Year: 2006

Quoting from TG Daily:

Following up on this morning’s news of six versions of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s next-generation client operating system, a Microsoft spokesperson told TG Daily this afternoon that Virtual PC Express, a feature of Microsoft’s new Enterprise and Ultimate versions, will be designed to run older editions of Windows as a subsystem.

“Virtual PC Express will be able to run any previous version of the Windows operating system,” the spokesperson wrote. “Customers who have annuity agreements with Microsoft automatically are granted a second license to install Windows as well as downgrade rights. This enables a customer to install an older version of Windows on top of Virtual PC Express without having to acquire an additional license.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of data center virtualization and management software solutions, today announced that it has joined Blade.org, an industry community around IBM’s BladeCenter ecosystem.
…
Virtual Iron’s support for IBM BladeCenter, provides a flexible, high performance foundation for utility computing initiatives with integrated I/O interconnects, networking and built-in redundancy. Virtual Iron’s virtualizes all BladeCenter components, including processors, memory, storage and networking, to speed deployments and migrations, while also providing outstanding scalability. Virtual Iron’s policy-based management also makes use of health status information from BladeCenter components to allow automated actions in the event of failures.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

Richard Garsthagen find a new hack form .vmx configuration files of VMware virtual machines:

…
So how do we get this Intel Pro 1000/MT card in our VM, well quite simple. Edit your .VMX file and make sure the Ethernet configuration has this line in it:

ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”

…
Now aware of this change, I was of course curious if there was a performance difference between the vlance and intel pro NIC. Well I am not allowed to publish benchmark tests, but I can tell you there is. But in different scenarios I had different winners. TCP pure network the vlance was faster, UDP pure network the Intel won by far. Doing file copying (so disk and network) the intel won frequent as well…

Read the whole post at source.

iReach Research published a report, Virtualisation as an Enabler of Knowledge Management, claiming a quarter of European firms are currently using server virtualization and 67% of them plan to increase their usage over the next year.

This report seems to totally disagree with the 1 week ago news Techworld reported: Users fail to grasp virtualization benefits.

Based on my personal experience and after collecting several feedbacks from virtualization professionals around Europe, I find rather difficult to believe iReach report.
I would believe a whole quarter of them is evaluating virtualization technologies and testing them in limited environments. I absolutely don’t believe they are using virtualization in production.

Since the report doesn’t explain how firms are working with virtualization, and which kind of industries are involved (it would be easier to believe a quarter of all european IT companies statement) I don’t find it very useful.

Thanks to VMblog for the news.

Bob Roudebush tested Akimbin Slingshot and blogged about it:

…
I spent some time with the product this afternoon using the company’s 30-day trial and an installation of VMware GSX server. I must say I was pretty impressed – though I am sure I wasn’t able to properly put the thing through its paces with my single-server environment. The installation was pretty straightforward and the online documentation was informative. I did run into a small issue, though, which prevented me from “deploying” (more Slingshot terminology) a template once I had created it. I sent off a quick email to their support alias and received a response (and a fix) in less than an hour. On a Saturday afternoon, no less. And for software that I was just evaluating. I appreciate software companies that still try hard to exceed their clients’ or prospects’ expectations. You don’t see that very often these days….

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the OpenVZ official announcement:

The OpenVZ project today announced that its website attracted more than one million hits in January – just one month after full production – as more businesses and individuals explore and contribute to the leading open source operating system virtualization project. Also, with more than 1,000 message posts, the OpenVZ support Forum has been very active with the user community.
…
“Clearly virtualization is technology whose time has arrived,” said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project. “We are immensely gratified that OpenVZ has quickly gained traction not only in the community, but with users who derive value by deploying their applications on virtual private servers. We will continue to add features to OpenVZ software and expect that over time virtualization will become part of the mainstream Linux distributions.”

OpenVZ is an open source spin-off of SWsoft Virtuozzo, which I extensively covered in this 8-pages review.

Symantec is preparing a webinar about VMware ESX Server high availability to put in light acquired Veritas products:

Companies are moving their business critical applications to virtual environments to reduce costs, increase utilization, and gain flexibility. The latest research from IDC suggests that 22% of server workloads are virtualized today with 45% of all planned server deployments seen as potential virtualization candidates. However, the move to virtual environments increases the risk that human, software, or machine error will cause these important applications to fail.
To mitigate this risk, firms require robust availability and disaster recovery solutions. Symantec is working with VMware, the leader in virtualization, to build a complete Data Center Availability Solution that meets the needs of firms leading the charge to virtual data centers.

This webcast will be an overview and technical discussion of how the Veritas Data Center Availability Solution enables VMware ESX to achieve higher levels of availability and be configured for a remote disaster recovery environment.

The event is scheduled for 2nd March. Register for it here.

Ben Armstrong wrote a new script. This time it calls the Virtual Server COM interface for CPU history tracking:

Set objVS = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)
set objVM = objVS.FindVirtualMachine(WScript.Arguments(0))
Set colAccountants = objVM.Accountant

i = 1
For Each intCPUUtilization in colAccountants.CPUUtilizationHistory
Wscript.Echo i & “: ” & intCPUUtilization
i = i + 1
Next

Read the original post for updated and comments.

As a security professional I’m particularly sensible to this topic so I’m very happy to report the news:

In November 2005 VMware issued a call for presentations about virtualization serving for security purposes to be presented in Cambridge.

Three presentations were selected:

• Better Security with Virtual Machines
• Performance Implications of Anti-Virus Execution on a Virtual Platform
• Automated Defense from Rootkit Attacks

The first one is particularly interesting not just because it refers to some upcoming ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0 features, but also cause it underlines where VMware could concentrate forces in the near future:

• Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) embedded in the virtualization layer
• Real-time hardware modification on attack detection
  (e.g.: virtual switch unbinding)
• Automated virtual-machines revert to safe snapshots

A real pity to not have the whole voice recording for them.

A VMware partner, Technical Architecture Solutions, released a Microsoft Excel workbok that can be used for making cost comparisons for future deployments based around VMware ESX Server rather than physical boxes.

It doesn’t produce a complete, complex TCO analysis but it’s a good starting point, and is completely free of charge.

Download it here.