Year: 2006

A very appreciated tip this time from Ben Armstrong: how to modify Virtual Server default behavior in checking virtual machines availability:

Virtual Server provides a service where a user can be notified if a virtual machine is not responding. This is called the virtual machine heartbeat. There are two situations under which a virtual machine might not send its heartbeat. One is because the virtual machine has crashed – and no programs are running any longer. The other is because another program on the virtual machine may be using all of the CPU resources and not leaving enough CPU time for our code to be able to send a heartbeat message…

Read the whole article at source.

The Virtualization Glossary has been moved and revamped.

Check the new Virtualization Glossary!

Quoting from Strategiy:

HP has hosted a roadshow in Dubai promoting the mainstream adoption of virtualisation by businesses around the Middle East.
…
Recent additions to HP’s range of virtualisation portfolio include the expansion of the multi-operating system HP Virtual Server Environment for HP Integrity servers, new HP-UX 11i mission-critical virtualisation capabilities, accelerated availability of OpenVMS on virtualised Integrity servers, a new packaged solution with VMware and HP ProLiant Essentials Virtualisation Management software, and new network consolidation service.

HP has also recently introduced new HP Integrity Essentials software products, offering customers the industry’s first and most robust integrated software family for planning, managing and automating virtual servers.

The new software is part of the HP Virtual Server Environment for HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers…

Read the whole article at source.

The worldwide famous QEMU software is now ported on MacOS, under the name of Q:

Run Windows, Linux and a lot more Systems on your Mac. Q is a feature packed cocoa port of QEMU: Switch fast between guest PCs. Save and restart guest PCs at any stage. Easily exchange Files between Host and Guest. Q makes use of OS X most advanced technologies like openGL and coreaudio to accelerate your experience with your guest PC.

More informations and the universal binary (running on x86 and PPC architectures) package are available here.

As disclosed on January, Sun is introducing an hypervisor in its SPARC servers to seamless run Linux.

The work is going on and a Linux kernel already booted up on a Niagara CPU, as OSNews reported.

Deamon News interviewed Manuel Bouyer, NetBSD kernel developer, about the porting of Xen on NetBSD.

Read all here.

Thanks to OSNews for the news.

Virtual Strategy Magazine interviewed Bakul Mehta, Chief Strategy Officer and Vipul Pabari, Chief Technology Officer, ToutVirtual, about their new product ShieldIQ.

Read all here.

Ben Armstrong teaches us how to enable remote administration console, the VMRC, disabled by default on Virtual Server, with a simple script:

set vs = wscript.CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)

vs.VMRCEnabled = true
vs.VMRCAdminPortNumber = 5900
vs.VMRCIdleConnectionTimeoutEnabled = false
vs.VMRCXResolution = 800
vs.VMRCYResolution = 600

Read the original post for updates and comments.

Kim Wisniewsky wrote a nice how-to about installing PowerChute on the ESX Server service console:

Basically because ESX service console has no GUI, and because PowerChute has a Java GUI Installer, the only way to install PowerChute APC PowerChute Network Shutdown for Linux is to use a Helper Red Hat Linux Virtual Machine to install PCNS into, and tar up the resulting binaries and transport them into ESX…

Read it here.

From its blog, Steve Herrod, VP of Research & Development at VMware, announced the massive public beta 2 wave (2.700 testers) for ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0.

Highly expected new features are finally officially disclosed:

ESX Server Guest OSes

• 4-way Virtual SMP support
• 16GB Ram support
• 64bit experimental support
• Solaris 10 x86 experimental support

ESX Server Host OS

• iSCSI support
• NFS support

VirtualCenter

• Integrated ESX Server management
• Network diagram availability
• Centralized management model
• Improved authorization system
• Distributed Availability Services (DAS)
• Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS)
• Microsoft Windows guest OSes agentless backup

Read the whole post here.