In the User Authentication Configuration we can now add Active Directory groups not just individual users. With the role based administration available in the Cloud edition, this will greatly improve management of users across your site, so for example members of vdi-admins may only have access to your VDI infrastructure, and server-admins can see and administer everything.

After a little trial and error I found the following settings worked in my test OM instance:

• Set your Active Directory Domain i.e. vmturbo.local and click apply
• Select the Group Administration button and click Add new group
• Enter the group name as it is in Active Directory i.e. vm admins (this isn’t case sensitive)
• Select your desired Group Role and define a scope if required
• Click Create
• Sign in with your UPN formatted account login i.e. seymour.harding@vmturbo.local

Further details about the update can be found at VMTurbo

We at Satisnet are so passionate about VMTurbo and the power it unleashes within your datacenters that we’re running a number of free to attend Webinars and Workshops at our centre in Luton – feel free to sign-up and discover what VMTurbo can do for you. We’re also more than happy to conduct a private Webex with you to explain how Operations Manager works and how it can change the way you run your virtual environment – please contact us to request an appointment.

It works by allowing you to control PSI consoles on your machines. How often they sync with Secunia Cloud, approve patches for deployment and get further information on each vulnerability found.

For more information and to sign up for the free Beta Trial, please visit: http://www.satisnet.co.uk/secunia-smallbusiness.html

ExtraHop Press Release – 4 December 2012:

ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions, today announces two offerings that enable enterprises to more effectively leverage the cloud both for their own business-critical applications and to quickly augment their IT staff with ExtraHop’s cloud-based remote analysis service.

The First Agentless APM Solution for Microsoft Hyper-V

Gartner projects that Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation platform will account for 27 percent of the entire server virtualisation market and 85 percent of the small-to-medium business server virtualisation market by 2013. However, to trust these environments with business-critical applications, organisations must be able to deterministically monitor application performance within Hyper-V environments and correlate performance issues across all tiers of the application delivery chain—something that legacy, agent-based APM solutions cannot do.

Working with early-access versions of the new Windows Server 2012, which was released for general availability in September, ExtraHop announces the first agentless APM solution to run as a Hyper-V virtual appliance taking advantage of the new Hyper-V Virtual Switch capability. For the first time, Microsoft customers can achieve cross-tier operational visibility in a Hyper-V environment, correlating metrics across the application, network, web, database, and storage tiers. Enterprises can monitor both public and private Windows Azure cloud environments with the new enhancement and can even try the solution in these environments free for 60 days with the ExtraHop Discovery Edition download.

“Agent-based APM tools do not offer cross-tier visibility, which is required to provide capacity planning, pinpoint root causes in virtual environments, and understand application and end-user performance,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop Networks. “Our agentless approach is the first solution for obtaining complete operational intelligence for Hyper-V environments, and it’s the only way to do it without overhead or manual configuration, which are especially burdensome in dynamic virtualized environments.”

Cloud-Based Application, Network, and Infrastructure Analysis with ExtraHop Atlas Connect

With skilled IT workers continually cited as one of the top-five workplace shortages, ExtraHop’s new cloud-based Atlas Connect service enables enterprises to quickly and easily gain secure remote access to ExtraHop’s IT operations experts with a single click. With no network or security adjustments required, Atlas Connect provides organisations with timely application, network, and infrastructure analysis so they can focus staff resources on other important IT projects. The new cloud-based offering also enables cloud and managed service providers (MSPs) to deliver additional value to their own customers by offering them the same analysis-as-a-service options to help manage their IT environments.

“One of our major focuses is being more proactive with our IT services. I never realized how useful ExtraHop would be at enabling that,” said John Trainor, Chief Information Officer, Aaron’s Inc. “With the Atlas service, we have a complete picture of what is going on across all of our infrastructure. The Atlas Services report supplements our team so that I don’t have to keep on staff a group of experts who look at performance all day, every day. Instead, we can focus on our business and on moving projects forward. I was shocked at how quickly we realized value from the service, and it just gets better as we resolve low-hanging fruit and move into more chronic, but hard-to-find, problem areas.”

VMTurbo, the leading provider of intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualized environments, today announced that it is gaining traction in the education sector, as more universities and higher education organizations turn to VMTurbo Operations Manager to ensure peak performance, increase utilization, and drastically reduce operating costs. Addressing the need for automated decision-making to specify and implement actions that reduce resource contention and prevent performance issues, VMTurbo is providing these institutions with a solution for the multi-faceted issues that arise when managing large, multi-site data centers that run a wide-range of applications.

“As more universities rely on virtualized and cloud environments to operate their massively complex and dynamic infrastructures, the need for an innovative operational approach to automate and control these environments is at an all-time high. The constant, real-time coordination between operational teams to identify, diagnose and remedy issues is too labor-intensive to scale,” said Lauren Whitehouse, director of product marketing at VMTurbo. “Our success with higher education validates the difficult workload management challenges we address and solve for IT.” 

VMTurbo has been deployed by a number of well-known organizations including London School of Economics (LSE), Northeastern University, Saarland University, East Carolina University, the University of Bielefeld, Edith Cowan University, Lane Community College, Washington University in St. Louis, andIndiana University. LSE, an acclaimed specialist university with an international intake and a global reach, turned to VMTurbo after its existing tools failed to ensure that applications were resourced effectively.

What Higher Ed Customers are Saying About VMTurbo

“VMTurbo’s market-based approach fit our criteria, as it automates control across virtualized data centers to drive performance up by intelligently determining how infrastructure resources are allocated,” said Danny Simpson, systems specialist for IT services at LSE. “With VMTurbo Operations Manager, we are confident that applications, infrastructure and operational teams are now being utilized in the best possible manner.” 

“When we first evaluated VMTurbo, we recognized the company’s vast understanding of how to best allocate resources and drive performance by identifying bottlenecks and recommending solutions,” said Robert Reynolds, lead virtualization architect at Indiana University. “Their approach is something really different and worthwhile.” 

About VMTurbo Operations Manager

VMTurbo Operations Manager is the only solution on the market that understands application performance, resource utilization and capacity constraints in a virtualized data center, and is able to automatically adjust allocation to ensure service based on priority. Since its initial release, more than 8,000 cloud service providers and enterprises worldwide have deployed the VMTurbo platform to gain greater control and prevent performance issues across their virtual infrastructure.

CSC is utilizing VMTurbo Operations Manager to automate intelligent resource allocation and workload placement decisions – ensuring service availability, operational efficiency, and optimal utilization for commercial and government enterprise cloud customers.

“Service level assurance is at the heart of CSC’s value proposition to enterprise cloud customers and VMTurbo’s intelligent placement of workloads and ability to allocate resources based on application performance and business priorities enables us to provide reliable commercial and government cloud services,” said Eli Almog, chief technology officer for CSC Cloud Services. “CSC BizCloud and CSC CloudCompute, both VMware vCloud Datacenter Services, provide infrastructure as a service for doing real business on the cloud. We did a thorough competitive analysis and determined that VMTurbo’s sophisticated analytics engine and its API integration to vCloud Director and Cisco UCS made it the right choice for CSC’s enterprise cloud.”

Virtualized data centers and cloud infrastructures require a different approach for operations management. VMTurbo delivers a cloud-scale control plane that identifies constraints and automates resource allocation decisions to optimize utilization and meet SLAs.  The technology addresses resource contention before problems occur, makes certain that applications have the resources they require, and ensures the infrastructure is utilized in the most efficient way possible.

“As a leading service and business solution provider to some of the most sophisticated customers across the globe, CSC understands what it takes to ensure customers experience optimal performance for critical services,” said Lou Shipley, president and chief executive officer of VMTurbo. “We are excited to be working with CSC to deliver an improved operational model for cloud environments, one where our technology automates intelligent allocation and placement decisions without requiring manual intervention to prevent performance issues and ensure optimal use of the underlying infrastructure.”

At the heart of VMTurbo’s value proposition is the Economic Scheduling Engine which drives efficiency and optimal resource utilization, reduces operations costs, and enables cloud service providers, like CSC, to intelligently plan virtualization initiatives. The VMTurbo Operations Manager solution delivers critical capabilities such as multi-tenancy support, service provider scale, and open API integration to critical sophisticated cloud infrastructures built on VMware vCloud Director and Cisco UCS.