Migrating your VMs from one hypervisor to another may be a bit of a challenge if you don’t have some decent virtual machine converter at hand. Different hypervisors have their own proprietary VM formats: VMDK, VHD and VHDX, QCOW, you name it. The problem is that one VM format can be not supported on other platforms. In this case, a V2V converter is a must-have. Now, the question arises: which converter should I choose?

After 2016 everyone can come to a certain conclusion that ransomware is a persistent phenomenon to reckon with from now on, with more sophisticated and innovative techniques to come. That is why it is crucial for every user and administrator to learn how to improve and protect their computer from ransomware.

The Virtualization Review Editor’s Choice is a selection of the most outstanding virtualization products of 2016. It is based on the opinions and overlooks by the trusted experts in the fields of virtualization and cloud computing. This is not the “best of the best rating”. No criteria were applied to make the list. This is just the collection of individual choices of writers, who deal with the industry daily, so they have pointed out virtualization solutions they found especially interesting and useful.

The new device by Synology, an all-flash NAS named FS3017, marks the first time the vendor has issued something entirely targeted for flash, not simply also supporting it. FS3017 is said to be ideal for big data analysis, video post-production, virtualization, and handling demanding database applications.

Big news: this year Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.

Recently, it became known that there is a private, mysterious network stretching between London and Frankfurt that is twice as fast as the normal Internet. The connection, provided by a series of microwave dishes on masts, was completely secret to anyone but one company. Only when a competitor completed its own microwave link between the two cities, the first company revealed that it too had a link between the cities in order to get a share in this potential market. Similar stories can be found all over the world, but because these networks are privately owned, and because they are often used by financial groups trying to find an edge on the stock market and eke out a few extra billions, you have to investigate hard to find them.

Windows Server 2016 enables building a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) with new layers of security and Azure-related approach for hosting business applications and infrastructure. The new Software-Defined Network (SDN) Stack  provides dynamic security and hybrid flexibility by enforcing network policy in the Hyper-V Virtual Switch using the Azure Virtual Filtering Platform (VFP) Switch Extension. Instead of programming network configurations into a physical switch,  the new Microsoft Network Controller delivers the network policy to the Hyper-V Hosts using the OVSDB protocol and is programmed into the VFP extension of the vSwitch by a Host Agent which enforces the policy.

The recent distributed denial of service attack against Dyn, the dynamic DNS service, affected the availability of a row of major websites and Internet services, including Twitter and Reddit. The attack began at 7:10am Eastern Time (12:10pm UK) and was mainly focused on Dyn’s US East Coast name servers. According to Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn, DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations was experiencing a service interruption during that time. By 9:20am ET same morning, Dyn had mitigated the attack and services returned to normal.

WD issued Blue and Green branded SATA SSDs, which are based on SanDisk technology for the first time. The Green brand is for secondary storage, being reliable, cool and eco-friendly, whereas Blue ones are built for PC primary storage use. Other WD brand colours include Black for enthusiast products and Red for NAS and SOHO (small office, home office) use. The Blue and Green SATA SSDs are designed to be used mainly in notebooks, PCs and workstations. The Blue product is optimized for multi-tasking and resource-heavy applications. Still, WD states that the Green SSDs deliver essential-class performance, and are a great option for every-day use.