Year: 2006

When Microsoft published Virtual Server 2005 R2 bits for evaluation (180-days trial) something wrong happened and x64 Enteprise Edition disappeared very soon.

Now x64 Enterprise Edition is back available on the evaluation page.

Thanks to Ben Armstrong for the news.

Ben Armstrong reports Virtual Server 2005 R2 is finally available for MSDN Subscribers.

The available version is the Standard one (x86 and x64, English and Japanese) and it’s filed under Applications instead of Servers.

Ben Armstrong reports new Virtual Machines Additions are finally available for Windows Server 2003 SP1 VMs inside Virtual Server 2005.

Differently from what Ben wrote on his blog post this update won’t work for Virtual PC 2004. Microsoft is working for it.

Donwload the update here.

Note: this update is not needed on Virtual Server 2005 R2.

Portlock is a new company entering in the virtualization market with a storaging product supporting Physical to Virtual (P2V) migrations: Storage Manager.
The product version (3.36) featuring P2V capability will come in two versions: one for VMware ESX Server, one for Microsoft Virtual PC / Virtual Server.

Competing with (at least) PlateSpin and VMware isn’t easy so they opened betas of both versions to everybody.

Storage Manager with VMware migrations edition was expected to launch on 4th January, but at today the final release isn’t yet announced.
Storage Manager with Microsoft migrations edition is expected to be launched on 11th January.

Maybe you can still try to enroll programs here: VMware edition and Microsoft edition.

Less than a month ago VMware, launching its Player, offered community to host new virtual machines with pre-installed applications.
A lightning fast answer come from projects mantainers, researchers and organizations.

The 2006 starts with a bunch of new VMs for VMware Player flooding VMTN Community Virtual Machine site:

• KDE on SuSE Linux VM by Stephan Binner
• m0n0wall VM by Chris Buechler
• Sguil VM by Richard Bejtlich
• Syllable VM by Daniel Gryniewicz

Many more already there and others coming.

Now that Workstation 5.5 is released VMware could start concentrating on aligning whole the product line to the upcoming ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0, actually in beta phase.

Customers start wondering what features GSX Server 4.0 and Workstation 6.0 will bring.

I compiled a list of things could be interesting to have:

• Host OS high availability (at least virtual machines Hot StandBy) [GSX]
• Virtual Machines hot backup [GSX and Workstation]
• Microsoft Vista / codename Longhorn Server AERO compatibility [GSX and Workstation]
• Sun Solaris 10 host and guest support [GSX and Workstation]
• MacOS x86 guest support [Workstation]

Do you have more wanted features to suggest? Would you vote these features to rank them?
Write me in comments and I’ll update this post.
VMware is reading…

Happy New Year and welcome back on virtualization.info.

I’ll use the first year post to announce I started a new blog about IT Security: SECURITY ZERO.

As some of you already know I’m first of all a security professional, author of a security book, holding CISSP certification and few others from various vendors.
Since today I’m also awarded of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) prize.

I mantained for months a blog about security in Italian. It didn’t work as I hoped so I prefer translating in English what I already wrote on it and continue my efford on this new place.

I’ve talked so far and will still talk about:

• technologies like firewalls, VPN, intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS), honeypots, endpoint security, security event managers (SEM), backup, wireless (Wi-Fi, RFID, Blueetooth), VoIP, content filtering, biometrics, etc.
• techniques like hardening, forensic analysis, exploiting and privileges escalation, penetration testing, social engineering, trashing, etc.
• open source and commercial products from Check Point, Cisco, Core Security, eEye, Enterasys, Microsoft, Sun, Symantec, Websense, etc.
• subjects like privacy, ethical hacking, etc.

and so many other things I didn’t mentioned.

I hope some of you can find SECURITY ZERO as interesting as virtualization.info. Good reading!