Year: 2003

The first Microsoft made Virtual PC edition is finally available on MSDN on Platforms section.
It’s a 40 MB iso available only in English language.

VMware just expanded product line introducing a hi-end tool for multiple ESX server (and multiple GSX Server in future) environments: VirtualCenter 1.0

VirtualCenter offers an advanced VMs control that GSX and ESX web management interfaces cannot offer. It also introduces VMotion technology to move without any downtime a virtual machine from one physical ESX to another one.

With VirtualCenter VMware eventually cuts off many third parties companies providing VMs managing products, like Leostream, Platespin, Dunes, etc.

Microsoft annnounced will distribute Virtual PC 2004 on MSDN (any subscription) for mid-November 2003.

I found this paper while Googlin around: hope it’s useful for some of you:

http://suif.stanford.edu/papers/lisa03-deploying-vap.pdf

Some days ago the just launched VMware web community saw 1000th user registered.
A quite impressive result that can provide an idea of how many customers are around (this was impossible with newsgroups analysis).

VMware choosed to add this support tool to already existing newsgroups to let enterprise users (managing company firewalls blocking NNTP protocol, for example) be obtain more profit from community.

First real Microsoft release of Virtual PC, since Connectix acquisitions, is becoming reality (before this, MS released a Virtual PC 6.1 for MAC in August) in about a week and will be worldwide available in around 90 days.
Virtual PC will be also included in MSDN subcriptions.

Virtual Server is actually in a pre-beta phase accessible via Customer Preview Program since May.
Expected beta phase is now shifted to mid November while official release is shifted from end 2003 to first half 2004 (some sources reports this could happen during first quarter, around February).

Yes,
it’s true: Microsoft Certified Trainers and Linux User Groups members can receive a full Workstation license absolutely at no cost.
Here’s official announcement:

As a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) or Linux User Group charter member, you’re on the forefront of developments in information technology, and your colleagues depend on you for guidance on critical systems decisions.

http://www.vmware.com/wl/offer/427/0

VMware already done this some years ago for MCTs. Now we are here again.
Maybe they are trying to attract as much experts as possible before Microsoft releases Virtual Server…

Virtual Driver Disk (VDD) is a free utility developed by Kenji Kato, one of unofficial VMware supporters that answers on newsgroups.
VDD permits you to mount a virtual disk and see it as a physical disk on any physical machine you want, reading, writing, etc any file inside it.

From 3.0 release notes:
Now you can use up to 22 virtual disk drives at the same time. You can increase/decrease the number of drivers while the driver is running.
New “write-block” virtual disk open mode. In this mode, the virtual disk appears to be writable to the OS, but every write command is silently ignored and data is not actually written to the image file.
Now you can use raw sector image devided into multiple files. This is in effect the same thing as VMware 2.x Plain Disk or VMware 4.x Flat Virtual Disk, but with a very simple list of component files as the descriptor file.
Now you can see the partition structure of a disk image without actually opening it as a virtual disk.

Red Hat, the most widely used commercial Linux distribution, has announced that it will not release any more products in the Red Hat Linux line.
They will continue to sell Enterprise Linux line (version 3.0 is just released).

This could means that VMware ESX Server (based on a custom Red Hat Linux) could switch to another base OS in its next releases.