Year: 2004

The long waited VMware competitor seems to be (quite) arrived. Today Microsoft announced general availability of VS2005 Release Candidate. Just register and download it! (it expires January 1, 2005)

The big news it that there will be two different editions:

– Standard Edition, supporting up to 4 processors
– Enterprise Edition, supporting up to 32 processors (not available for download)

This is the only real difference.

Here the Standard Edition minimum requirements:

– Minimum CPU Speed
550 MHz or faster; 1.0 GHz or faster recommended

– Host Operating System
Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition
Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition
Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition
Windows Server Small Business Server 2003, Standard Edition
Windows Server Small Business Server 2003, Premium Edition
Windows XP Professional (for non-production use only)

Microsoft also kindly adviced about not-Windows operating systems availability:

Virtual Server 2005 guest virtual machine environments are optimized for Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows NT 4.0 Server, yet enables users to run a broad range of x86-based operating systems.

Just remember: Microsoft doesn’t support any OS but Windows.

Microsoft hopes to go in RTM before end of summer and broadly distribute VS2005 before the end of the year.

Maybe you know San Diego TechEd 2004 is closed. Maybe you also know that during TechEd few sessions were about Virtual PC 2004 and upcoming Virtual Server 2005.

To be exact here the sessions list about both products and relative slide, videos and hands on lab:

With the release of Workstation 4.5.2, VMware stopped virtual disks and partitions “home-made” operations like moving from a smaller vdisk to a larger one, changing vdisk type, and so on.
The new Virtual Disk Manager do all of these tasks and more:

– Automate the management of virtual disks with scripts.
– Create virtual disks that are not associated with a particular virtual machine, to be used as templates, for example.
– Switch the virtual disk type from preallocated to growable, or vice versa. When you change the disk type to growable, you reclaim some space on the virtual disk. You can shrink the virtual disk to reclaim even more disk space.
– Expand the size of a virtual disk so it is larger than the size specified when you created it.
– Defragment virtual disks.
– Prepare and shrink virtual disks without powering on the virtual machine. (Windows hosts only.)

VDM will work on vdisks created with VMware GSX Server, VMware Workstation and VMware VirtualCenter (provided the virtual disk was created on a GSX Server host managed by VirtualCenter).
The only spot is that there is no GUI for it: just command line program.

Anyone wanna develop a GUI frontend for this, uh?

VMware just releases a minor upgrade for its most famous product: VMware Workstation.
Ok, I’m joking: this is a minor release only for release number. But it’s a really big improvement in virtualization technologies.

Here the changes:

– VMware Virtual Disk Manager
You can create, manage and modify virtual disk files from the command line or within scripts with the VMware Virtual Disk Manager utility. For more information, see Using VMware Virtual Disk Manager.

– Enhanced VPN support over NAT
VMware Workstation now supports PPTP over NAT.

Solaris users come back to the family! (and please, please: someone develop a new unofficial VMware Tools for Solaris 10…)

—

Update: I just tried a Windows Server 2003 GuestOS inside new Workstation 4.5.2. It seems much faster than before. Even faster than a real machine. Comment this post and tell me if I’m the only one having this impression.

Virtualization market is mature enough to accept a dedicated event. This is what VMware managers probably thought when created VMWorld conference.

So we now have the First Annual VMware User Conference, organized in San Diego, California for October 27-29, 2004.
Actually registrations are still closed, but you can sign up announcements newsletter to be informed when you can register.

Still no informations on prices, sessions, tracks and so on. Stay tuned for updates.

Maybe we’ll meet there, who knows.

Today I discovered for the first time a very old (but still active) project about virtualization called Parallel Virtual Machine.

Quoting from website:

PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or Windows computers hooked together by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer. Thus large computational problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and memory of many computers. The software is very portable. The source, which is available free thru netlib, has been compiled on everything from laptops to CRAYs.

PVM enables users to exploit their existing computer hardware to solve much larger problems at minimal additional cost. Hundreds of sites around the world are using PVM to solve important scientific, industrial, and medical problems in addition to PVM’s use as an educational tool to teach parallel programming. With tens of thousands of users, PVM has become the de facto standard for distributed computing world-wide.

Thanks to Raffaele for pick up on this.

previously reported about the new Serenity Virtual Station (SVISTA) beta program. Competing with EMC/VMware and Microsoft, Serenity can still count on a quite notable base of interested users: whole OS/2 community see in this virtualization product the only, at today, occasion to consolidate and integrate their OS/2 applications with Windows, Linux, FreeBSD environments.

So on OS/2 World web forum you can read first comments (and a couple of small screenshots) about this story.

Thanks Friedrich for pointing my attention to this.

During San Diego TechEd 2004, Microsoft release an interesting Information Resource Kit containing new informations on this long awaited product.

CD contains:

-) 2 White Papers (Virtual Server 2005 Product White Paper and Virtual Server 2005 Technical White Paper)
-) 2 Presentations (Virtual Server 2005 Product Overview Presentation and Virtual Server 2005 Technical Overview Presentation)
-) 1 Product Information flayer (Virtual Server 2005 Data Sheet)

Quoting from original VMware announcement:

How Virtual Hardware Enables Real Recovery!

Sign up today, space is limited!
Attendees will be entered into a drawing to win one of three copies of
VMware Workstation.

Only USA locations are available. I really hope VMware arrange something in Europe or ever record event on a webinar.

If someone of blog reader will attend this seminar can send me a detailed feedback: I’ll publish it here for sure. Thanks.

Quoting from Yahoo Finance:

Serenity Systems International (SSI) has announced an open (public) beta program for its Serenity Virtual Station (SVISTA) product, a virtual machine application for Intel based PCs. The software being tested runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and IBM’s OS/2. A FreeBSD version is planned for later this year.
SVISTA supports running of different operating systems, or multiple instances of the same operating system, as “guest desktops” inside the virtual machine. This provides the user with the ability to access multiple desktops on the same computer at the same time.

Presentations providing more information on this functionality are available on http://www.serenityvirtual.com

What isn’t said in this article is that joining beta program will cost $50 (V.A.T. excluded), cause you need to buy the beta release at online shop. IMHO this is quite absurd: why one person should pay for an instable and young product when he can choose between EMC/VMware and Microsoft products lines?
Isn’t for the 50 dollars, is for the principle.