Year: 2005

Quoting from the official VMware support page:

1. What server products did VMware announce at VMworld?
VMware announced ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 at its VMworld user conference. These releases will be major upgrades to the current ESX Server and VirtualCenter releases.

2. Are ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 available now?
No, ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 are currently in limited beta testing. A public beta program will begin later this year and general release will follow in the first quarter of 2006.

3. What is new in these releases?

• NAS and iSCSI Support
  By supporting lower-cost, more easily managed shared storage, ESX Server 3 lowers the barrier to entry for deploying virtual infrastructure and further reduces total cost of ownership (TCO). Advanced ESX Server features like VMotion and Distributed availability services are fully supported with NAS and iSCSI environments. Virtual machines see identical virtual storage containers regardless of the underlying physical setup, ensuring hardware independence.
• 4-Way Virtual SMP
  Only VMware Virtual SMP allows a single virtual machine to span multiple physical processors. Virtual SMP and ESX Server 3 extend the feature to support virtual machines configured with up to four processors. 4-way Virtual SMP lets ESX Server virtual machines handle the processing requirements of scaled up workloads like databases and messaging servers so applications previously reserved for physical systems can now enjoy the ease of management and flexibility offered by virtualization. Additional service fees and conditions apply.
• 16GB RAM for Virtual Machines
  ESX Server 3 lets you allocate up to 16GB of memory per virtual machine to support the most demanding workloads in virtual machines. The expanded memory capability together with 4-way Virtual SMP truly enable virtualization anywhere in your data center.
• Distributed Availability Services
  An option when used under VirtualCenter 2 management, Distributed availability services detects failed virtual machines and automatically restarts them on alternate ESX Server hosts. Distributed availability services selects a failover host that can honor the virtual machine’s resource allocations so that service level guarantees remain intact. With Distributed availability services, you can deliver high availability for critical applications without the cost and complexity of clustering. Additional service fees and conditions apply.
• Distributed Resource Scheduling
  Built on top of VMotion and VirtualCenter, Distributed resource scheduling intelligently and continuously balances virtual machine workloads across your ESX Server hosts so you can safely operate at 80% utilization or higher. Distributed resource scheduling detects when virtual machine activity saturates an ESX Server host and it triggers automated VMotion live migrations, moving running virtual machines to other ESX Server nodes so that all resource commitments are met. Distributed resource scheduling enables a self-managing, highly optimized compute cluster with built-in resource and load balancing. Additional service fees and conditions apply.
• VMware Consolidated Backup
  An ESX Server 3 option offering improved backup performance and simplicity, Consolidated backup supports host-free, LAN-free, agentless backup of Windows virtual machines. Consolidated backup automatically quiesces a virtual disk before creating an online snapshot with no virtual machine downtime required. A separate physical machine can mount the snapshots and use a standard backup agent to back the data up. Consolidated backup provides the simplicity of backing up an entire running virtual machine in one operation while allowing file-level restores. Additional service fees and conditions apply.
• Large-Scale Management
  VirtualCenter 2 can manage hundreds of ESX Server hosts and thousands of virtual machines. VirtualCenter 2 starts up faster, is more responsive and is designed from the ground up to handle the largest virtual infrastructure deployments.
• Unified User Interface
  ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 share a new VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client accessible from any Windows PC or browser. Remotely access and manage ESX Server hosts, virtual machines and VirtualCenter Management Servers from a single client.
• Improved Virtual Infrastructure Oversight
  VirtualCenter 2 centralizes storage of virtual machine configuration files and VMware licenses for greater deployment flexibility. Finer grained access controls and audit trails support enterprise security requirements. An improved inventory model and interactive topology views help simplify management.
• Expanded ESX Server Hardware Support
  We anticipate ESX Server 3 will be certified with industry-leading rack, tower and blade servers from Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, NEC, Sun and Unisys. ESX Server 3 supports AMD and Intel dual-core processors (a dual-core processor is considered as one processor for licensing purposes).
• Expanded ESX Server Guest Operating System Support
  We anticipate ESX Server 3 will be certified with recently updated Windows, Linux and NetWare guest operation systems.
• Expanded I/O Device Support
  We anticipate ESX Server 3 will be certified with additional PCI-based SCSI, RAID, Fibre Channel, and Ethernet controllers.
• Expanded Storage Area Network Support
  We anticipate ESX Server 3 will be certified with additional Fibre Channel SAN products.

4. What is the pricing for ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2?
VMware will announce pricing for ESX Server 3, VirtualCenter 2 and related components such as Distributed availability services, Distributed resource scheduling, Consolidated backup, 4-way Virtual SMP and VMotion at a later date.

5. I currently own licenses for ESX Server and VirtualCenter. How will I upgrade to the new releases?
VMware ESX Server, VirtualCenter, Virtual SMP and VMotion customers with active Support and Subscription contracts are entitled to the new releases at no cost. Virtual SMP upgrades provide current Virtual SMP customers with the new 4-way version of Virtual SMP. The new Distributed availability services, Distributed resource scheduling and Consolidated backup options will be available for purchase by existing customers with pricing for those options to be announced at a later date.

6. Are ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 compatible with earlier releases?
VirtualCenter 2 can manage mixed ESX Server 2 and ESX Server 3 hosts. The final releases of ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 will support in-place upgrades of ESX Server 2 and VirtualCenter 1 servers. ESX Server 3 will be capable of running older ESX Server 2 virtual machines, but those virtual machines should be upgraded using tools provided with ESX Server 3 to permit them to use all the new capabilities in ESX Server 3.

7. Is there a beta program I can join?
VMware will be announcing a public beta program for ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 later in the fourth quarter of 2005. To sign up for our beta program, please see this Web page: http://www.vmware.com/betarequest

If you have designed hardware availability and enough time to spend (and you are in very need of upcoming ESX and VC features) you can try to apply for the new beta program starting in the 4Q 05: http://www.vmware.com/betarequest

Good luck!

Quoting from CRN:

The imminent launch of XenSource’s first commercial open source solutions will kick off commoditization in the virtualization software market and threaten VMware’s bread-and-butter revenues, observers predict.

XenSource, the Palo Alto, Calif. startup that also oversees the open source Xen project, will launch its first management and automation solutions based on the open source Xen 3 virtualization engine in two weeks, said Simon Crosby, founder and vice president of strategy for Xensource.

For XenSource, the Xen virtualization engine is a free platform service on which other value-added solutions can be built. Microsoft has the same notion and also announced plans earlier this year to integrate a virtualization hypervisor into the Longhorn Windows Server R2 in 2008.

Crosby said more servers aren’t running virtualization because VMWare’s flagship ESX product is too costly. “We can rapidly accelerate adoption of the virtual enterprise if we have the best hypervisor that is freely available,” he said. “It will create a huge market for solutions offerings around it, commercially supported offerings that we can build can build an ecosystem around.”

To that end, XenSource plans to build a strong channel program for ISVs and service firms and will try to avoid the portability problems Linux distribution vendors have encountered by offering a certified single Xen code base upon which all development will take place, Crosby said.

Commoditizing the virtualization engine is good news for customers but not necessarily for VMware, whose ESX server, introduced in 2001, transformed the tiny firm into a multi-million dollar empire acquired by EMC for more than $600 million early last year.

XenSource announced its formation and $6 million in funding from last January. Its co-founders are Crosby and Ian Pratt, who is the Xen project leader and a senior faculty member at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

“Xen is the biggest challenge to VMware coming over the next year, the first real challenge to VMware in the hypervisor market in the x86 market,” said Tom Bittman, a vice president and fellow at Gartner Group. “I don’t think Xen will take over the world, as it will be less mature initially, but it will be on the table.”

Xen is having broad repercussions across the industry. Since going public earlier this year, VMware has responded by pushing forth a platform based on open standards.

Microsoft formed a pact with VMware competitor SWSoft and last week announced significant licensing changes that address how virtual workloads will run on Windows, even as it prepares to integrate hypervisor technology into the Windows server by the end of the decade.

The introduction of XenSource’s commercial solutions puts VMware’s OEM partners in an uncomfortable position, said sources who declined to be named.

While Linux backers IBM and Hewlett-Packard have embraced Xen publicly, executives from the server and services divisions from those companies don’t want to disrupt the lucrative flow of revenues that come from their respective VMware practices, analyst and partners agree.

Xen is no hollow threat. Over the past year, the Xen open source project, which Xensource founders oversee separately, has received backing from virtually all of the major players in the industry including Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, HP, Dell and the entire Linux community.

Linux distribution leaders Red Hat and Novell, for instance, are integrating the Xen engine into their next generation Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 servers, due to ship in 2006. The kernel.org led by OSDL fellow and Linux creator Linus Torvald is implementing core aspects of Xen into the Linux kernel.

Initially, Xensource will go to market this quarter with Linux and open source solutions but Windows solutions will be offered in the first quarter of 2006, Crosby said. In August, the company demonstrated Windows XP running on Xen using Intel’s Virtualization Technology extensions. XenSource will also run on AMD’s “Pacifica” virtualization technology due in the first half of 2006.

Even as VMware pronounces technical superiority over Xen and a broad ecosystem of more than 1,000 ISVs and service partners, open source offerings tend to catch up fast, observers note.

The availability of Xensource’s new management and automation solutions, for example, will likely force VMware to make pricing cuts on ESX and shift its focus on VirtualCenter and other value-added solutions to stay relevant in the long term, analysts note.

XenSource demonstrated at the fall Intel Developer’s Forum its policy driven workload management solution for transactional enterprise applications, using the Xen hypervisor.

“It will be on the table in the same way that Microsoft attacked VMware’s GSX server and they dropped pricing 44 percent,” Gartner’s Bittman said. “When Xen comes out, VMware will watch carefully and if they see any nip on their heels they’ll be ready to drop the price on ESX.”

VMware appears to be heeding the open source threat.

As it prepares to kick off its partner and user conference in Las Vegas this week, VMware launched on Monday its next generation ESX 3 that includes Virtual SMP and VirtualCenter Agent with VMotion live migration technology starting at a base price of $5,000. Virtual SMP and VMotion are sold separately. Currently, pricing for ESX server starts at $3,750 for a two processor server; $1,200 for Virtual SMP and Virtual Centers starts at $5,000.

In conjunction with partners, VMware also introduced on Monday new services for Capacity Planning and Consolidation that will be delivered from VMware directly and VMware Authorized Consulting (VAC) partners. VMware Capacity Planner is based on AOG’s CapacityPlanner acquired by VMware earlier this year, sources said.

Additionally, the company is also extending its virtual infrastructure with advanced services for the server and desktop. VirtualCenter 2, also announced on Monday, features Distributed Availability Services and Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS).

At the conference, VMware will push the concept of the Enterprise Hosted Desktop using ESX 3 to serve up secure virtual desktops.

Reseller made good margins from ESX sales in the past but VMWare effectively commoditized the server when it authorized Insight and CDW to sell the server, some partners note.

So for many VMware partners, the commoditization has already forced them to shift to VMware’s advanced VirtualCenter 2 and VMotion technologies.

“The virtual engine is being commoditized and if Xen is another way to deliver it, then you need to layer on that and a key part of success is all the additional products being developed,” said Mike Reilly, managing partner at Foedus, a VMware Authorized Consulting partner based on Portsmouth, NH. “The real value of this environment is the virtual ecosystem you can build around it.”

Even as XenSource begins its assult on VMware, a Herndon, Va., firm called Parallel will launch in November a “lightweight” hypervisor for the desktop and early 2006 for the server aimed and priced for SMB customers.

VMware is becoming more channel friendly and plans to build a stronger army of channel partners to fight off incursions into its territory, partners said.

“They’re worried about Xen and even built some para-virtualization into ESX3,” said one VMware VIP partner who declined to be named. “VMware is learning to support their partner base and they have well meaning partner managers but it takes a while to change the culture,” he partner said. “They’re building it up slowly. It’s only a small part of the organization that truly believes they need partners beyond hardware partners.”

I personally believe we’ll not have any war unitl Xen won’t support Windows as guest OS. If this happens a huge number of users will really start using Xen, consolidating platform reliability and aiding enterprise adoption.
I also suppose a Windows-supported Xen will initially spread thanks to consolidated distributions (like SuSE, Red Hat, etc.) including it among standard packages and eventually live cd distributions (like Knoppix), providing a zero-time startup for virtualization infrastructures.

VMware VMTN community forums staff open today a new forum dubbed User Solutions where to collect how-to, scripts and other tools developed by experts and enthusiasts to solve the most common problems VMware technologies still have.

The new forum is already filled with great projects from VMguru follks.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that more than 60 leading operating system, database, application server, enterprise application, management and infrastructure software vendors now support their software applications in VMware virtual infrastructure environments. In addition, a wide range of leading software vendors have commercially available integrations with VMware virtual infrastructure.

“The industry continues to rally behind customers’ desires to standardize on VMware virtual infrastructure in their data centers for more flexible and cost-effective deployment and management of their application environments,” said Diane Greene, president of VMware. “We are proud of our broad and growing ecosystem of leading industry partners that support and integrate to VMware virtual infrastructure.”

Among the major software vendors and product groups that have support policies for their customers who run their software applications in and with VMware virtual infrastructure environments are Altiris, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Business Objects, Cerner Corporation, Check Point, Citrix Systems, Commvault, Computer Associates, EMC/Documentum/Legato, HP, Hyperion Solutions, IBM DB2/Domino/Lotus Notes/Tivoli/WebSphere, i2, Internet Security Systems, LANDesk, McAfee, McKesson, Mercury, Microsoft, MySQL AB, NetIQ, Novell/SuSE, Opsware, Oracle/JD Edwards/PeopleSoft, Peregrine Systems, Plumtree Software, Quest Software, Red Hat, SpikeSource, Sybase, Symantec and Teamquest.

“Thanks to the tremendous cost savings and efficiencies of virtualization, our goal is to virtualize as many of our servers as we can using VMware virtual infrastructure,” said Barry Naber, assistant director of IT operations at International Truck and Engine. “We are pleased to see so many major ISVs supporting VMware virtualization technology so we can continue adding to our virtual infrastructure.”

The leading applications, frameworks and software vendors that have integrations with VMware virtual infrastructure include AK Computer Services, Akimbi, Altiris, Aurema, Avaya, BMC Software, Cassatt, Centrify, ClearCentral, Computer Associates, Compuware, Dell OpenManage, Dunes, Enigmatec, Evident Software, Fox Technologies, HP OpenView/ProLiant Essentials, IBM Director/Rational/Tivoli, LANDesk, Leostream, Macrovision, Mercury, Metilinx, Microsoft Operations Manager, NetIQ, nworks, Opalis, Opsware, PerfMan, Platform Computing, PlateSpin, Quest Software/Vintela, Real Enterprise Systems, Segue, Softricity, Surgient, Symantec, Teamquest, Toolwire and Vizioncore. VMware continues to work with these and other partners on integrations with upcoming releases, including the next generation releases of its industry-leading data center products VMware ESX Server 3 and VMware VirtualCenter 2.

VMware, with its strong ecosystem of partners, continues to lead the market in providing innovative virtualization products:

“BMC Software is broadly committed to delivering solutions that leverage and optimize VMware virtual infrastructure environments as witnessed by our announcement this week regarding our Service Oriented Resource Management Strategy,” said Fred Johannessen, vice president and program executive of capacity management and provisioning at BMC Software. “Our customers are aggressively deploying VMware environments and with our new strategy and virtualization solutions, customers now have the ability to automatically provision new server and software resources, based on real-time business requirements.”

“Customers are embracing VMware virtual infrastructure to help them derive maximum business value from their investments in data center infrastructure,” said John Pincomb, vice president of product management at Computer Associates. “By building VMware support into our industry-leading management solutions, CA is uniquely enabling these customers to optimize their virtualized IT environments.”

“In response to increasing customer adoption of VMware virtual infrastructure environments, Hyperion has worked with VMware to qualify Hyperion configurations for VMware environments,” said John L. Kopcke, chief technology officer at Hyperion Solutions. “The combination of industry-leading Hyperion Business Performance Management software and the flexibility, efficiency and availability from VMware virtual infrastructure is a significant value for our joint customers.”

“We’ve had a positive response from customers running IBM Workplace, WebSphere Portal and Collaboration solutions in VMware virtual infrastructure environments, to deploy and manage their applications with increased flexibility,” said Ken Bisconti, vice president of workplace, portal and collaboration software at IBM. “We’re committed to supporting our customers who run IBM Software applications in VMware environments, and we look forward to exploring more ways to work closely with VMware to bring value to customers.”

“Increasingly more and more of our customers have discovered the value of running Internet Security Systems’ host protection solutions in a VMware environment,” said Heath Thompson, vice president of engineering at Internet Security Systems. “We are committed to our partnership with VMware and supporting customers who run our software in VMware environments because of the tremendous value we can offer our joint customers.”

“Novell Open Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Novell eDirectory and other Novell software running on VMware virtual infrastructure offer the flexibility and business value our enterprise customers demand,” said David Patrick, vice president and general manager of Linux, Open Source platforms and services at Novell. “As virtualization becomes a new standard layer in IT infrastructure, Novell is committed to supporting our customers who run Novell software in VMware environments and staying on the forefront of innovation.”

“Virtualization is a game-changing technology for organizations that provides flexibility and cost savings and improves overall productivity,” said Niall Wall, vice president of business development and alliances at Symantec. “Symantec is committed to continue working with VMware to provide customers with best-in-class solutions for high-availability, data protection, system recovery and storage management for their VMware environments.”

In addition, VMware virtual machines are rapidly becoming a preferred distribution vehicle for software vendors. Many software vendors, including BEA Systems, IBM Software, MySQL AB, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat and SpikeSource, distribute their software in downloadable, pre-installed virtual machine environments as part of the VMware Technology Network (VMTN). Software distribution in VMware virtual machines allows these vendors to more easily bring new technology to users for development, evaluation, testing and validation. Instead of spending time installing and configuring applications, developers, QA teams and IT organizations are able to focus their efforts on development and testing.

For more information, please visit www.vmware.com/isvsupport and www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today unveiled major new releases of its data center products: VMware ESX Server 3, virtual infrastructure software for partitioning hardware and consolidating application workloads in mission-critical environments, and VMware VirtualCenter 2, software for managing virtual infrastructure.

With the next generation releases of VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter, VMware offers a powerful enterprise virtualization platform that is providing the foundation for the industry’s next wave of innovative data center management technologies. VMware and its partner community are now delivering a comprehensive set of management technologies based on virtual infrastructure designed to substantially reduce the cost and complexity of data center environments.

“In the last several years since we first introduced virtual infrastructure with our ESX Server and VirtualCenter products and enabled the vast selection of partner solutions built on that platform which have followed, thousands of customers have been able to substantially improve how they build and manage their distributed systems through virtualization,” said Karthik Rau, director of product management at VMware. “With the introduction of ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2, VMware continues to raise the bar by providing customers with the ability to drive even higher availability and better flexibility and to apply the benefits of virtualization throughout the enterprise.”

Building on the success of VMotion technology for live migration of running virtual machines with zero-downtime, VMware is now introducing new transformative virtual infrastructure management technologies:

• Distributed Availability Services
  Infrastructure-wide high availability services for critical applications without the cost and complexity of clustering. Distributed availability services detect failed virtual machines and automatically restart them on alternate ESX Server hosts. Distributed availability services select a failover host that can honor the virtual machine’s resource allocations so that service level guarantees remain intact.
• Distributed Resource Scheduling
  Infrastructure-wide resource optimization enabling a self-managing, highly efficient compute cluster with built-in resource and load balancing. Built on top of VMotion technology and VirtualCenter, distributed resource scheduling intelligently and continuously balances virtual machine workloads across ESX Server hosts so users can safely operate at 80% utilization or higher. Distributed availability services detect when increasing virtual machine activity saturates an ESX Server host and triggers automated VMotion live migrations to move running virtual machines to other ESX Server nodes so that all resource commitments are met.

VMware ESX Server 3 and VMware VirtualCenter 2 provide customers with the option to deploy virtualization in any environment – from the smallest branch office to the largest data center. ESX Server 3 has broader x86 support that unlocks the power of newer dual-core processor hardware and added NAS and iSCSI networked storage compatibility. Expanded virtual machine memory limits and new 4-way Virtual SMP further enable the most memory and processor-intensive server applications to run in virtual machines.

VirtualCenter 2 scales up to control the biggest infrastructures with hundreds of hosts and thousands of virtual machines and it provides enhanced usage reporting and security auditing features to meet enterprise requirements. In addition, VirtualCenter 2 simplifies management with a richer unified client and centralized host configuration tools.

“The new features in VMware ESX Server 3 and VMware VirtualCenter 2 support our plans to further expand our virtual infrastructure,” said Paul Poppleton, senior staff engineer for QUALCOMM. “Using ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 will allow us to optimize efficiency and resource use across the infrastructure, while driving down hardware and operational costs. With distributed availability services, we can bring complete high availability coverage to many of our production applications at minimal cost. Also with 4-way Virtual SMP and the increased 16GB virtual machine memory limits, we can migrate more of our physical servers to virtual machines. We are also looking forward to VirtualCenter’s sophisticated control features, including finer grained access controls and audit trails, as well as the inventory model and interactive topology views. We’ll have an easier time managing our data center with more servers virtualized.”

Pricing and Availability
VMware ESX Server 3 and VMware VirtualCenter 2 are currently in limited beta testing. A public beta program will begin later this year and general release will follow in Q1, 2006.

The current Virtual Infrastructure Node (VIN) for ESX Server combines ESX Server with Virtual SMP and a VirtualCenter Agent with VMotion technology and starts at $5,000. Current ESX Server, Virtual SMP, VirtualCenter and VMotion customers with active Support and Subscription contracts are entitled to the new upgrades for those products at no cost when the new upgrades are generally available. The distributed availability services and distributed resource scheduling will be available as add-on modules when they are generally available.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced the availability of a set of focused server consolidation assessment services that assess the capacity utilization of an organization’s IT infrastructure, identify opportunities for consolidation and help deliver a virtualization roadmap for effective server containment and consolidation.

“For organizations looking to increase productivity, reduce complexity and improve the predictability of their IT infrastructure, server consolidation through virtualization is a compelling solution that is rapidly becoming mainstream,” said Jason Martin, vice president of VMware Professional Services. “The VMware server consolidation assessment services encapsulate best practices developed during thousands of successful enterprise customer virtual infrastructure deployments.”

VMware server consolidation assessment services leverage VMware Capacity Planner, a hosted IT capacity analysis and planning tool that enables the delivery of accelerated, more accurate and benchmarked capacity planning and server consolidation assessments. These services are based on the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Methodology, a methodology for producing, validating and improving a common approach for the successful adoption, operation and management of VMware virtual infrastructure products.

AccessFlow, a VAC Partner, recently conducted a VMware server consolidation assessment service for Mechanics Bank, one of the largest banks headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with more than $2.5 billion in assets, in which AccessFlow thoroughly evaluated Mechanics Bank’s current server infrastructure in order to create a successful virtualization strategy.

“VMware Capacity Planner aided us in our deployment strategy for Mechanics Bank,” said Steve Kaplan, president of AccessFlow. “It helped us with ‘if/then’ modeling so we could come up with the optimal solution for Mechanics Bank. It gave us information on capacity planning, performance metrics during peak hours and other key utilization statistics. Further, VMware Capacity Planner’s agent-less feature and Web-based analysis capabilities helped us significantly reduce the time taken to complete the assessment.”

“AccessFlow was able to provide us with a clear picture of our server environment,” said Richard Lewis, vice president of IT for Mechanics Bank.
“We found that some applications were performing differently than we thought. Some were more memory intensive, some were CPU-bound. Having this information
allowed AccessFlow to create a strategic, comprehensive virtualization solution to meet our needs.”

The VMware server consolidation assessment services include an introductory capacity assessment and a more detailed virtualization assessment. Custom assessments tailored for more complex customer environments are also available. These assessment services are conducted by VMware Professional Services or VAC Partners, part of the rapidly growing global network of virtual infrastructure experts skilled in deploying VMware solutions.

For more information on VMware assessment services, visit http://www.vmware.com/services/consulting.html.

Thanks to Steven Bink for submitting the news.

Three days ago a VMware employee answered a user in the VMTN discussion forums mentioning an upcoming RC2 release for Workstation 5.5.

If so it’s obvious the RTM will not be presented at VMworld 2005 as I was guessing. I’m starting to suspect VMware is waiting for Microsoft Vista beta 2, expected for December 7th, to be sure users can install it flawless as guest OS.

Meanwhile there are issues around the highly expected VMware Player. More datails to come.

Microsoft decided to make its VHD format available to third parties under a royalty-free license.

We already saw PlateSpin, in this post, and Acronis, in this post, moving to gain benefits from this choice.

More vendors will surely adapt their products to interact with the VHD format. The first category doing so will probably be antivirus, now eventually able to scan virtual machines HDs from the host OS.

The specifications disclosed, which are going to be discussed at Microsoft ITforum 05 conference, include:

• Hard Disk Foot Format
• Dynamic Disk Header Format
• Block Allocation Table and Data Blocks
• Implementing a Dynamic Disk
• Mapping a Disk Sector to a Sector in the Block
• Splitting Hard Disk Images
• Implementing a Differencing Hard Disk
• CHS Calculation

You can apply to see details by signing the Virtual Hard Disk Image Format Specification License Agreement here.

Update: The license agreement states that any product developed with VHD manipulation capability needs to be distributed in binary form only.

Thanks to Robert Aitchison for the insight.

Did you miss the PDC 05 U.S.A. conference this year? No problem: Microsoft is going to have multiple sessions about its upcoming virtualization technologies at ITforum 05 european conference.

Actual agenda includes the following sessions:

• CHT013 Automating a Dev/Test Lab with Virtual Server
  Virtualization can significantly reduce the cost of developing and testing complex multi-tier applications. Multiple servers can easily be provisioned and manipulated ‘virtually’ without requiring large amounts of physical hardware. In this Chalk-&-Talk we will discuss how virtualization is changing dev/test and provide some real world examples.
• CHT014 Architectural Best-Practices for Virtual Server
  Virtualization can provide an effective means for consolidating production servers. In this Chalk-&-Talk we will discuss real-world usage of Virtual Server and how it could best be applied in your IT organization.
• INF304 Virtual Server – Advanced Scripting and Other Secrets
  Virtual Server provides a powerful selection of COM interfaces for manipulating all facets of a virtual machine. This can support everything from provisioning to day-to-day management operations. In this session we will showcase the COM API and demonstrate a range of scripting examples. We will also demonstrate how partner offerings are using the API to productize key provisioning and management functionality.
• INF307 Understanding and Working with the Virtual Server Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Disk Format
  Microsoft has standardized on the VHD file format for the running and management of virtual machines. This file format provides for a range of disk types, including dynamically expanding, linked, undo and differencing disks. In this session we will take a deep dive into the file format, and discuss best practices and partner offerings for disk image management and migration.
• INF308 Clustering and High Availability with Virtual Server
  Virtual Server 2005 R2 provides new high-availability features such as guest clustering and host-based clustering. These provide the basis of a very robust production server consolidation solution. In this session we will explore these new Virtual Server capabilities in detail, and look at key partner offerings that add additional high-availability functionality.
• INF318 Windows Hypervisor and Virtualization Futures
  This session provides a technical overview of the Windows Hypervisor. The Windows Hypervisor will provide the foundation for Microsoft’s Windows virtualization solutions in the Longhorn Server timeframe. This session discusses the Hypervisor and related I/O virtualization layers.