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Red Hat has agreed to acquire ManageIQ, for approximately $104.0 million in cash. The closing of the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by the stockholders of ManageIQ. ManageIQ was already supporting the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform.
ManageIQ provides Virtualization platform Management software providing monitoring, management and automation. And by this acquisition Red Hat can offer a complete solution for cloud management.
After releasing a beta in November, Microsoft last week released version 8.0 of its Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP). MAP is Microsofts capacity planning tool, which it releases for free as a so called solution accelerator. MAP uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Active Directory, SMS Provider, and other technologies to collect data in your environment and inventories computer hardware, software, and operating systems in small or large IT environments without installing any agent software on the target computers. This version focuses on assessment of readiness for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
Included in this latest version of the toolkit are hardware and infrastructure readiness assessments to plan your deployment of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, migration to Windows Azure Virtual Machines, ready your environment for Office 2013, and track Lync users.
Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for its private cloud management suite System Center. The news was initially posted at a TechNet forum by a Microsoft employee working in the System Center division, and later was verified by Mary Jo Foley working at ZDNet. General Availability is expected in January 2013.
Service Pack 1 is applicable to System Center 2012 which was released in April this year, mainly provides the support for managing and installation on top of Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, the OS products which Microsoft released in August this year. In September Microsoft released a public Beta of the Service Pack 1 release.
During HP Discover which was held in Frankfurt Germany last week, HP announced some updates to its Cloud Portfolio which HP calls HP CloudSystem. HPs Cloud portfolio consists of solutions from other vendors, with supplementary tools provided by HP making up the whole stack.
First of all, HP announced the release of HP Cloud Compute, its public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution based on OpenStack. HP also announced the release of HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) version 3.1. its management platform for deploying cloud services providing better support for the KVM, Hyper-V and ESX hypervisors. HP also released Continuous Delivery Automation (CDA) version 1.1, which automates cloud application releases.
EMC and VMware on December 4, announced the merge of their cloud application and big data offerings into a single virtual organization called the Pivotal Initiative.
Amazon has announced that the AWS Marketplace now also contains applications which can run on top of Microsoft Windows. Amazon is launching with an initial set of applications and will continue to release more in the near future. The applications will run on top of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 Amazon Virtual Machine Images (AMIs) on top of Amazons Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform.
The applications currently offered are:
HP has released a paper titled: HP Departmental Private Cloud Reference Architecture, the paper which contains 88 pages defines a best practices reference architecture and detailed implementation guide for building a highly available two node virtualization or private cloud solution based on Windows Server 2012, Server 2008 R2 and System Center 2012 ideally suited for mid-sized businesses and branch office deployments.
The reference architecture is built with HP ProLiant DL360e servers, HP P2000 MSA Array System with SAS shared storage, HP E2910 switches, and HP Insight Control management software.
During the annual Amazon event AWS RE: Invent, Citrix announced that a Citrix NetScaler Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and a CloudBridge AMI are now available in the AWS Marketplace which can run on Amazons Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform.
The AMI for NetScaler uses the same binary as the VPX virtual appliance and MPX and SDX appliances. It supports Layer 4 to 7 technology like load balancing, content switching, global server load balancing, SSL VPN and application firewall. Before this AMI was available most of these technologies had to be implemented in different AMIs providing the necessary functionality. CloudBridge is capable of setting up a WAN-optimized, secure tunnel between EC2 and the on-premise datacenter.
Apprenda has announced version 4.0 of its Microsoft .NET Platform-as-a-Service Solution (PaaS) product which is also called Apprenda. Apprenda which is actually an application server and container for .NET applications can run in hybrid-cloud environments, and now supports Windows Server 2012. An application running on Apprenda is one that is composed of some number of traditional ASP.NET or Silverlight UIs, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) web services, and SQL Server-based databases.
Apprenda is licensed in 2 free editions, ApprendaCloud which is a hosted solution and Apprenda Express which has some limitations compared to Apprenda, the paid version based on an annual subscription.