Google Cloud Previews Kubernetes Support for Windows Containers

Virtualization Review | February 03, 2020

The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is now previewing Kubernetes orchestration support for Windows Server containers. Specifically providing that support is the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) platform for containerized applications, Google said in a recent announcement.GKE version 1.16.4, now in beta, can run both Windows and Linux containers "side-by-side in the same cluster," the company said. Supporting Windows on GKE is a part of our commitment to provide a first-class experience for hosting and modernizing Windows Server-based applications on Google Cloud,"Google added. "To this end, in the past six months, we added capabilities such as the ability to bring their own Windows Server licenses (BYOL), virtual displays, and managed services for SQL Server and Active Directory."

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Virtual Desktop Strategies, Virtual Server Management

VMware Advances Autonomous Workspaces with AI-Powered Integrations

Business Wire | August 28, 2023

VMware Explore 2023 — Data and intelligence play a key role in enabling automation and implementing a successful hybrid work strategy, but a holistic approach is required to maximize its advantages. Today, VMware announces modern AI integrations to the Anywhere Workspace platform, part of the VMware Cross-Cloud services portfolio, that automatically optimize employee experience, drive new vulnerability management use cases, and simplify application lifecycle management. VMware Anywhere Workspace is the only hybrid work platform that integrates digital employee experience (DEX), virtual desktop infrastructure and apps (VDI and DaaS), unified endpoint management (UEM) and security to enable a seamless and secure workspace on any device or location. “Last year, we announced our Autonomous Workspace vision as a path forward for organizations to navigate the challenges brought on by hybrid work,” said Shankar Iyer, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “We are thrilled to unveil new advancements for our customers that expand data sources and insights, integrate with technology partners for improved security, and unify app delivery strategy across all virtual desktops and apps. These innovations continue to progress our vision of providing the next evolution of digital workspaces.” Integrated AI-Driven Platform Scales Experience Management VMware continues to leverage data, intelligence, and automation to improve the employee and IT experience by introducing new Insights and Playbooks based on greatly expanded data and machine learning algorithms that enhance DEX remediation capabilities. These updates broaden access to data, help strengthen VMware Insights, and allow for remediation of more issues. VMware will now enable delivery of new app performance scores, in addition to existing mobile device, desktop, and virtual environment experience scores. If a SaaS app service goes down, IT is proactively alerted and employees are automatically notified. This allows IT to quickly resolve the outage without dealing with inbound support tickets and employees don't waste time trying to access unavailable services. But simply providing IT with more data is not enough to empower them to work smarter. VMware’s AI-driven Insights feature now provides anomaly detection that informs IT of potential experience issues for frontline devices and VDI environments, in addition to mobile and desktop environments. Today’s announcement of new Playbooks enables IT to create step-by-step remediation workflows to resolve incidents more efficiently and use success rate analytics to automate the resolution process and streamline execution over time. “Workspace ONE Intelligence has been a game changer for us when it comes to automating life cycle management inside UEM. We have been utilizing it for automatically tagging devices and assigning them into smart groups. We have also used several dashboard templates for monitoring our security stance and helping remediate high-risk security threats,” said George March, manager of digital workspace and development, Information Technology, USA Health. “Next on our roadmap is implementing the ITSM connector, and with the addition of remediation playbooks, we are so excited about the way it will streamline our help desk support teams workflows.” Unique Partner Integration Powers New Security and Manageability Use Cases Ensuring end-to-end manageability and security for today’s distributed workforce is critical and requires a holistic approach to vulnerability assessment, prioritization, remediation, out-of-band support, and reporting. Collaboration with a best-of-breed partner ecosystem that offers speed, breadth, and depth in vulnerability management is necessary to protect against sophisticated attack vectors. VMware is committed to innovating together with our technology partners to provide customers with more secure and seamless hybrid experiences. Today, VMware continues this mission by announcing an expanded partnership with Intel through a one-of-a-kind, cloud-native integration of Workspace ONE with Intel vPro®. This chip-to-cloud integration makes it easier to secure and remotely manage work devices entirely from the cloud, with no additional on-premises infrastructure and management software needed. Through line of sight and out-of-band management of vPro powered devices, IT teams can have below-the-OS vulnerability insights, and visibility to reduce the impact of potential exploits quickly and efficiently. Using Workspace ONE, customers can have centralized visibility into Intel vPro-powered PCs and accelerate patch remediation cycles for devices located outside of office perimeters, even if the devices are sleeping or powered off. This improves security and compliance by accomplishing higher patch saturation with fewer remediation steps and reduces potential disruption to employee productivity. Modern App Management Simplifies Virtual Environments Managing and delivering apps across VDI, DaaS, and published app environments has become increasingly complex and inefficient due to silos of legacy tools used. VMware recently introduced Apps on Demand, powered by VMware App Volumes, to unify app management and intelligently deploy apps to published app hosts or non-persistent desktop environments, all based on real-time app usage. Today, VMware announces additional expansion of App Volumes support to deliver apps on demand to persistent virtual desktops. Now in beta availability, customers with persistent VMware Horizon environments will be able to use App Volumes to capture their apps once and deliver to many persistent virtual desktops. This automates the app delivery process with up to 99% compatibility and reduces management time and costs for any desktop or published app environment. VMware App Volumes is the only solution to help organizations deliver and manage apps across VMware Horizon, Citrix, Microsoft, and Amazon virtual desktop and app deployments as part of VMware’s Apps Everywhere vision. Boeing: A ‘Hybrid Workforce Innovator’ The Boeing Company (Boeing) has used VMware Workspace ONE across the United States and in more than 65 countries to support its global workforce of 140,000 employees who develop, manufacture and service commercial airplanes, defense products and space systems for its customers. At VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, they were named ‘Hybrid Workforce Innovator’ as part of the 2023 VMware Customer Achievement Awards for the Americas for enabling its workforce to work from anywhere in the world, improving the user experience while reinforcing and advancing security for devices and applications. “VMware Anywhere Workspace helps us manage and protect end points, provide a common platform to access apps and tools, as well as helping facilitate a digital experience for our employees,” said Kristina Ross, Boeing Workplace Solutions director for Research & Technology. “Workspace ONE helped streamline our transition from traditional PC lifecycle management to Windows 10 modern management which was enabled by our shift to a SaaS-based solution for the company. Today, we have a unified view to oversee all endpoint requirements, and the adoption of SaaS enhanced our scalability and ability to shift focus from infrastructure to business facing solutions.” About VMware VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. As a trusted foundation to accelerate innovation, VMware software gives businesses the flexibility and choice they need to build the future. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to building a better future through the company’s 2030 Agenda.

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Virtual Desktop Strategies, Virtual Server Management

Betacom Selected as One of the First Wireless Service Providers for VMware Private Mobile Network

businesswire | August 24, 2023

Private wireless pioneer Betacom today announced it has been selected by VMware as one of three inaugural wireless service provider partners to deploy and manage VMware Private Mobile Networks. Aimed at accelerating digital transformation at the edge, VMware, which today announced its latest edge initiatives at VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, tapped Betacom to help enterprises reduce the complexity associated with private mobile networks. “Betacom is an ideal provider partner for VMware’s edge focused innovations and initiatives,” said Saadat Malik, Vice President, VMware Edge Computing. “With their dedication to security, performance, and simplicity, together we can help our customers advance their business and operational goals to not only embrace the Industrial Internet of Things but to do it efficiently and effectively and without additional resources.” Betacom will seamlessly integrate VMware’s Private Mobile Network offering built on Edge Compute Stack into its existing private network managed service offering 5G as a Service (5GaaS), enabling rapid deployment and effortless management and orchestration of private wireless networks for enterprise clients. Betacom 5GaaS, the industry’s first fully-managed, end-to-end private wireless service, safeguards data by isolating traffic and keeping company data behind the enterprise firewall, by implementing Zero Trust design principles and Betacom AirGap Protection that features a combination of traffic segregation, 3GPP tunneling, encryption and granular access controls. Betacom delivers 24x7, 365 days a year network management from its cloud-based Security and Service Operations Center (SSOC). The new VMware Edge Compute Stack can support multiple use cases at the edge including deployments in the manufacturing, retail, campus and healthcare sectors for a wide variety of applications. For manufacturing customers, the solution supports software-defined manufacturing, predictive maintenance, inventory management, safety and security. For healthcare customers, it provides support for IoT wearables, smart utilities and surgical robotics. “We are excited to partner with VMware in support of its latest technology offering, which enables all the edge functions necessary to facilitate Industry 4.0,” said Johan Bjorklund, CEO of Betacom. “Clients are looking for high-performance, low-latency solutions that are ideal for optimizing automation, data collection and the Internet of Things, and that is exactly what VMware Private Mobile Networks is designed to deliver through our partnership.” About Betacom Betacom offers the first fully-managed private 5G network service, building on its long history as a wireless infrastructure provider to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, the company has regional offices throughout the country. Having completed more than 800 large-scale design and deployment projects, Betacom inspires confidence among their customers who have worked closely with them to meet their pressing high-performance connectivity needs. Its secure private 5G wireless service is the first managed service of its kind in the United States.

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Virtual Desktop Strategies, Virtual Server Management

LogicMonitor Expands Observability Intelligence to New Environments

businesswire | August 18, 2023

LogicMonitor, a leading SaaS-based unified observability platform for hybrid IT infrastructure, today announced expanded integrations, insights and workflows to the LM Envision Platform. LogicMonitor is also introducing Dexda, an event management solution that filters through the noise of thousands of daily alerts by using advanced machine learning (ML) techniques, contextual enrichment capabilities and deduplication efforts. Together, these additions allow customers to reach a significantly lower mean time to resolution and lower risks to the business. “Every business is under tremendous pressure to seamlessly deliver exceptional digital performance,” states Christina Kosmowski, CEO, LogicMonitor. “To efficiently do that, our customers look to us to contextualize the overwhelming amount of data within their complex IT environments.“ The core of LogicMonitor’s platform has been built with advanced machine learning, intelligence and automation, combined to abstract complexity and deliver business impact through IT data collaboration. The company has focused its product roadmap in the areas of intelligence, experience and extensibility. Intelligence and Automation Dexda is the next evolution of AI Ops. It is built on top of LogicMonitor’s extensive data set and integrated into its platform, so users can effortlessly move from alerting to automating actions. Key attributes of Dexda include: Adaptive Correlation- Alerts are automatically re-clustered when a more optimal option is detected. ServiceNow Ready- Automatically enriches Dexda alerts with ServiceNow CMDB data to drive additional context for ML correlations. User-defined Correlation- Dexda admins can now fine-tune the ML models to meet their unique needs or build new ML models. In addition to Dexda, LogicMonitor has also delivered: Event-Driven Ansible Integration- This jointly developed solution with Red Hat assists with auto-remediation and auto-troubleshooting. This integration lets customers trigger remediation workflows in Ansible and act in accordance with predefined rules. Datapoint Analysis- Leverages machine learning techniques to find related metrics and patterns across different resources, which in turn reduces MTTR and increases productivity. Unified Platform Experience A unified platform experience is critical for consistency, adaptability and scalability while reducing tool sprawl and data complexity. Troubleshooting in hybrid modern environments requires a contextual and intuitive UX across devices, services and networks. This modernization and unification effort is the key to continually delivering new capabilities to users and keeping time to value short for new customers. UI Modernization- Optimized to present information in complex hybrid environments. Components for all parts of the LM Envision platform now include bulk actions, better search and filtering and new editors for LogicModules. Expanded Cloud Support- 20 new out-of-the-box dashboards for AWS and Azure, accelerating time to value while providing service-specific views for more insight into health, performance and availability. Log Ingest and Filter Simplification- Introduced declarative UI to simplify log collection and configuration. Users can also add custom LM Properties to the logs which allows for more flexible searching and potentially faster MTTR. Digital Experience Monitoring- Synthetic tests now support multi-factor authentication (MFA) and automated alerts for latency and error conditions. Extensibility As a trusted partner in the advancement of monitoring across on-prem, hybrid and cloud environments, LogicMonitor continues to invest in new ways to manage and monitor network equipment through integrations woven tightly into its overall platform experience. Improved VMware vSphere Support- Support for vSphere 8 and automation for the discovery and monitoring of new ESXi Hosts and mission-critical Virtual Machines, eliminating manual processes – reducing the time, resources and risk involved in repeatable remediation processes. Cisco Meraki and Catalyst SD-WAN- These new integrations make it easier than ever to monitor Cisco environments in the broader context of one's heterogenous hybrid infrastructure. Customers can now get alerted about anomalous events, visualize network traffic usage and see how Cisco vEdge/cEdge (formerly Viptela), SD-WAN Controllers, Meraki Security Appliances, Switches, Wireless Access Points and Smart Cameras connect to their network and where alert conditions exist. Improved Kubernetes Monitoring- Greater coverage and deeper visibility into frequently changing cloud environments with new support and coverage for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Anywhere and enhanced Kubernetes helm and scheduler monitoring. SaaS Monitoring-M365 and Okta logs allow users to clearly understand why problems happen, pinpoint the root cause and quickly troubleshoot alongside alerts. By advancing many key features of its platform, LogicMonitor customers can harness the full potential of their data to make informed decisions with confidence and efficiency. This approach not only streamlines operations, but also provides clarity and precision to the complexities of their IT landscape. About LogicMonitor LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based observability intelligence platform, LM Envision, helps ITOps, CloudOps, DevOps, CIOs, and business leaders gain operational visibility into and predictability across the technologies that modern organizations depend on to deliver extraordinary employee and customer experiences. LogicMonitor seamlessly enables unified observability across infrastructure, networks, clouds, containers and applications, empowering companies to focus less on troubleshooting and more on innovation.

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Server Virtualization, Virtualized Environments

Plotly Unveils Dash Enterprise 5.1, Empowering Corporate Data App Development in Secure Environments

Newswire | June 30, 2023

Plotly, the industry leader in low-code data app platforms, announces the release of Dash Enterprise 5.1. This latest release brings a host of powerful enhancements, including Virtual Machine (VM) compatibility, enhanced security measures, and performance improvements. With a commitment to providing a unified developer experience, Plotly enables data scientists, analysts, and software developers to effortlessly build, deploy, and scale their applications within enterprise environments. Dash Enterprise 5.1 delivers over 100 feature enhancements across the entire platform, ranging from portal theming to security patches. Platform users will find more flexibility, improved security controls, enhanced scalability, and better performance and reliability, leading to a more seamless experience within their organizational settings. With Dash Enterprise 5.1, developers now have more flexibility to work within their organizational setting with higher security controls and options in place, including: As organizations increasingly rely on data apps to drive their analytics strategies, Dash Enterprise 5.1 provides a comprehensive, all-in-one solution for building, deploying, and scaling data apps within the corporate sphere. With this latest release and the recent SOC 2 compliance designation, Plotly solidifies its position as the leader in secure, low-code data app platforms by delivering a comprehensive feature set and a steadfast commitment to customer success. "Dash Enterprise 5.1 integrates powerful enhancements that facilitate seamless data app development and deployment. By introducing features such as VM compatibility, airgapped support, and access controls, organizations can rely on Dash Enterprise with absolute confidence in the most stringent corporate environments," commented Chris Parmer, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Plotly. About Plotly Plotly offers Dash Enterprise, the premier data app platform for Python that enables organizations to collaboratively develop and deploy apps in a secure, scalable, managed environment. We're also the stewards of the open-source graphing libraries behind our namesake, bringing interactive data visualization to your web browser. With 89,000+ GitHub stars, 12,600,000+ downloads per month of Plotly open-source libraries, and 326,000,000+ total open-source downloads, Dash is the leading low-code platform for AI apps. These Dash apps give a point-and-click interface to models written in Python, vastly expanding the notion of what's possible in a traditional dashboard.

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