SCVMM 2012 public beta available

Download available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0fbb298-8f02-47e7-88be-0614bc44ee32

From the link: 

Feature Summary

• Fabric Management
  • Hyper-V and Cluster Lifecycle Management – Deploy Hyper-V to bare metal server, create Hyper-V clusters, orchestrate patching of a Hyper-V Cluster
  • Third Party Virtualization Platforms – Add and Manage Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX Hosts and Clusters
  • Network Management – Manage IP Address Pools, MAC Address Pools and Load Balancers
  • Storage Management – Classify storage, Manage Storage Pools and LUNs
• Resource Optimization
  • Dynamic Optimization – proactively balance the load of VMs across a cluster
  • Power Optimization – schedule power savings to use the right number of hosts to run your workloads – power the rest off until they are needed
  • PRO – integrate with System Center Operations Manager to respond to application-level performance monitors
• Cloud Management
  • Abstract server, network and storage resources into private clouds
  • Delegate access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and user quotas
  • Enable self-service usage for application administrator to author, deploy, manage and decommission applications in the private cloud
• Service Lifecycle Management
  • Define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, os images and applica tion packages
  • Compose operating system images and applications during service deployment
  • Scale out the number of virtual machines in a service
  • Service performance and health monitoring integrated with System Center Operations Manager
  • Decouple OS image and application updates through image-based servicing
  • Leverage powerful application virtualization technologies such as Server App-V

Don’t ask, don’t tell…Apple’s policy on Mac malware

Ars has a wonderfully insightful article with internal Apple memos regarding the Mac Defender malware.  The best part, Apple says to tell customers:

• Do not confirm or deny that any such software has been installed
• Do not attempt to remove or uninstall any malware software
• Do not send escalations or contact Tier 2 for support about removing the software, or provide impact data.
• Do not refer customers to the Apple Retail Store.  The ARS does not provide additional support for malware.

Even more telling: “Apple’s [IT] department mandates the use of Norton Antivirus on company machines.”

from: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/05/malware-on-the-mac.ars/1

CentOS 5.2-5.6 Hyper-V support announced

http://blogs.technet.com/b/openness/archive/2011/05/15/expanding-interoperability-to-community-linux.aspx

“Specifically, effective immediately, Microsoft will support Windows Server2008 R2 Hyper-V to run CentOS. CentOS is a popular Linux distribution for Hosters, and this was the number one requirement for interoperability that we heard from that community. “

VirtualBox 4.0.8 released 5-16-2011

This is a maintenance release: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

The following items were fixed and/or added:

• Mac OS X hosts: fixed incompatibility with recent Mac OS X versions in 64-bit mode (bug #8474)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed incompatibility with hosts with more than 16 cores (bug #8389)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed painting corruptions on a second monitor in 64-bit mode (bug #7606)
• GUI: restored functionality to set an empty host key to disallow any host key combination (4.0.6 regression; bug #8793)
• VBoxManage: added controlvm screenshotpng subcommand for saving the screenshot of a running VM in PNG format
• VBoxHeadless: fixed potential crash during shutdown (Windows hosts only)
• NAT: built-in services use the correct Ethernet addresses in Ethernet header and in ARP requests
• Host-only networking: fixed adapter reference counting
• E1000: fixed rare guest crashes with Linux SMP guests (bug #8755)
• SATA: fixed guest disk corruption under rare circumstances (only relevant for guests with more than 2GB RAM; bug #8826)
• Storage: fixed data corruption after a snapshot was taken with asynchronous I/O enabled (bug #8498)
• Floppy: several improvement
• HPET: another fix for time jumps (bug #8707)
• USB: removed assumption that string descriptors are null-terminated (Windows hosts only)
• 3D support: fixed a potential crash when resizing the guest window
• 3D support: fixed GNOME 3 rendering under Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15
• Snapshots: fixed another bug which could lose entries in the media registry when restoring a snapshot (bug #8363)
• Shared Folders: don’t stop mounting the other valid folders if one host folder is inaccessible (4.0.6 regression)
• Linux Additions: check whether gcc and make are installed before building kernel modules (bug #8795)
• Solaris Additions: added support for X.Org Server 1.10
• Guest Additions: fixed inappropriate Guest Additions update notification when using vendor-specific version suffixes (bug #8844)