Google.com manually).

One good point about Windows 10 S is it's much faster than Windows 10 because it isn't bogged down in any way. This means it can run on lighter hardware. It can boot in around 15 seconds and, when installed on a laptop, deliver significantly better battery life. You won't notice this kind of difference so much in a virtualised environment, though.

Installing Windows 10 S to a virtual machine

While there are a number of virtual machine options available, we used the highly popular VirtualBox application from Oracle.

Step 1

Download and install a copy of Oracle's VirtualBox here www.virtualbox.org. Run the program and click 'New' in the Manager window. In the 'Create Virtual Machine' dialog box enter Windows 10 S as the name of the operating system. Select Windows 10 as the version or choose 'Windows 10 (64bit)' if you downloaded a 64-bit ISO.

Step 2

Click Next, then accept the default Memory Size. Choose to 'Create a virtual hard disk now' and click Create. Accept VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) as the hard drive file type. Choose the option to have your virtual drive dynamically altered (it will resize as required) and increase the default size to 64GB or above.

Step 3

Click Create and VirtualBox will build the drive. When done, select the entry in the Managerand click the Start button. In the 'Select start-up disk' window, click the folder icon andnavigate to the Windows 10 ISO. Select it, click Start and Windows 10 will install.

Select your language settings, then click the 'Install now' button.

Step 4

Once Windows 10 is installed in VirtualBox and fully updated, you'll be ready to convert it to Windows 10 S. Open Microsoft Edge (since this is the only browser you'll have installed in your new virtual environment) and go to bit.ly/wins431. Read all about Windows 10 S and then when you're ready, click the 'Download installer' button.

Step 5

Run the installer and you should see a message stating 'Congratulations, Windows 10 S can be installed'. Click Next and the installation process will begin. Windows 10 S will be downloaded and once the files have been verified, you'll be asked what you want to keep from your existing installation. Select 'Nothing'.

Step 6

Click Next and the installer will fetch some updates, restart your system and begin the full installation. It will reboot several times along the way. When it finishes, you'll be guided through the usual configuration steps. Spend some time customising the privacy settings. Once that's out of the way, you can start using Windows 10 S.

Image: Shutterstock

VMware has announced the launch of VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3, integrating cloud management for businesses wanting to implement a hybrid cloud alongside compute, network, storage and application services.

The deployment and configuration of VMware vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight can all be automated through the VMware SDDC Manager to speed up the time it takes for businesses to kick-start workloads.

Heterogeneous server support means businesses can operate multiple server models from a single rack or select servers for each workload domain if they'd rather be more specific. These means the development environment can be completely tailored to the application, offering greater flexibility.

VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3 can be deployed on premise or as-a-service in the public cloud, via VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, CenturyLink, Fujitsu K5, OVH and Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware.

"VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3 will be a leap forward in delivering on our promise of providing customers with the simplest path to the hybrid cloud," said John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager of VMware's Integrated Systems Business Unit.

"Since introducing VMware Cloud Foundation in 2016, our customers have consistently purchased and deployed vRealize Automation alongside the platform for automated delivery of application and infrastructure services. It was a no-brainer for us to integrate VMware Cloud Foundation and the vRealize Suite to automate the deployment and configuration of cloud management services to accelerate customer time to market."

VMware has now teamed up with Intel to offer VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3 with Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Intel Select Solutions for VMware Cloud Foundation will speed up the deployment of on-premise environments, all the while optimising the experience to enable businesses to achieve the best performance, security and reliability for containerised workloads.

Microsoft has announced it will be the first vendor to offer AMD's EPYC processors on virtual machines operating via its Azure cloud platform, aimed at storage workloads.

This is the first time AMD has managed to get its made-for-server chips into the mainstream, with its previous efforts being usurped by Intel's x86 processors.

However, improved performance thanks to its Zen architecture means AMD now has the chance to take over some of Intel's market share with its EYPC made-for-server processors. This debut on Microsoft's L-Series VMs takes advantage of the chip's threads and cores, coupled with more memory and bandwidth.

"We're welcoming AMD's new EPYC processor to Microsoft Azure with the next generation of our L-Series Virtual Machines," Corey Sanders, director of compute at Microsoft Azure said. "The new Lv2-Series are High I/O, dense storage offerings which make EPYC perfect for Azure customers' demanding workloads. We've enjoyed a deep collaboration with AMD on our next generation open source cloud hardware design called Microsoft's Project Olympus.

"We think Project Olympus will be the basis for future innovation between Microsoft and AMD, and we look forward to adding more instance types in the future benefiting from the core density, memory bandwidth and I/O capabilities of AMD EPYC processors."

Microsoft's Lv2-Series instances will use AMD's EPYC 7551 processor, with a base core frequency of 2.2 GHz and a maximum single-core turbo frequency of 3.0 GHz. They support 128 lanes of PCIe connections per processor, which AMD said should offer 33% more connectivity than two-socket alternatives.

"We are extremely excited to be partnering with Microsoft Azure to bring the power of AMD EPYC processors into their data centre," said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's enterprise solutions division.

"There is tremendous opportunity for users to tap into the capabilities we can deliver across storage and other workloads through the combination of AMD EPYC processors on Azure. We look forward to the continued close collaboration with Microsoft Azure on future instances throughout 2018."

Image courtesy of AMD

What is Hyper-V?

Microsoft Hyper-V is Microsoft's virtualisation platform - a technology that, essentially, produces a virtual IT environment as opposed to working on a physical one.

It makes use of a hypervisor: a layer between physical and virtual spheres that distributes the system's hardware resources among virtual machines (VMs). Software executed at the user's end is then run on these virtual machines as if it would on the physical hardware itself.

Microsoft's Hyper-V platform was first introduced in tandem with Windows Server 2008 - and has been released with every Windows Server iteration since.

It is also available as a smaller, standalone product -- named Microsoft Hyper-V Server -- that includes only the relevant features required for virtualisation, Graphical User Interface (GUI) and services.

Due to this minimalistic approach, the more simplistic Hyper-V Server does not require the same level of maintenance and even possesses fewer vulnerabilities.

The latest version of Hyper-V is available with Windows Server 2016 and features a host of enhancements over its predecessors.

Who is Hyper-V aimed at?

According to Microsoft, Hyper-V is recommended as a solution for all user needs. However, since its introduction in 2008, the product has typically possessed limited features compared to its rival VMware. Each new version of Hyper-V brings with it significant improvements, however, and Microsoft is quickly catching up with the competition.

Microsoft describes its latest standalone Hyper-V Server 2016 as containing only the Windows hypervisor, a Windows Server driver model and virtualisation components.

"It provides a simple and reliable virtualisation solution to help you improve your server utilisation and reduce costs," the company states.

How does it impact the market?

The underdog is a position that Microsoft has not held in its core enterprise operating system market in a very long time.

The fact that Hyper-V is almost a feature-for-feature rival to VMware is a testament to its engineering prowess and recognition that virtualisation was a complete game changer – better late than never.

The rivalry between the two firms is great news for the industry and has been a contributing factor in curbing some of VMware’s slightly gouging pricing structures that penalised customers for using virtual RAM and for stacking up loads of VMs on few physical servers.

Conversely, VMware has also prompted Microsoft to adapt with its free Hyper-V server as an example of a truly useful product from a company not noted for its altruism. At the current development rate, Microsoft may ultimately match VMware in terms of features, but Microsoft trails in terms of market share, with IDC awarding it roughly 30 percent market share to VMware’s 54 percent, with rival Citrix as the only other vendor with double digit virtualisation share.

Microsoft has been quietly helping developers to create Hyper-V supported versions of previously “VMware only” software and hardware platforms including Tintri, Atlantis Computing – even supposed rival Citrix’s CloudPlatform is due native Hyper-V support. The strategy aims to dispel the notion that VMware is enterprise while Microsoft, at least in virtualisation, is more midmarket.

Points of interest

Although VMware and Microsoft are comfortably #1 and #2, they are not the only games in town.

In some cases, rivals with a few points of market share offer some interesting vertical differentiators. For example, channel partners looking to offer very dense “commodity” virtual hoisting, vendors like Parallels provide a Hypervisor that integrates directly into its provisioning platform which reduces both cost and complexity.

If you are building platforms purely in the open source space then KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a real alternative. Although open source, it has some powerful backers like IBM and the overall costs compared to Microsoft or VMware is significantly lower while raw performance is easily on-par.

Growing marketshare

Based on 2014 data from IDC, Microsoft now commands around a 35 percent of the hypervisor market with rival VMware at just under 45 percent. Although in terms of absolutely revenue VMware is still ahead, Microsoft has caught up quickly from its late start through a number of factors. The most important is its tight integration with its Azure cloud platform which offers a credible rival for Amazon, especially when moving traditional Microsoft workloads into the cloud.

Another factor that has helped the firm is its growing support for Linux distribution within its virtualisation layer. Although not perfect, it has invested engineering capability into creating a modest level of feature parity with its Windows feature set and the next iteration of server product goes further still.

However, one could argue the main reason for its rapid and continued growth is the 80/20 rule. In comparison to VMWare, it is still less feature rich but in as the adage goes 80 percent of the user’s only use 20 percent of the features and Microsoft has hit the core requirements. This also translates to cost. Deciphering the various pricing schemas and then trying to compare features side by side is difficult but there is a pattern. In essence, running an environment on Hyper-V works out cheaper than VMware’s ESX if you don’t need the higher end features and can live without Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). However, when you add in the price of SCVMM and then compare it to VMware vSphere, there is price parity but VMware still has more features. The caveat is that pricing is based on a whole load of additional conditions like workload and processor configuration but this rule of thumb seems to hold true.

Update: Windows 10 and imminent Server 2016 to adds enhancements

Updates to Microsoft virtualisation platform are normally centred on OS launches and Windows 10 and the upcoming Server 2016 have added a number of technical benefits:

Production checkpoints

Production checkpoints allow you to easily create “point in time” images of a virtual machine, which can be restored later on in a way that is completely supported for all production workloads. This is achieved by using backup technology inside the guest to create the checkpoint, instead of using saved state technology.

Hot add and remove for network adapters and memory

Server 2016 will add allow the addition or remove a Network Adapter while the virtual machine is running, without incurring downtime. This works for generation 2 virtual machines that run both Windows and Linux operating systems. The upgrade also allows adjustment to the amount of memory assigned to a virtual machine while it's running, even if you haven’t enabled Dynamic Memory

Integration Services delivered through Windows Update

In Windows 10 and going forward, all integration components will be delivered to virtual machined through Windows Update along with other important updates. This is a significant change as it helps to reduce the currently cumbersome processes of manually updating environments.

Channel Pro opinion

Microsoft is still the largest channel-centric software vendor in the world. Even though virtualisation changes the utilisation and deployment dynamics of applications, the bulk of the world still relies on Microsoft operating systems and productivity software. When you compare its virtualisation rivals, even they concede that the end application on top of the hypervisor will likely have a Microsoft element. That status quo is not changing anytime soon.

Just recently, a number of VMware-focused ISVs, most notably Veeam, have launched Hyper-V versions as a recognition that it is a not a one-horse race. To say that Microsoft’s Hyper-V is equal to its primary rival is not the case, but what is clear is that channel partners with virtualisation practices would be wise to brush up on Hyper-V skills.

Another area of integration that may well benefit the channel is the tightening of the relationship between Microsoft Hyper-V and its Azure cloud service. For example, the launch earlier this year of the Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Service protects allows on-prem applications to be replicated and recovered on Hyper-V Virtual Machines running in a private cloud. The recent updates has made the process much simpler with a pricing model that actually offers the channel a method of building their own cloud backup business – although there are many specialist ISV in this space with far more flexible alternatives.

The era of mysticism that surrounded virtualisation has passed and customers are now more comfortable with expressing a preference in virtualisation platform. The days of just pushing that decision to the implementation partner is gone and we are potentially heading towards a more commoditised hypervisor future where the differentiator will be more around management tools.

With Microsoft now a credible second fiddle to VMware, what is clear is that real choice exists and in many ways, its approach is helping to commoditise the hypervisor and wider virtualisation play and move the value add higher up the stack into the management layer. The last Gartner Magic quadrant highlights this with only Microsoft and VMware in the top right, and every other vendor in the middle bottom left of the niche players.

Although still rivals with VMware, the ecosystem of third party vendors is now building products that support both platforms is good news for the channel. In addition, some of the aggressive press briefing by Microsoft against VMware, the most odd occurrence during a VMware World event a few year back, has subsided which suggest the fear of losing its place in the virtualisation gold rush has subsided.

28/07/14

What is Hyper-V?

Microsoft Hyper-V is the software giant’s virtualisation platform.

Launching as part of Windows Server 2008, the platform was a decade late compared to arch-rival VMware which launched in 1998. It is has been a part of every Windows Server edition since and is also available as a free version which is standalone without the full server software component. The free version is not just a demo; it offers a fully featured bare metal hypervisor and has been used successfully in cloud type application that requires the clustering of resources and connection from clients. The current version sits within Windows Server 2012 R2 and aside from tool refreshes, the platform looks stable until the next Windows Server version which is likely to be after 2015.

Who is it aimed at?

If you ask Microsoft, Hyper-V is for absolutely everybody across every use case. However, although performance is comparable, VMware vSphere has an advantage in terms of high end features and management elements. In addition, VMware has slightly better support for Linux versions and slightly more support from third party software developers that specifically target virtualised environments.

There used to be a notion that Microsoft was better for small environments while VMware owned the larger enterprise space. This distinction is less clear with every version of both platforms. Microsoft has committed a lot of development resource into Hyper-V and its entire virtualisation effort and is catching up fast.

How does it impact the market?

The underdog is a position that Microsoft has not held in its core enterprise operating system market in a very long time.

The fact that Hyper-V is almost a feature-for-feature rival to VMware is a testament to its engineering prowess and recognition that virtualisation was a complete game changer – better late than never.

The rivalry between the two firms is great news for the industry and has been a contributing factor in curbing some of VMware’s slightly gouging pricing structures that penalised customers for using virtual ram and for stacking up loads of VMs on few physical servers.

Conversely, VMware has also prompted Microsoft to adapt with its free Hyper-V server as an example of a truly useful product from a company not noted for its altruism. At the current development rate, Microsoft may ultimately match VMware in terms of features, but Microsoft trails in terms of market share with IDC awarding it roughly 30 percent market share to VMware’s 54 percent, with rival Citrix as the only other vendor with double digit virtualisation share.

Microsoft has been quietly helping developers to create Hyper-V versions of platforms and notable VMware only software and hardware platforms including Tintri, Atlantis Computing - even supposed rival Citrix’s CloudPlatform is due native Hyper-V support. The strategy aims to dispel the notion that VMware is enterprise while Microsoft, at least in virtualisation, is more mid market.

Points of interest

Although VMware and Microsoft are comfortably #1 and #2, they are not the only games in town.

In some cases, rivals with a few points of market share offer some interesting vertical differentiators. For example, channel partners looking to offer very dense “commodity” virtual hoisting, vendors like Parallels providers a Hypervisor that integrates directly into its provisioning platform which reduces both cost and complexity.

If you are building platforms purely in the open source space then KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a real alternative. Although open source, it has some powerful backers like IBM and the overall costs compared to Microsoft or VMware is significantly lower while raw performance is easily on-par.

Channel Pro opinion

Microsoft is still the largest channel-centric software vendor in the world. Even though virtualisation changes the utilisation and deployment dynamics of applications, the bulk of the world still relies on Microsoft operating systems and productivity software. When you compare its virtualisation rivals, even they concede that the end application on top of the hypervisor will likely have a Microsoft element. That status quo is not changing anytime soon.

Just recently, a number of VMware-focused ISVs, most notably Veeam, have launched Hyper-V versions as a recognition that it is a not a one-horse race. To say that Microsoft’s Hyper-V is equal to its primary rival is not the case, but what is clear is that channel partners with virtualisation practices would be wise to brush up on Hyper-V skills.

Another area of integration that may well benefit the channel is the tightening of the relationship between Microsoft Hyper-V and its Azure cloud service. For example, the launch earlier this year of the Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Service protects allows on-prem applications to be replicated and recovered on Hyper-V Virtual Machines running in a private cloud. The recent updates has made the process much simpler with a pricing model that actually offers the channel a method of building their own cloud backup business – although there are many specialist ISV in this space with far more flexible alternatives.

The era of mysticism that surrounded virtualisation has passed and customers are now more comfortable with expressing a preference in virtualisation platform. The days of just pushing that decision to the implementation partner is gone and we are potentially heading towards a more commoditised hypervisor future where the differentiator will be more around management tools and support.

Virtual machine data is at risk from a newly-discovered vulnerability dubbed Venom.

Hackers using Venom can steal privileged credentials for a company's entire IT infrastructure by breaking through the protections cloud service providers use to separate each customer's data.

Once attackers gain the information to access one area, they are able to access other virtualised environments, compromising the entire corporate network.

The zero-day exploit was found this week by threat intelligence firm CrowdStrike, which warned that it dates back to 2004.

Jason Geffner, the senior security researcher who discovered the flaw, said it affects virtual floppy drive code used by virtual machines.

"This vulnerability may allow an attacker to escape from the confines of an affected virtual machine (VM) guest and potentially obtain code-execution access to the host," he wrote.

"This VM escape could open access to the host system and all other VMs running on that host, potentially giving adversaries significant elevated access to the host's local network and adjacent systems."

However, CyberArk cyber crime expert, John Worrall, said most organisations have isolated their virtual environments from external users, making them immune from the attack.

But those without isolated environments risk suffering devastating attacks, he added, saying: "When an attacker gains privileged access, they exploit it to anonymously survey a company's security posture, often for months at a time.

"With this knowledge, they can easily execute their attacks undetected, whether it's exfiltrating information as part of espionage campaign, implanting malware as part of a financially motivated attack, or simply destroying a company's ability to do business, as was done to Sony Pictures."

Some have compared the attack to Heartbleed, the OpenSSL flaw that let attackers spy on data being sent online.

However, Karl Sigler, Threat Intelligence Manager at Trustwave doesn't think it's as serious a threat as Heartbleed.

"There are no known in-the-wild attacks and a patch is available," he said. "The virtualisation products it does affect are popular (XEN, KVM, QEMU, and VirtualBox), but the absence of VMWare and Microsoft as affected eases the blow in a lot of cases.

"I would see this attack typically used to target hosting companies that use virtual environments like KVM. An attacker would purchase a KVM instance then use VENOM to breach the hosting machine."

Symantec agreed, its response team adding: "Heartbleed affected a huge number of websites, applications, servers, virtual private networks, and network appliances. Meanwhile, VENOM only affects virtualization systems that specifically use QEMU's Floppy Disk Controller and does not impact some of the most widely used VM platforms."