Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
In the official launch of VMware Player, the Palo Alto company started two initiatives:
virtualization.info will surely adhere to the evangelization initiative, promoting VMware Player on the blog!
VMware finally launched (this time for sure) its free virtualization product: VMware Player.
VMware player had a complicated release history…
Developed in parallel to Workstation 5.5 it was released and annunced as 1.0 final before Workstation 5.5. That was a marketing mistake, since that build is considered beta 2.
Than VMware released Workstation 5.5, embedding a new build of Player 1.0. Even if everybody consider that the final release, it is not, since the stand-alone product was still labelled beta 2.
Now, finally, VMware release a real final 1.0 which has a build number higher than Workstation 5.5. This is an important note cause isn’t clear what users should do with the Player build embedded on Workstation 5.5.
VMware Player is based on the same virtualization engine of VMware Workstation 5.5, with a subset of features.
The world press and the whole virtualization community talked about this product, working on reducing limitations. Related to this you could want check out my Guide to create .vmx files for VMware Player.
You can download VMware Player 1.0 here.
You can also download here the final version of the VMware Browser Appliance virtual machine, based on Ubuntu Linux 5.10.
This could be slightly off-topic but multicore-core CPUs are about to change the processors market forever and virtualization is one of the most sensible segments to this technology.
Both VMware and Microsoft reshaped their agreement terms to bind licenses to physical CPUs instead of core. But this could change again as soon as we go towards quad-core or better architectures.
It worth to read this small article.
Thanks to OSNews for the news.
VMware Player is the free virtualization engine VMware launched since October 2005.
It’s based on the same engine of VMware Workstation and has a lot of features. To see a summary of them check my dedicated post.
Being a scaled down version of VMware Workstation, VMware Player misses some critical features, like creating new virtual machines.
But the VMware EULA doesn’t prevent users from creating new virtual machines in other ways and use them with VMware Player.
So, for example, you could legitimately install VMware Workstation trial, create a new virtual machine, uninstall it and use the new virtual machine inside the VMware Player.
Now, since this an uncomfortable way to go, various VMware enthusiasts created workarounds and tools to produce new virtual machines good for VMware Player.
There is a lot of confusion about these workarounds and tools, also because many of them have the same name.
To create the new virtual machine you just need two files: a virtual machine configuration file (.vmx) and a virtual machine hard disk (.vmdk).
Technics and tools spreading on the web should produce both files to have a working virtual machine.
I will summary in this post various methods and will update the post when a new method or tool come up. So be sure to check it often.
Robert Petruska and Ulli Hankeln did it again.
Robert Petruska created a bunch of great Windows GUIs for many famous VMware utilities.
Ulli Hankeln reversed the VMware virtual hard disks (.vmdk) structure, creating a lot of incredible utilities.
Between them there is a batch for producing new VMware virtual machines configuration files (.vmx) called vmx-builder.cmd.
Why should you need producing new .vmx files from scratch? Simple: to create new virtual machines with VMware Player without installing VMware Workstation trial.
If you wanna know more you better read my previous post and come back here.
Now Robert and Ulli worked together and produced a Windows application easier than ever to creat new .vmx files: the VMX Builder.
Please note that this utility isn’t connected with the online VM Builder.
Quoting from the Paralles official announcement:
After months of focused research, development and testing, Parallels, Inc., (www.parallels.com) today announced the immediate general availability of Parallels Workstation 2.0, the world’s first hypervisor-powered desktop virtualization solution, at the industry leading price point of $49 per license.
…
Parallels Workstation 2.0’s lightweight hypervisor inserts a thin layer of software between the machine’s hardware and the primary operating system that directly controls some hardware profiles and resources, resulting in dramatically improved virtual machine stability, reliability, and performance. The technology also empowers Parallels Workstation to fully realize the features and benefits of Intel Virtualization Technology architecture, an important new technology that optimizes CPUs for virtualization…
Dave Jaffe published on VMTN User Solutions forum a great C# source code for automating virtual machines cloning inside a VMware environment.
It requires VMware Virtual Infrastructure SDK so this is going to work with GSX and ESX Server only if you have VirtualCenter also, not Workstation.
The compiling instructions are inside the source code.
Adding a simple GUI would be very simple starting from here.
An old news indeed since PlateSpin announced this on 17th October, but now that IBM released Virtual Machine Manager 2.01 for IBM Director 5.10 it worth to mention.
Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement:
PlateSpin Ltd. today announced that its patent-pending PowerConvert product is now integrated with IBM Director 5.10.
Released in September 2005, IBM Director 5.10 is the latest version of a widely deployed, integrated suite of software tools that provides a consistent, single point of management and automation for complex IT environments. IBM Director facilitates hardware configuration, deployment, monitoring and inventory management.
When combined with PowerConvert, customers have the ability to manage the migration of data, applications and operating systems from physical servers to virtual machines from a central point of control, making it ideal for server consolidation projects….
IBM annonced its new Director 5.10 on 23th September and released it on 25th October.
Director is an enteprise management platform free for IBM xSeries and BladeCenter customers, also managing any kind of operating system.
Since December 2004 IBM also released a great add-on for Director called Virtual Machine Manager, able to interact with VMware ESX Server, GSX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server hosts (since version 2.0) to discovery and manage even virtual machines, performing some tasks VMware VirtualCenter usually offers, like migrating virtual machines from a managed host with high CPU usage to a managed host with the lowest CPU usage.
Till today IBM annonced the new Virtual Machine Manager without releasing it, so who switched to Director 5.10 lost control of virtual infrastructure.
Now the Virtual Machine Manager 2.01 is out, bringing a couple of bug fixes and support for the new Director release.
Download IBM Director 5.10 and Virtual Machine Manager 2.01 here.
You could also be interested in reading the related IBM Redbook (in updating for Director 5.10): Implementing Systems Management Solutions using IBM Director
VMware just published a new wonderful 23-pages paper on ESX Server 2.x on how to benchmark VMs performances and apply different resources allocation methods.
It covers the following topics:
Download it here.