The VMguy

Infrastructor Navigator has been released and can be found here.  Rather than go thru the details, I’ll repost the features from the release notes:

VMware vCenter™ Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of the change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure. Infrastructure Navigator helps virtual infrastructure administrators perform the following tasks:

• Make accurate first-level triage to help either eliminate the problem or associate the problem with the virtual infrastructure when business service users report problems.
• Assess change impact, manage, and communicate virtual infrastructure issues for critical applications.
• Understand the application and business impact of changes to the virtual infrastructure on applications.

The Open Source Licenses (OSL) file for the virtual appliance is available at /root/open_source_licenses.txt. You can retrieve the file by running the scp root@<appliance IP>:open_source_licenses.txt command.

Infrastructure Navigator is supported on vCenter Server 5.0 with the vSphere Web Client. The supported ESX versions include ESX/ESXi 3.5 (build 425420), ESX/ESXi 4.0 (build 398348), ESX/ESXi 4.1 (build 433742), and all builds of ESXi 5.x.

Features

This section describes the key features for the Infrastructure Navigator 1.0.0 release.

Simplifies and automates the deployment and the discovery process and keeps manages Application Component Knowledge Base (KB) current

• Eliminates physical switch spanning or credential based discovery.
• Discovers and maps the application components and dependencies using KBs and presents this knowledge through maps or search for relevant use cases.

Provide Infrastructure Navigator data for vCenter Server and related solutions

• Ensures that the application and dependency data is available to the rest of the vCenter Server entities and its various solutions through the vCenter extensibility APIs.
• Supports SRM integration to set up more focused and accurate site recovery and backup plans.

The enterprise and standard editions of Operations Manager have been updated to v5 and can be downloaded here.  There’s not really a What’s new in the release notes, but rather a high-level summary of the features as so:

VMware vCenter Operations Manager is an automated operations management solution that provides integrated performance, capacity, and configuration management for highly virtualized and cloud infrastructure. Deep VMware vSphere integration provides the most comprehensive management of VMware environments. VMware vCenter Operations Manager is purpose-built for VMware administrators to more effectively manage the performance of their VMware environments as they move to the private cloud.

Key Benefits

• Actionable intelligence to automate manual operations processes
• Visibility across infrastructure and applications for rapid problem resolution
• Proactively ensures optimal resource utilization and virtual and cloud infrastructure performance

Vacation this week so slightly delayed.  Chargeback Manager 2 was released this week and can be downloaded here.  There are some significant updates in this release that can be found in the What’s New Section of the Release Notes:

The vCenter Chargeback Manager 2.0 provides various new features.

• Automatic Report Scheduler
  In vCenter Chargeback Manager, you can define automatic report schedulers. These schedulers create report schedules for hierarchies and entities that match the criteria specified in the automatic report scheduler. The automatic report scheduler scans all the hierarchies and creates report schedules for the hierarchies and entities that match the specified criteria.
• Charge thin and thick provisioned virtual machines differently
  In this release, you can charge thin provisioned disks and thick provisioned disks differently. By default, thin provisioned disks are charged for the actual usage of the disk. You can override this behavior to charge the thin provisioned disks as thick provisioned in your billing policy.
• Cost variance and cost optimization
  vCenter Chargeback Manager provides a cost variance graph in the report dashboard that lets you analyze the day-to-day change in cost for a selected hierarchy or entity. The graph shows cost data for the last 30 days and that projected for the next 3 months in sets of 30 days each. vCenter Chargeback Manager lists different cost optimization opportunities, such as oversized virtual machines, undersized virtual machines, idle virtual machines, and powered off virtual machines. Cost variance and cost optimization is displayed only for the vCenter Servers that are integrated with VMware vCenter Operations.
• Showback Report
  A showback report lets you analyze how the cost is distributed among the entities based on a specified distribution policy. It is a configurable report that does not include any costs when it is generated. You can specify the total cost, fixed cost, and resource weight in the generated report to obtain the cost for each entity and for each resource per entity. The cost per entity is calculated based on the distribution policy that you select when generating the show back report.
• Apply fixed cost based on virtual machine state
  In vCenter Chargeback Manager, you can now define fixed costs that will be applied on an entity only for the duration for which the virtual machine in the entity is powered on.
• Tier-based storage costing
  vCenter Chargeback Manager lets you define storage tiers and configure cost on the tiers. All the datastores under a tier will be charged uniformly as per the cost configuration settings on the tier. You can also include VM storage profiles in a tier. The storage profiles defined in vSphere are synchronized and the datastores are automatically grouped according to their storage profiles. The cost configuration defined on a profile is applied on all the datastores that match the storage profile. Similarly, the cost configuration defined on a tier is applied to all the datastores or storage profiles added to the tier.
• Support for raw device mapping
  vCenter Chargeback Manager accounts for usage of hard disks that use raw device mapping. The corresponding cost and usage data is reported for the virtual machines that have disks using raw device mapping.
• Complete support for vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
  vCenter Chargeback Manager 2.0 supports the new features introduced in vSphere 5.0, such as VM storage profiles, and that introduced in vCloud Director 1.5, such as support for an SQL Server database.
• Partial support for IPv6
  In this release, vCenter Chargeback Manager supports IPv6 over IPv4 on an experimental basis. You can provide URLs with IPv6 IP addresses when connecting to vCenter Servers, LDAP Servers, vCenter Chargeback Manager databases, and vCenter Server databases. Ensure that the IPv6 IP address is enclosed in square brackets [ ] in the URL as per the standard convention.
• VM Instance Cost support for all hierarchies in vCenter Chargeback Manager
  In vCenter Chargeback Manager 2.0, you can define fixed cost pricing matrices for virtual machines based on vCPU count and memory bundles. Unlike earlier releases, this functionality is now available for all the hierarchies created in vCenter Chargeback Manager.
• Support for burstable billing or 95th percentile billing for the external network traffic in vCloud Director
  You can now calculate the cost for external network traffic in your vCloud Director setup based on the 95th percentile transfer rate. Starting with this release, vCenter Chargeback Manager introduces the external network transmit rate and external network receive rate resources and the Burstable Utilization resource attribute for these resources. You can define a billing policy that has these resource-attribute pair in the expression to calculate the cost based on the 95th percentile transfer rate. vCenter Chargeback Manager calculate the 95th percentile value based on the daily samples. That is, vShield Manager Data Collector runs a job that accounts for the samples for the last 24 hours and computes the 95th percentile value based on these samples.
• Support for overage charging for org vDCs in the Allocation Pool model of vCloud Director
  In this release, vCenter Chargeback Manager provides the VMware Cloud Director apply overage charge on Allocation Pool vDC property for the Cloud Director Data Collector. This property must be set to true (default value is false) to account for the resource usage over and above the guaranteed reservation in vCloud Director. This is applicable only for CPU and memory. Also, you must use the VMware Cloud Director Overage Allocation Pool Cost Model to account for resource overage. You must, however, modify the cost model to define the base rate and overage rate for the resources.
• New cost models and billing policies for vCloud Director
  This release of vCenter Chargeback Manager introduces two new cost models and billing policies that are made available when you install the Cloud Director Data Collector. 
  • VMware Cloud Director Actual Usage Cost Model: This cost model uses the new VMware Cloud Director Billing Policy – Actual Usage. This billing policy lets you calculate cost based on actual resource usage for all resources except count of networks, enabled IPSec VPN tunnel count, and NAT, DHCP, and firewall services. For these resources the allocation values defined in vCloud Director is used.
  • VMware Cloud Director Overage Allocation Pool Cost Model: This cost model uses the new VMware Cloud Director Billing Policy – Overage Allocation Pool. Only for this beta release, the billing policy calculates the overage cost for CPU based on actual usage and that for memory based on allocation. For external network transmit and external network receive the actual usage values are used and for all other resources the allocation values are used.

Last night, VMware released Fusion 4.1.  You can update your installation by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the title bar.  You can also go straight to the download here.  As always, here’s the What’s New section from the release notes:

Smart Full Screen

Full screen mode provides better productivity and consistency with Mac OS X Lion than previous versions.

The Lion full-screen button is used in virtual machine windows.

The Lion full-screen keyboard shortcut (Cmd-Control-F) is now supported in addition to Cmd-Control-Return.

Like other full-screen Lion applications, a VMware Fusion virtual machine moves to a new space when all displays are connected to the virtual machine.

Switching to Full Screen mode on a secondary display uses the whole display but does not create a new space, which enables you to work in other Mac applications while the virtual machine makes full use of the secondary display.

The VMware Fusion menu bar and toolbar are now accessible from Full Screen mode. A short delay in showing the menu allows access the top of the virtual machine screen, particularly when running Mac OS X Lion in a virtual machine.

A redesigned, compact minibar that you can drag for quick access to common actions without leaving Full Screen mode.

Automatic virtual machine power on

Virtual machines can now be powered on automatically when VMware Fusion starts. You can override this setting by holding Shift when VMware Fusion starts. This feature was removed in VMware Fusion 4 but is now available in VMware Fusion 4.1 in the General settings for every virtual machine.

Improved animations

Improved animations for full screen mode, unity mode, library and snapshots.

Fast screen resizing and improved startup time

Faster screen resizing (Microsoft Hotfix 2522761 recommended), faster transitions into Unity and Full Screen modes, and improved startup time with Windows 7 virtual machines.

Improved Mac OS X Lion guest operating system support

Improved Mac OS X Lion virtual machine support including smoother mouse movements and support for File Vault 2 when using Mac OS X 10.7.2 or later. Upated VMware Tools disable sleep on older versions of Mac OS X virtual machines.

Improved graphics performance

Improved graphics performance and correctness for Internet Explorer 9 and Solidworks 2012 and improved graphics performance when using Mac OS X 10.7.2.

VMware Fusion 4.1 also resolves the following issues:

An intermittent problem when plugging in a new USB device that resulted in error 4.

Improved support for resizing NTFS formatted disks.

An intermittent issue connecting USB devices attached via a Thunderbolt display.

An intermittent issue installing Mac OS X Lion from physical media.

Improved compatibility of shared folders for many applications.

An issue installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu 11.10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7.

A graphics rendering issue on some Mac Pro systems with very large amounts of memory

A graphics rendering issue specific to some non-English languages.

An intermittent problem when using the migration assistant on Mac OS X 10.7.2.

Spurious activation messages when using Boot Camp virtual machines on some systems.

Fresh off the upgrade to the vSphere client for iPad comes an updated View client.  You can head right to the download in iTunes here for the upgrade.  As always, here’s the What’s new from iTunes:

What’s New in version 1.2

• Optimized for VMware View 5 with improved performance
• Support for iOS 5 including Airplay
• Presentation Mode for use with external display and Airplay
• Embedded RSA soft token simplifies login to desktop
• Background tasking to move between Windows and iOS apps
• Updated look and feel
• Integrated online help
• Buffered text input for multibyte text entry
• Now in French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese
• Bug fixes