In November Microsoft released a public beta of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) version 6.5. Today Microsoft announced its release, which is the follow-up of version 6.0 which was released in July this year.

Version 6.5 provides the following new features:

• Discovery of Oracle instances on Itanium-based servers with HP-UX for migration to SQL Server, including estimation of complexity when migrating to SQL server

• Assessment for migration to Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track infrastructures, including computing power, network and storage architectures

• Revamped Azure Migration feature

• Software Usage Tracking, including assessment for planning implementation of Forefront Endpoint Protection which is now part of a Core CAL and Active Devices

VMware has released the vCloud Connector, its Software as a Service (SaaS) management tool for VMware environments residing on- or off premise offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). vCloud connector was initially announced at VMworld in August this year and is now generally available.

vCloud Connector provides a new faster, high reliable data transfer architecture, which automatically retries and resumes tranfers interrupted by network problems. vCloud Connector is now also accessible from any web browser using the URL vcloud.vmware.com, or from a plug-in installed in the vCenter Console.

vCloud Connector allows you to connect multiple clouds which could be either private or public. Public clouds are operated by vendors providing Global Connect, an effort between VMware and several vendors providing public cloud solutions based on the VMware stack.

Microsoft has released a beta of the next version of its capacity planning tool the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit version 6.5. This version will be the follow up of version 6.0 which was released in July this year.

Version 6.5 will add the following new features:

• Discovery of Oracle instances on Itanium-based servers with HP-UX for migration to SQL Server, including estimation of complexity when migrating to SQL server
• Assessment for migration to Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track infrastructures, including computing power, network and storage architectures
• Revamped Azure Migration feature
• Software Usage Tracking, including assessment for planning implementation of Forefront Endpoint Protection which is now part of a Core CAL and Active Devices

Microsoft has released a public beta of System Center App Controller, its management portal for public and private clouds codenamed Concero which it announced in January this year. App Controller will be able to manage the Hyper-V hypervisor and the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 . App Controller will also be able to manage Windows Azure and Azure appliances and is build on Silverlight so it can be accessed through a web browser and offering a single pane of glass to both private and public clouds. App controller will replace the self-service portal in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012.

App Controller provides the following features:

• Self-service application management
• Design, build, configure and deploy services using a library of templates with predefined configuration values
• Consolidated views of private and public cloud services

In June this year, cloudcomputing.info reported that VMware released a set of papers, dubbed the vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT) providing guidance for customers planning to implement their own cloud infrastructure.

Now VMware has updated the vCloud Architecture Toolkit to version 2.0, which contains the following papers:

• Document Map, providing an overview of the documents below

• vCAT introduction, providing considerations when first deploying a cloud strategy.
• Private VMware vCloud Service Definition, providing business and functional requirements for Private cloud architectures including sample use cases
• Public VMware vCloud Service Definition, providing business and functional requirements for Public cloud architectures including sample use cases
• Architecting a VMware vCloud, providing design considerations for architecture

• Operating a VMware vCloud, providing operational considerations for running a vCloud

• Consuming a VMware vCloud, providing organization and user considerations for building and running vApps within a vCloud

• vCloud implementiation Examples:
  • Private VMware vCloud
  • Public VMware vCloud

• Hybrid VMware vCloud Use Case

Or you can download the whole bundle.

In July this year Citrix acquired Cloud.com a company providing an orchestration tool for managing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) called CloudStack. Now Citrix has announced a new upcoming release of CloudStack introducing support for now the vSphere and Oracle VM hypervisors which is expected in October. Microsoft Hyper-V support is expected in Q4 this year.

CloudStack will now be completely open sourced under the GPL v3 license, which is inline with the open source commitment of Citrix. CloudStack can be deployed on-premise or as a hosted cloud service and a preview release (dubbed version 2.1.11) is available today as a free download from CloudStack.org or as a commercially supported solution from Citrix.

CloudStack provides virtual machines self-service provisioning, dynamic workload management, virtual network fencing and routing, usage metering and billing, support for snapshots and rollbacks, ISOs and VM templates library, delegate administration, multi-tenancy and web access. Cloudstack leverages components from – and contributes to the OpenStack community, which further develops the technology from RackSpace and NASA which was released as open source in July last year and for which Citrix is second largest contributor at this moment.

During VMWorld in Las Vegas, VMware announced version 1.5 of vCloud connector, a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds powered by VMware vSphere. vCloud Connector is capable of viewing, managing and tranferring workloads across private and public clouds. A beta version will be provided shortly.

vCloud Connector provides a new faster, high reliable data transfer architecture, which automatically retries and resumes tranfers interrupted by network problems. vCloud Connector is now also accessible from any web browser, or from a plug-in installed in the vCenter Console.

VMware also announced Global Connect, an effort between VMware and several vendors providing public cloud solutions based on the VMware stack. Global Connect provides consistent management spanning multiple providers and is expected to span 25 datacenters in 13 country by the end of this year. The providers are Dell, Verizon, Bluelock, Singtel, CSC, Colt, and Softbank Telecom.

When VMware announced its Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution Cloud Foundry in April this year it detailed that Cloud Foundry would be able to run on several types of clouds, including on what VMware called a Micro Cloud but technically means a VM running under VMware Fusion of Player.

The beta of Micro Cloud Foundry can be downloaded from the Cloud Foundry website, a CloudFoundry.com account is required. Once running developers should be able to use vmc or STS from their client and successfully target the Micro Cloud Foundry instance.

In April this year, Nimbula launched the first version of its product Director, a tool assisting the creation of Private, Public and Hybrid cloud solutions running on top of a Linux distribution (CentOS based) supporting KVM virtualization. Director promises an Amazon EC2-like experience for enterprises and service providers. The company is founded by Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, both formerly Amazon executives, who initiated and developed EC2.

Now Nimbula has announced version 1.5 of Director introducing support for geographically distributed clouds, managing them from a single view.

The new version also adds the following new features:

• Policy based automation
• Storage Management functionality
• Packaging up a choice of OS as a customized basis for cloud deployment

After releasing a public beta in May this year, Microsoft has now released version 6.0 of its capacity planning tool, the Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP), which is the follow up of version 5.5, released beginning this year.

Version 6 includes assessment and planning for evaluating workloads for public and private cloud platforms, identifying the workload and estimating the infrastructure size and resources needed for both Windows Azure and Hyper-V Fast Track. MAP 6.0 also provides an Office 365 client assessment, enhanced VMware inventory, and Oracle schema discovery and reporting.

Version 6 can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.