April 2015 | Snel.com

FreeIPA

FreeIPA is a security solution that you can install on Linux/Unix based operating system. It provides centralized authentication, authorization and account information by storing data about user, groups, and hosts. With FreeIPA you are also able to deploy two-factor authentication.

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Cache

LVM gives you the ability to manage and allocate disk space effectively. In the CentOS 7.1 release LVM has added a new caching feature to improve the performance and security of the disks. The new cache feature allows one or more faster speed disks to act as a cache for one or more slower hard disks.

Automatic Bug Reporting Tool

The Automatic Bug Reporting tool keeps running in the background as soon as any system error or application is detected. So when the error is detected this tool will report the error details to remote bug trackers.

OpenJDK-1.8.0 fully supported

CentOS 7.1. supports OpenJDK 8 as well, Open Java Development Kit (OpenJDK) is a free and open source implementation of the Java Platform.

Updated drivers for network and graphics card

In this latest CentOS release, you will find improvements for processors, graphic cards and other drivers. Old and new graphic and Enthernet cards are both supported. The support for new processors includes Intel Broadwell and graphics AMD Hawaii cards.

Updated Software Versions

You will find updated versions of the most used applications such as OpenSSH, Dockers, Email clients and more.
In order to get started with the CentOS 7.1 installation, you can find a small tutorial here.

So VMware 6.0 is finally available between our Operating system offers. You are able to install VMware 6.0 with instant setup through your SnelPanel. This edition of VMware comes with new features as well as some great new updates. We will highlight a few of these updates in this post.

Security enhancements

Account Management

ESXI 6.0 offers new ESXCL commands. It enables management of local account on the ESXI server. The ability to add, list, remove and modify accounts across all hosts in a cluster can now be centrally managed using a vCenter server system.

Account Lockout

There are also two new account lockout settings available in ESXI Host Advanced system. The settings are for the login attempts and account lockout duration. These settings only affect the SSH and vSpere web services connections. So direct access to the console and console shell are both not affected.

Password Complexity Rules

In the previous editions of ESXi, password complexity changes had to be made by hand-editing the /etc/pam.d/ passwd file on each ESXi host. In this edition, you can do this by adding an entry in Host.

Advanced system settings

It is possible to enable centrally managed setting changes for all hosts in a cluster.

vCenter Server Enhancements

Changes

VMware has simplified vCenter. It is a lot easier to automate the installs. There are no longer separate installers for vCenter services. However, if you are running Windows version, VMware vSphere Update manager remains as a standalone Microsoft Windows Installation.

vSphere vMotion

In this edition vSphere vMotion capabilities have also been enhanced. You are now able to perform a live migration of virtual machines across virtual switches. You can also vMotion between different Datacenter objects, folders and virtual switches within the same vCenter.

Multi-processor fault tolerance (SMP-FT)

Next up, a great feature, the new support for Multi-processor fault tolerance (SMP-FT) which allows continuous availability for virtual machines with zero downtime and zero data loss.

Through the use of a completely new fast-checkpointing technology, vSphere FT now supports protection of virtual machines with up to four vCPUs and 64GB of memory. In the previous version, this was restricted to a single vCPU. The majority of mission-critical customer workloads can now be protected regardless of application or OS.