Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D

Following on the heels of the FS-4300DN comes this slimmed down mono laser printer from Kyocera, the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D. The difference in price may be significant – at the time of writing, the FS-4300DN costs around £870 to the £270 of the FS-2100D – but in many respects these two models have much in common.

For a start, there's the overall look of the two printers. Kyocera's Ecosys range have a unified design, so the various models resemble each other very closely. The casing of the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D is chunky and robust, but not overly heavy. At 13.5kg it's only 1.1kg lighter than its big brother. Nonetheless, 13.5kg is by no means weighty for a business laser at this price point.

The black-and-cream casing makes the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D look more like an architectural experiment from the 1960s, especially with a curved turret comprising the front right corner. This turret is mirrored in the optional paper trays, so as you build up the Kycoera's paper handling, the overall look remains consistent.

And those paper handling facilities deserve mention. Just like the FS-4300DN, the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D comes with a sizeable 500-sheet tray as standard, along with a 100-sheet multipurpose tray. You can add up to four additional 500-sheet paper trays, for a maximum of 2600 sheets. That figure was decent in the high-end FS-4300DN, but in the sub-£300 FS-2100D it's outstanding.

As with the FS-4300DN, the top-mounted control panel is wide-ranging and highly detailed, giving you full control over most aspects of the printer's operation, while the strong monitoring facilities give network managers easy control of the Kyocera. You can access files from USB drives for added security.

Connectivity options as standard are rather lacking on this model, with only USB 2.0 offered. You do have the option of upgrading to gigabit ethernet for £125, although should you want such facilities, you're better off just paying an extra £72 for the FS-2100DN model, which comes with gigabit ethernet as standard.

Either printer can be upgraded to wireless 802.11/b/g/n facilities for the exorbitant fee of £289.

The N-suffixed Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100DN also has more memory than the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D, matching the FS-4300DN's 256MB.

The Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D, on the other hand, comes with just 128MB as standard. The FS-2100D also has a lower maximum memory of 1152MB, as opposed to the 1280MB of the FS-2100DN.

Up to 40 pages per minute is boasted by the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D. In real-world printing, you're unlikely to get to that due to the printer needing around 10 seconds to get started.

Once the first sheet has come out, though, subsequent sheets are almost instantaneous, and this is a reasonably fast model. Even with the 10 second startup, we were able to achieve figures of 29.7ppm, and if you're printing large jobs then you can expect that to increase to the mid-30s.

Duplexing is provided, although the speed here does fall to a rather more sluggish 15.4ppm – a drop of close to fifty percent, which isn't ideal.

Even with experimentation, the Kyocera's output isn't as dark as we'd ideally like. This was a slight complaint of the FS-4300DN as well, and seems to be common to the Ecosys printers. The characters also fell just short of the crisp perfection we expect of the best laser printers. Neither is this the best model for graphics reproduction.

The running costs aren't quite as low as on the FS-4300DN, with the Kyocera Ecosys FS-2100D's toner generating only half as many pages at a time. They are a little cheaper to compensate, although the cost per page is still almost 0.3p more.

Nonetheless, close to 0.7p remains very cheap for a page of text, with few other printers able to get anywhere near such low running costs.

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VMware vSphere 5.1 looms large

With the release of VMware vSphere 5.1, VMware's product line underwent some naming and positioning changes. In the past, there were two different bare-metal hypervisors, one free and one sold as part of the vSphere suite. Now there is just one. The new standard is ESXi 5.1, which still comes in a free version. However, the free version is now limited to 32GB of physical RAM.

The ESXi hypervisor is required for all vSphere installations starting with version 5.0. ESXi does not use Linux, as did ESX, for the service console that executed scripts and provided hooks for third-party agents. The new ESXi code base has shrunk, presenting a smaller attack surface and requiring less maintenance and patching. Higher reliability and stability in the hypervisor translate to fewer headaches for IT administrators and longer uptime for mission-critical applications.

VMware has also introduced three different offerings under the label vCloud Suite, which include bundled products targeted at specific use cases. They are licensed on a per-CPU basis and come in Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise editions. These products provide the functionality to implement infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds for large data centres or service providers. For this review I focused on the basic VMware vSphere functionality along with the VMware vcentre Server management system.

Installation and configuration: For the purpose of this review I used a Dell PowerEdge R715 server as the primary VMware ESXi host. Dell is a longtime VMware partner, and it has many convenient features, such as the ability to boot the base ESXi image from either an SD card or a USB disk. Dell provides this image on its website, and I used it to create a bootable USB device. Installing and configuring an ESXi host is pretty simple for most any supported hardware.

Configuring a vSphere environment is a different story. If you plan on using any of the more advanced features available from VMware, you will need to install vcentre Server. Here you have several options, such as using an existing Windows Server or deploying the vcentre Server as a virtual appliance (VA). The VA option uses Suse Linux as the base OS and a local database for small installations of less than 50 VMs. For larger installations you must use an external Oracle database. If you go the Windows Server route, you'll also need to have SQL Server installed to house the inventory database.

You must configure a separate network for all vMotion traffic before any virtual machine migrations can be accomplished. Each host participating in vMotion must have a minimum of two Ethernet adapters with at least one supporting Gigabit speeds. Each host must have a port group designated for vMotion traffic with source and destination hosts on the same subnet. That's quite a bit of configuration required to accomplish a migration -- especially when compared to Microsoft's Hyper-V live migration feature, which requires almost no configuration.

New and improved in vSphere 5.1: VMware vSphere 5.1 brings a number of capabilities to the table specifically aimed at the high-end, high-volume virtualisation customer. These include features like Storage DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), introduced in vSphere 5.0, which automates load balancing across storage devices just as DRS balances VM loads across hosts. With Profile-Driven Storage and tight integration with the new vCloud Director, you get a new level of storage automation not previously available.

With the vSphere 5.1 release also comes a new version of the virtual machine format (version 9) that supports larger virtual machines. Another nice enhancement means the end of reboots when upgrading VM guests to newer versions of the VMware Tools. On the networking front are enhancements to the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) in support of link aggregation (LACP support) and expanded virtual MAC address assignments for large implementations. Other improvements to VDS beef up network monitoring and troubleshooting and even rollback and recovery.

In terms of raw scalability, vSphere 5.1 increases the number of distributed switches per vcentre Server from 32 to 128. It also ups the numbers on static port groups (5,000 to 10,000), distributed ports (30,000 to 60,000), and hosts per VDS (350 to 500).

Managing vSphere 5.1: The traditional management tool, available as a free download, is the VMware vSphere Client. This option is being phased out with the new Web client available with version 5.1 of vcentre Server. In reality, there probably aren't many VMware installations of any size running without vcentre Server. At the lower end, Microsoft makes life easier, as you can manage small Hyper-V deployments with Hyper-V Manager and the new Windows Server Manager tool. (See my review of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.)

That said, VMware's vcentre Server provides the glue that holds large VM deployments together. It's required for many of VMware's advanced features such as the cloning or migrating of VMs. With the new Web client you can easily perform almost any task required to manage your entire vSphere infrastructure. With VMware vSphere PowerCLI, you get the full scripting capability of PowerShell and more than 370 cmdlets to automate almost any repetitive task you need to accomplish in day-to-day operations.

Performance and scale: When you look at vSphere 5.1 from a big-picture perspective, you see a number of enhanced capabilities that directly affect performance. Storage is a key part of the VM puzzle, and the enhancements in vSphere 5.1 for vMotion deliver new capabilities such as using multiple NICs. Using the right type of storage for different workloads can have a significant impact on overall performance as well. vSphere 5.1 supports automated storage management to include different classes of service, allowing you to direct high-IOPS workloads to more expensive SSD storage while allocating lower-cost storage to lower-throughput needs.

Performance and scalability both depend on efficient usage of other resources like network bandwidth and CPU. VMware provides granular control over all of the above, making it easy to implement the likes of Quality of Service (QoS) for the network and limit CPU resources based on service-level agreements. While these considerations are not always part of the performance discussion, they influence how a virtual environment performs overall -- VMware delivers these features in spades.

Final analysis: VMware continues to deliver features and enhancements that make vSphere the obvious choice for any large-scale virtualisation deployment. The new vCloud suites bundle together previously separate pieces required for building a large-scale private, public, or hybrid cloud. While Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 and other solutions may be chipping away at VMware's lead, vSphere still has a number of features -- such as rules-based load balancing for VMs and storage, as well as advanced virtual networking capabilities -- that the competition can't match. These features will certainly make a difference in large settings, and some will make a difference in smaller shops with more complex needs.

Now read:  virtualisation showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

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Innergie mCube Slim 95 travel adaptor

Innergie’s mCube Slim 95 solves the annoying problem familiar to anyone who travels with a laptop on a regular basis; no matter how slim and light the laptop itself, the AC adaptor is probably a standard unit that along with its cabling can add surprising bulk.

Compounding this, the same issue will apply to smartphones, digital cameras, tablets and camcorders, each of which will also need its own adaptor. A few devices will charge from a laptop USB port when it’s switched on, while those requiring more than 5 watts (anything from a tablet upwards) won’t.

The Slim 95 is designed as a one-size-fits-all answer to this multi-device inconvenience.

On first impression, the white plastic adaptor unit itself doesn’t save much weight (179g) or bulk compared to a standard netbook equivalent, but some of this is gained back through slimmer cabling to and from the adaptor. This will be particularly true for UK consumers who have to put up with thick mains leads.

As it names implies, the Slim 95’s rating is 95 watts which powers and charges a plethora of devices from the 10 watts or thereabouts needed to cope with tablets and some smartphones to the 45 watts of a camcorder and 65 watts of a laptop.

The adaptor is supplied with nine different tips covering the 11 major makes of laptop (Samsung, Dell, Acer, Asus, HP/Compaq, IBM/Lenovo, Gateway, MSI, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba), which attach very tightly to a universal interface. Note: Apple laptops are not covered but there is a power LED to let you know that it is working correctly.

A particular feature is that the Slim 95 can charge a laptop and second device through its USB port at the same time which immediately means that users don’t have to carry around one power supply. Add in a third USB-chargeable device and the weight savings start adding up.

Slightly confusingly, Innergie also sells an identically-rated mains adaptor with two USB charging ports but for most people this is probably overkill.

The diagram on the firm’s website lists a voltage switch although that was missing from the unit sent for review; presumably it is auto-sensing. The Slim 95 states that includes protection from power surges although any competent laptop adaptor should also do this.

In use with a Samsung netbook we found it ran a bit cooler than the manufacturer's adaptor, charging the unit in the same time. It coped with dual-charging a smartphone equally well.

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Xamarin 2.0 works mobile development magic

Unless you've been living on a planet far, far, away from the galactic trade routes, you know there are only two practical choices of programming languages -- Java and Objective-C -- for developing native mobile apps. If you are an experienced C# codesmith who wanted to try your hand at Android or iOS app development, you were out of luck. No longer: Xamarin 2.0, an SDK produced by Xamarin, allows you to write Android and iOS apps using C# code. Equally important, you can do this with Microsoft's Visual Studio.

The Xamarin SDK is based on an open source project known as Mono that allows Microsoft .Net applications to run on other platforms. Xamarin currently consists of class libraries, a C# compiler, and a virtual machine. The class libraries implement the core APIs of Microsoft's .Net 4.0 framework. The compiler complies with the C# 5.0 standard, and it has support for namespaces and assemblies. The virtual machine executes the Common Language Infrastructure bytecode generated by the C# compiler.

The Xamarin SDK also provides platform-specific frameworks that work with Google's Android APIs and Apple's iOS APIs. However, these frameworks are not abstraction layer APIs that only access a lowest common denominator of platform services. Instead, they provide "bindings" -- mechanisms that enable C# method calls to properly invoke native methods designed for use with a different programming language -- to the native APIs for each platform. The Android API binding frameworks are called Mono for Android, while those for iOS are called MonoTouch. The result: Xamarin lets you write a native mobile app entirely in C# code.

To use the Xamarin SDK to its fullest, the app should be factored so that its UI code is uncoupled from its core algorithmic code. That is, you write the core algorithms with the .Net framework, then implement the native UI for each target platform using the Mono for Android and MonoTouch frameworks. The factored design allows the app to be built and deployed on both Android and iOS devices, where the app's core code uses the native API of the target platform. This scheme lets you repurpose field-tested C# code and libraries. It also provides some flexibility in choosing how many of the platform's native APIs to use. For example, your app might draw on the .Net networking stack for network services or rely on the platform's own networking stack frameworks.

To develop your Android and iOS apps, you can use Xamarin's own IDE, Xamarin Studio, or stick with Visual Studio. The Xamarin IDE allows you to organise projects into solutions so that one build command will make both an Android app and an iOS app. The Xamarin IDE also lets you execute and debug code in simulators for each platform or on the devices themselves. There's no compromise if you prefer to develop in Visual Studio, as Xamarin lets you build, download, and debug app code on the target devices with Microsoft's IDE.

iOS app development: It's complicated

Although Xamarin lets you use your Windows PC for iOS development, that doesn't mean you don't need a Mac. For a number of reasons, Xamarin still requires Apple's iOS SDK tools to complete the code generation. For example, the Xcode simulator is required for code debugging, and the app's interface must be designed using Xcode's layout and storyboard editor, Interface Builder (IB). Finally, to distribute apps in the App Store you must use Xcode's code-signing mechanism.

How is it possible to use Visual Studio to write and debug iOS apps? Xamarin performs a clever sleight of hand that sets up the Mac as a back-end build server to Visual Studio. Installing Xamarin on the Mac places a remote build server on the computer. This build server uses Apple's Bonjour service discovery protocol so that Windows systems can find it on the network and establish remote sessions with it. An inexpensive Mac Mini can be used as a shared network resource for multiple Windows developers.

When you execute a build with Visual Studio, the remote session has the build server issue the appropriate command lines to the Xcode build tools. (This works because the Xcode IDE itself is simply a GUI layered over command-line tools.) After the build completes, the iOS simulator on the Mac starts and remote commands from Visual Studio operate the simulator through the Xcode debugger. Or the Xcode debugger can download the code onto an iOS device, and you can debug it there through Visual Studio.

The other aspect to iOS app development is whether to IB or not to IB. The UI of an iOS app can be constructed two ways: either through program code or by using Xcode's visual editor. IB lets you lay out the app's interface by pointing, clicking, and dragging UI elements. These UI elements are actually Cocoa Touch framework objects in a serialised format. That is, you manipulate the UI objects themselves in IB. This ability to edit Cocoa Touch objects is not easily duplicated on the PC. Therefore, you either have to use IB on the Mac to design the app's UI or write the UI entirely in code to implement it. In the latter case, you can use a utility like PaintCode, which lets you design the UI visually; it then generates the appropriate Objective-C or C# code.

Constructing the UI for an Android app can be accomplished with Windows tools, because Android uses XML to store the layout. Xamarin Studio has a graphical layout editor similar to IB that lets you construct the Android app's UI visually. Xamarin also provides an add-in that implements this graphical editor in Visual Studio.

Using Xamarin Studio to run a C# app in the iOS simulator. A breakpoint has been set in a platform-specific UI file that manages the native implementation of a log-in screen.

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Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 narrows the gap

With the release of Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V gains increased scalability in terms of both raw specs and features that make larger environments easer to manage. Hyper-V 2012 pushes the limits to 4TB of RAM per host and 64 nodes per cluster, and it adds advanced features such as a virtual switch, a virtual SAN, and live storage migration that were previously available only from VMware. It also includes native clustering capability, so you have the ability to build a highly available virtual machine cluster with commodity hardware and two OS licenses.

Although Microsoft has made great strides in many feature areas, there is still a fairly substantial gap between Hyper-V and VMware vSphere at the high end. VMware has many features focused on service providers, whether they're companies offering services for sale or large enterprise IT departments delivering services to business units within the company. Hyper-V 2012 does not have anything like VMware's vSphere Storage DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), for example, where you can provision different classes of storage based on a set of requirements to include cost and performance. Hyper-V also lacks many of the new virtual data centre features recently introduced by VMware. (See my review of VMware vSphere 5.1.)

That said, Hyper-V 2012 also introduces many new features that make it more attractive to small and midsized companies where cost is a significant driver. The new capabilities in SMB 3.0 allow anyone to stand up an HA Hyper-V cluster using low-cost servers and commodity SAS disk drives. In the past you would have been required to purchase a high-dollar storage system to get the same level of reliability, and you would have needed to buy the virtualisation software from a vendor other than Microsoft. Low-cost HA clustering alone will make IT managers think twice about spending scarce IT budget dollars on additional software when Windows Server 2012 comes with Hyper-V in the box.

In addition to examining features and manageability, I ran a few performance tests. Using the Sandra 2013 benchmarks for a Windows 32-bit client, I tested Windows VM performance under vSphere 5.0, vSphere 5.1, Hyper-V under Windows Server 2008 R2, and Hyper-V under Windows Server 2012. The server hardware used for this review was a Dell PowerEdge R715 with dual AMD Opteron 6380 CPUs, 64GB of memory, and two Seagate ST9300605SS 10K 300GB SAS drives configured as a RAID1 array.

Installation and configuration: Hyper-V 2012 couldn't be any easier to install in Windows Server 2012. Simply choose the Hyper-V role from the Server Manager application, click through a few screens, and you're done. Be aware that the install will require a reboot of your server. You'll need to go through a few basic configuration steps before you can actually deploy VMs on your new Hyper-V installation. All Hyper-V 2012 VMs require a virtual switch connection in order to communicate over the network. Because a virtual switch must be connected to an underlying network interface for a physical connection, you must configure this connection after Hyper-V is installed.

While included in Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V 2012 is also available in a free stand-alone version. This product essentially installs a server-core version of Windows Server 2012 with a minimal user interface. It's intended to be managed remotely, with just a few options and controls available from the console. These include details such as changing the computer name, networking configuration, enabling remote desktop, and powering down the system. Adding a Hyper-V Server 2012 host to the management console on another Windows Server 2012 machine requires merely a right-click and the entry of the Hyper-V server's IP address.

New and improved: A number of new capabilities introduced in Hyper-V 2012 extend existing features. For example, live migration of running VMs, which previously required shared storage, can now be done in a nonclustered environment. This feature is called "shared nothing migration" in some circles. Live storage migration -- a new feature that aims at parity with VMware -- makes it possible to move the virtual hard disks in use by a running VM to a different storage device. These two features combined make it possible to move running VMs between any connected machines on a domain.

Hyper-V Replica, which provides unlimited, host-to-host replication of virtual machines without shared storage, brings Microsoft up to par with other virtualisation vendors in the area of redundancy. The ability to store Hyper-V disks on SMB shares is yet another feature that delivers a new level of resiliency in the form of Cluster Shared Volumes for SMB file stores. Cluster Shared Volumes essentially eliminates the need for high-cost storage to deploy an HA virtualisation solution. The new Hyper-V Extensible Switch provides a platform upon which networking vendors can build new functionality. Hyper-V switch extensions might include network-based virus protection or intrusion detection solutions, for example.

On the numbers front, there are gains in the amount of memory an individual guest can support (1TB vs. 64GB in Windows Server 2008 R2), logical processors per host (320 vs. 64), and nodes per cluster (64 vs. 16). The total number of virtual processors per host is now 2,048, up from 512 in Windows Server 2008 R2. A single host can now support up to 1,024 active VMs as opposed to 384 in the previous release. Support for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) inside virtual machines is new to Hyper-V 2012 as well.

Managing Hyper-V 2012: Microsoft has two basic paths for managing Hyper-V 2012 out of the box, using either the graphical user interface Hyper-V Manager or PowerShell. Either way, the work gets done with PowerShell commands and scripts behind the scenes. The real power behind both management paths is the ability to manage multiple machines from a single console. Hyper-V Manager can manage any number of different Hyper-V hosts, all from within the same console. Even for small deployments, managing Hyper-V through Hyper-V Manager is much more efficient than remotely logging into each machine. The wizard-based approach to guiding you through most of the management tasks helps fledgling Hyper-V administrators get the job done.

PowerShell 3.0 is without question one of the other huge productivity gains for IT administrators responsible for supporting Windows Server 2012. With something like 2,430 new "cmdlets," there isn't an area of managing a Windows Server 2012 deployment without some support through PowerShell. With respect to Hyper-V 2012, there are upward of 140 unique cmdlets for managing all aspects of creating, provisioning, and running VMs. That number also includes cmdlets for managing the virtual network switch and other Hyper-V 2012 configuration parameters.

The next level of VM management comes in the form of Microsoft's System centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). SCVMM 2012 is the latest version but does not support Windows Server 2012 unless you apply Service Pack 1. Microsoft does offer a fully functional Hyper-V instance of SCVMM 2012 SP1 that includes the required SQL Server back end. You can install this on a Hyper-V 2012 host and manage other Windows Server 2012 systems once the configuration is complete. SCVMM 2012 is definitely the way to go for any organization with a large number of VMs.

Performance gains: Hyper-V 2012 includes a number of improvements in the area of performance. As you can see from the comparative table, which shows Sandra 2013 test results for a 32-bit Windows 7 SP1 VM, the most obvious is in the area of the crypto bandwidth tests. Previous versions of Hyper-V did not support AES-NI instructions in Intel's Westmere CPUs or in the AMD Bulldozer CPUs. Hyper-V 2012 provides this support, as the numbers clearly show. Almost across the board, my Sandra results showed performance of Hyper-V 2012 improved over Hyper-V 2008 and even VMware vSphere 5.1. (Note: I did not test performance of Linux VMs.)

Other areas of performance gain are hard to measure directly but are present nonetheless. These include the virtual SAN support, which allows you to connect a VM directly to a virtual Fibre Channel host bus adapter. This makes it possible to provision a VM with direct-attached storage to support specific workloads that in the past would have required a dedicated server. Another key improvement in the I/O area is new support for Single-Root I/O virtualis ation. Allowing supporting physical network interfaces to be carved into multiple virtual NICs, SR-IOV improves the Hyper-V host's networking functionality and overall throughput.

Final analysis: Hyper-V 2012 combines significant management and usability improvements with solid performance, especially for the purpose of virtualis ing many typical Windows workloads. New PowerShell cmdlets streamline the process of automating many of the tedious administration tasks previously requiring significant amounts of hands-on time. While there aren't any huge performance improvements from the individual guest perspective, the new I/O bandwidth features could represent significant areas for gains. When you couple that with other new OS features like SMB failover and clustering, you have the makings of a solid foundational product.

Now read: Virtualisation showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

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Virtualisation showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

Any comparison of Microsoft's Hyper-V versus VMware's vSphere has to take into consideration a number of different factors. First, there's the target customer and the feature set for different sizes of deployments. The needs vary widely depending on the number of virtual machine instances, and these requirements should drive the architecture and configuration choices. Second, there is the topic of management, which is also tied closely to the size of the installation. Beyond these considerations are a number of other issues, including cost, performance, scalability, and usability.

For example, when you install VMware ESXi on a host machine, you have a bare-metal hypervisor that runs independently of any operating system. If you use Windows Server 2012 as the foundation of your virtual infrastructure, you have an operating system that must be patched and updated periodically. That's not to say VMware ESXi doesn't need patches or updates from time to time, but it definitely has a smaller footprint than does Hyper-V.

We'll look at all of these issues and try to compare and contrast the two products from these angles. In the end, the answer depends on all of these factors. The best choice for a small or medium-sized deployment won't necessarily be the same as for a large-scale operation. Other details to consider include corporate culture, existing infrastructure, and history with either of the two products.

Target customer: VMware still has the edge when it comes to the high-end, high-volume virtualisation customer. VMware features such as the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) address the needs of large environments running large numbers of VMs with varied resource requirements. At the other end of the spectrum, you have to give the nod to Microsoft. If a small-to-medium-size business is purchasing Windows Server 2012 anyway, it doesn't make sense to also purchase VMware's vSphere to virtualise a few specific functions.

The hard-to-answer question is at what point it makes sense to go with VMware. Hyper-V 2012 leverages new capabilities in SMB 3.0 that give even the smallest shops the ability to stand up a high-availability cluster using low-cost servers and commodity SAS disk drives. Hyper-V 2012's host-to-host VM replication provides an additional level of redundancy not previously available from Microsoft and levels the playing field from that perspective.

At the same time, VMware has a similar function that uses the same Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) under the covers. These and many other similarities make comparing the two products problematic. In the end they are both compelling products with plenty of capabilities that you can tweak to meet most any virtualisation need.

Management tools: At the low end, Microsoft gives you a basic set of tools in Hyper-V Manager, which comes as an installable option with Windows Server 2012. VMware's traditional management tool, the VMware vSphere Client, is a free client you must install on a Windows PC. Both offerings connect to remote hosts, allowing you to manage any system you can reach over the network.

Some functions are not possible in the basic management tools for either product. Advantage here goes to Microsoft as Hyper-V Manager can, for example, export a VM, then do an import to clone or copy the VM. With VMware you must be connected to vcentre Server in order to export or clone a VM. With respect to monitoring, however, the VMware vSphere Client provides much more information about both the host servers and the client VMs. VMware scores a point here for a more detailed graphical presentation.

VMware provides vcentre Server for managing large installations while Microsoft offers System centre 2012. The latest release of vcentre (5.1) adds a Web client to the mix, providing the ability to manage your VMware infrastructure from literally anywhere. Both VMware and Microsoft support automated management using Windows PowerShell. VMware offers a free add-on called PowerCLI that includes a long list of custom PowerShell cmdlets for managing your vSphere infrastructure.

Performance and scalability: Deciding how to measure performance and scalability presents a challenge when comparing these two products. Microsoft has made a number of enhancements in Hyper-V 2012 that in some cases exceed the outer limits of vSphere. If you want to gauge scalability in terms of raw numbers like nodes supported in a cluster (64 for Hyper-V 2012 vs. 32 for vSphere 5.1) or VMs in a cluster (8,000 for Hyper-V 2012 vs. 4,000 for vSphere 5.1), you would deduce that Microsoft takes that round.

But measuring real-world capacity goes way beyond the basic numbers. Case in point: Both products now support the concept of dynamic memory, albeit in different manners. With Hyper-V 2012, you can configure individual VMs with an initial memory allocation and allow the hypervisor to adjust the amount of memory depending on current needs. This is not the default option when creating a new VM but a configuration setting. VMware has had this feature for several years, and the company claims much more real-world experience in the realm of memory utilization. Advantage here goes to VMware, but Microsoft has narrowed that gap substantially with Hyper-V 2012.

At the individual VM level, I used the Sandra 2013 benchmarking tool to determine basic numbers of performance from a single VM running Windows 7 SP1. This VM was configured to have 2GB of memory and two virtual CPUs. I ran four different benchmarks using Hyper-V 2008, Hyper-V 2012, vSphere 5.0, and vSphere 5.1. You can see from the table that Hyper-V 2012 holds its own against vSphere, at least with respect to running Windows VMs. Note that I did not test performance of Linux VMs. (Tests were run on a Dell PowerEdge R715 with dual AMD Opteron 6380 CPUs, 64GB of memory, and two Seagate ST9300605SS 10K 300GB SAS drives configured as a RAID1 array.)  

The bottom line: Finally, one of the most difficult factors to compare is cost. If you're looking at a small number of virtualised servers running Windows Server 2012, you already get that with the purchase of the operating system. Windows Server 2012 Standard comes with two virtual instances, while Windows Server 2012 Datacentre includes an unlimited number of VMs on a single machine. It really doesn't make sense to purchase an additional virtualisation product for a small-to-medium deployment.

VMware pricing starts at £2,354 for VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit, plus the vSphere Storage Appliance, covering three hosts with two CPUs each. Pricing for the central management system starts at $1,495 for the VMware vcentre Server Foundation, which supports up to three hosts. VMware vcentre Server Standard, which supports an unlimited number of hosts, costs $4,995. VMware vSphere with Operations Management bundles add deeper monitoring and automation capabilities; they start at $1,745 per processor.

Microsoft charges a base price of $882 for Windows Server 2012 Standard and $4,809 for Windows Server 2012 Datacentre for one machine with up to two CPUs.UK pricing from the web is around £500. This does not include individual client access licenses (CALs), which are required for each user or device accessing the server, or coverage for additional CPUs. The base price for System centre 2012 is $3,607 for a two-CPU server license and unlimited number of managed operating systems.

Microsoft also has a private cloud offering for customers looking to deploy a minimum of 25 server instances. Called the Cloud Infrastructure Server Suite, it includes System centre 2012 and offers advanced features like self-service workflow, automated provisioning, usage metering, and virtual networks.

Nevertheless, VMware has a number of features for high-end users that Microsoft can't match -- notably the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and a more advanced virtual switch. DRS is a self-learning automation engine that balances load across both servers and storage devices. The vSphere Distributed Switch includes enhancements such as network health check, backup and restore, rollback and recovery, and LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) support.

Choosing between the two vendors should be relatively easy for the high-end and low-end customers. VMware still wins the big shops, and Microsoft is now the clear choice for the small guys. The fight over the middle has only just begun, and it promises to be an interesting one. Microsoft will no doubt attempt to creep up the ladder while VMware will do everything in its power to keep the castle walls from being breeched.

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Brother MFC-J4510DW

The Brother MFC-J4510DW surprises you from first glance, a low-slung top measuring just 185mm deep but very wide. Black and cream isn't always an attractive combination, but it works here, a broad black stripe rippling across to match the bold dark top.

Wide looks betray the feature that makes this that most multifunctional of MFDs - an A3 printer. Paper is loaded sideways. This seems a touch quirky, but it's actually a brilliant twist that means the longer edge of paper now matches up with the longer width of most printers. For occasional A3, it makes a good deal of sense.

The Brother MFC-J4510DW is a smidgen wider than other models which helps it accommodate A3 (297 x 420mm) paper.

Setup is reasonably straightforward – even if this is the first printer where we had to consult the instructions to find out where to connect a USB cable.

Using the Brother is a joy, thanks to a sizeable and colourful 3.7in screen which makes the MFD logical and easy to operate.

With on-board fax, there's a danger that an MFD may get overloaded with keys, but the Brother employs the clever trick of lighting up buttons as and when you need them. Do something simple, you only have a few buttons to choose from.

Extensive connectivity options encompass Wi-Fi and ethernet. It also has cloud-computing credentials, and you can hook up the printer to mobile devices and memory card through a range of slots.

A nice touch is the Secure Print feature, which waits until you reach the printer before printing, to keep confidential work confidential.

We also liked the scanning component. There’s a substantial lid which can be adjusted for larger material, and the 2400x2400dpi optical resolution allows for good image depth. The additional 20-sheet ADF helps faxing enormously.

Paper handling is solid, with the well-built paper tray taking up to 150 sheets at a time. This is a decent amount for most purposes, although businesses making frequent use of the printer may find that the paper needs to be replaced a little too often.

The larger A3 prints need to be done in Best mode, and the fastest we could manage was 2m 55s for a full print, rather than 1m 42s for the A4 equivalent.

With regular A4 pages it’s a little faint at fastest 18.3ppm mode, but the middle settings still churn out pages at a decent 13.3ppm, and the text here is relatively dark and has considerable clarity, with none of the blurred lettering common to most inkjets.

The top mode was better still, at the expense of speed, at a mere 1.8ppm. Our magnifying glass revealed that it doesn't have the perfection of a good laser, but quality is good enough to pass most inspections.
In all modes colour was a little faint and watered down. If you want images packed with excitement, the Brother leaves you under-thrilled. Results with photographic paper are better, where the Brother MFC-J4510DW offers vibrant prints.

Auto duplexing is supported, with a hit on the speed, and even in fast-mode text falls from 18.3ppm to just 5.3ppm – a huge fall that means few may be prepared to wait for their paper-saving.

The Brother MFC-J4510DW is fairly quiet, although it does emit a noise like distant fireworks. This noise sometimes persists after printing.

Cartridge prices will be £23.99 for black and £15.59 for each CMY colour, in 600-page yield sizes. Higher yield options are £32.99, and £22.79 each for 1200-page refills.

In best-case with high yield 1200-page refills, costs are 2.75p black, and 5.7p colour. That’s reasonably competitive.

The £140 HP Photosmart 7520 has costs of 2.4p/4.8p, so Brother isn't quite as cheap. But it’s more affordable than the Canon MX895, at 2.9p and 12.5p for black/colour respectively.

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