Year: 2005

As some VMware users probably know there are some issues with ACPI in Microsoft Windows 2000 guest OSes virtual machines.
VMware offers a workaround but this won’t work well if you usually update your virtual machine with service packs and Windows Updates.

Someone investigated the issue deeply and produced a long, detailed support article:
http://starship.python.net/crew/timehorse/VMware.html

Quoting from Ask Dr. Root blog:

Consolidating with Solaris Containers:

Solaris Containers combine operating system partitioning with fine-grained resource controls to allow servers to be partitioned at sub-CPU granularity without having to replicate the operating system image itself. They provide a virtualised Solaris 10 Operating System image including a unique root file system, a shared read-only set of system executables and libraries, and whatever resources the root administrator assigns to the container at creation time. Solaris containers can be booted and shut down just like any instance of the Solaris 10 OS, and rebooted in seconds if the need arises. Unlike virtual machines, which must intercept every single interrupt and allocate it to the right instance, Solaris Containers support mainframe-level partitioning capabilities with almost zero overhead.

Consolidating using VMware ESX Server :

When an IT organization wishes to consolidate multiple Linux applications, multiple Microsoft Windows applications, Solaris OS applications, or a combination of them all, ESX Server is the consolidation option of choice. Not only can its virtual machine technology support all operating systems, it can support multiple versions of each one as well. IT organizations consolidating onto Sun x64 servers running ESX Server have the additional benefit of migration software that helps to package up an entire environment so that it can be installed in its own virtual machine.

What happens when the most famous open source virtualization project (Xen) meets the most famous open source liveCD project (Knoppix)? Xenoppix.

Xenoppix is a new Knoppix 4.0 customization including the Xen package and 2 pre-made guest OSes: NetBSD and Plan9.
X window System is prepared by KNOPPIX and GUI of GuestOS is mapped to the X11 using VNC full-screen mode

You really need to read the website for requirements and further explainations but if you never tried Xen this is a very good way to start in about 5 minutes.

I just wonder if Xenoppix could run inside a VMware Player virtual machine, launching then both its guests…. 🙂

Quoting from the Parallels official announcement:

Paralells, Inc. announced today that it is bringing hypervisor virtualization technology to the desktop by incorporating a lightweight hypervisor into the beta4 version of Parallels Workstation 2.0, the company’s efficient, cost effective, easy-to-use desktop virtualization solution. Parallels Workstation’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 maximally efficient, stable and secure virtual machines. In addition, the technology optimizes Parallels Workstation to work seamlessly with forthcoming hardware virtualization technologies like Intel VT and AMD Pacifica

A free, fully functional 60-day trial version of the beta4 version of Parallels Workstation is available for download at www.parallels.com/en/download!

“Including lightweight hypervisor technology into Parallels Workstation 2.0 ensures that the product is a virtualization solution for today, and tomorrow,” said Benjamin Rudolph, Parallels’ Marketing Manager. “Parallels Workstation’s lightweight hypervisor not only increases virtual machine stability, performance and security, but also helps the product to work efficiently with upcoming virtualization-optimized processors from Intel and AMD.”…

Are you interested in creating a virtuali infrastructure and offer virtual machines to your customers (maybe cause your are an Application Solution Provider) or partners?

Brian Madden just announced two news whitepaper from Citrix on how to set up this kind of environment (they call it Hosted Client Solutions) with Microsoft Windows Server 2003, VMware Workstation 5.0 or Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 SP1 and Citrix Presentation Server 4.0:

• Hosted Client Solutions on VMware Workstation
• Hosted Client Solutions on Microsoft Virtual PC

It really worth the read.

Quoting from CRN:

Server virtualization isn’t just for the big guys anymore. Small businesses can also benefit from virtualization, allowing offices of any size to access the latest enterprise-quality technology.

Ron Kramer has built his business around the idea that server virtualization can help small businesses work better, and his one-man IT-shop-for-hire is thriving.
…
In 2001, he started All Computer Solutions in Portland and now has more than 20 high-end boutique small-business clients.

Before virtualization technology, Kramer was putting two to four servers in each client’s office. Today, he takes a different approach. “I’ll put in one medium-powered HP ProLiant ML Series Server, and I’ll build it out with VMware GSX Server,” he said. “I’ll build a very robust host and we’ll have anywhere from three to six guest operating systems on that hardware. What virtualization allows me to do is become hardware independent.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from Investors:

When EMC (EMC) capped a 2003 acquisition spree by buying VMware for $635 million, it almost seemed like an afterthought.
…
But as EMC is learning, big things sometimes come in small packages. VMware has enjoyed a commanding lead in “virtual machine” technology. And while it generates a small fraction of EMC’s total sales, it’s emerged as one of the firm’s fastest-growing businesses.

Now the big question is: Can VMware stay on that growth path? It faces a raft of competitors, including a vastly improved version of Microsoft’s (MSFT) rival virtualization software and open-source alternatives.
…
According to IDC, the company had more than half of the virtual machine market in 2004. It overtook longtime leader IBM, (IBM) which in addition to its own virtualization technology uses VMware for its Intel-compatible servers.

But VMware faces mounting competition from Microsoft, which is close to launching an upgrade to its Virtual Server software.

“VMware has already dropped prices because of Microsoft,” said Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman. And new chip technology from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) could make virtualization software easier to produce. That could intensify competition.
…
Eventually, Microsoft plans to make virtualization part of its basic Windows operating system – rather than a software add-on….

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from Virtual PC Guy blog:

Virtual PC emulates an S3 Trio 64 Video card with 8mb of video ram (VRAM). From time to time I get people asking me why we do not increase the amount of VRAM – and there are a couple of reasons why:

• VRAM is a fixed overhead. Each virtual machine that you launch uses 8mb of your computers memory to store our VRAM information. If we increase this – it will increase the amount of memory used for each virtual machine – whether the virtual machine is using this extra memory or not.
• On video cards with hardware 3D acceleration support VRAM is used for storage of textures, and other performance improving measures. However with a 2D video card VRAM is only used to store a single frame buffer of the contents on screen. This means that with a 2D video card (such as we emulate) adding more VRAM just allows you to support higher resolutions – but it does not provide better performance. At 8mb we are able to display at up to 1600×1200 resolutions.

Even on a 2 GB RAM workstation (as mine) VMware virtual machines can run slowly. Too slowly sometimes.

This can depend on a large amount of factors but we can reduce the number to 4 critical issues:

1. Antivirus real-time protection
   You probably run VMware Workstation on your everyday working computer, and you probably want to stay secure running an antivirus software.

   The most useful feature of any AV is the real-time protection, catching and monitoring I/O accesses of every process for suspicious activities.
   This feature can greatly impact on your VMs performances and should be fine-tuned for virtualization.

   So be sure to create an exclusion filter on your real-time protection settings for .vmdk (VMware virtual disk) and .vmem (VMware virtual memory) files. In this way countinous I/O operations on your virtual machines will not be hit by antivirus checking.

   Note: if you plan to run liveCD operating systems (like Knoppix) inside your VMs or simply often use CD images for installing new software, I highly recommend to exclude .iso files too from AV checking.

2. HostOS disk fragmentation
   A really performance hitter for virtual machines is a fragmented host OS disk.

   VMs virtual disks are very large (4 GBs at minimum on the average) and are created by default as non preallocated. In other words your virtual disk grow as you install more software on the guest OS till reaching your defined disk limit.
   If you use only one physical disk for everyday work and VMs storing, you probably will use space around a growing virtual disk, obliging your host OS to fragment virtual machines more and more.

   So be sure to:

   • Create a dedicated partition for virtual machines only
   • Create guest OSes virtual disks with Allocate all disk space now option
   • Schedule a daily defragmentation for your virtual machines directories (maybe at launch time or during the night)
3. Memory trimming
   Workstation checks which part of the guest OS virtual memory is not used and allocates it back to the host OS. This permits to have more concurrent virtual machines running but everytime the guest OS asks back for its memory it suffers a performance degradation.

   So, if you have enough free RAM for all planned concurrent VMs, be sure to disable memory trimming for guest OSes adding the following line to the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file:

   MemTrimRate=0

   Note: Memory trimming can be disabled through GUI since Workstation 6.0.

4. Page sharing (quoted from VMware documentation)
   VMware uses a page sharing technique to allow guest memory pages with identical contents to be stored as a single copy-on-write page. Page sharing decreases host memory usage, but consumes system resources, potentially including I/O bandwidth.

   You may want to avoid this overhead for guests for which host memory is plentiful and I/O latency is important. To disable page sharing, add the following line to the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file:

   sched.mem.pshare.enable=FALSE option

These suggestions will work well for every VMware Workstation 5.x and Player 1.x since both share same engine.

Quoting from RedmondMag.com:

Several third-party vendors announced management packs and other products that support Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 at Microsoft’s IT Forum event this week in Barcelona, Spain.
…
AppMind version 3.8 now officially supports Sun Solaris on x86 and VMware ESX along with HP-UX, Solaris SPARC, Linux and OpenVMS. Version 3.8 also lets administrators perform central configuration, management and deployment to non-Windows systems from the MOM 2005 server.
…
Vendor nworks announced its VMware Management Pack for MOM 2005, which provides automated VMware ESX Server monitoring from MOM 2005. The product provides agent-less management and monitoring of more than 100 ESX Server and virtual machine metrics, as well as of root and virtual file system free space.
…

Read the whole article at source.