Year: 2006

Acronis has just launched TrueImage 9.1 Workstation, Server and Enterprise.

This new version features the new Acronis Universal Restore option, able to restore a saved computer image on a different hardware (included a virtual machine), modifying on the fly the HAL and other drivers needed by your operating system:

1. Boot into our recovery environment
2. Select the image to restore and the replacement system
3. Acronis Universal Restore initiates the restore process
4. Acronis Universal Restore detects the hardware and installs drivers
• The product detects the machine type and installs appropriate drivers for Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)
• The product detects hard disk controllers (SCSI and IDE)
• The product prompts you for driver locations
5. The machine reboots and Acronis Universal Restore begins mini-setup to load drivers into the Operating System.

Quoting from the HP official announcement:

HP has enhanced its HP Integrity server line and HP-UX 11i operating environment with significant capacity, virtualization and management upgrades.

The enhancements offer customers greater server capacity as well as faster deployment of enterprise software within an HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) running on the HP-UX 11i operating system – some virtualization projects can be brought online in less than half the time.
…
The next-generation chipset for Integrity servers delivers significant enhancements to performance and availability. The chipset enables customers to get 30 percent more work done across multiple workloads, while using the same number of Intel Itanium 2 processors. Featured and available today in the cell-based HP Integrity rx7640, rx8640 and Superdome servers, the chipset delivers single system availability features to improve memory availability, interconnectivity and fault tolerance…

Directly from BriForum 2005, the Brian Madden conference, here the Timothy Mangan session about performance measurement comparison of a Terminal Server in a real and a virtual infrastructure.

The session is really interesting. Download video, audio or PowerPoint slides here.

Timothy has also a related whitepaper on this topic available here.

Till Brehm has released an essential how-to for installing OpenVZ, the open source version of SWsoft Virtuozzo, on a Linux Debian 3.1 32bit operating system.

It starts from the very beginning step, patching kernel, up to the final goal, building a so-called Virtual Private Server (VPS).

Read it here.

If you are interested in OpenVZ you could find interesting as well my Review of SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows 3.5.1.

Quoting from eWeek:

Red Hat’s announcement March 14 of its integrated virtualization push, starring Xen, didn’t take anyone by surprise: Red Hat, along with just about everybody else, has been tooting the Xen horn ever since the fledgling open-source virtualization technology began grabbing headlines almost a year ago.
…
The trouble is that Xen is somewhat early on in its development, and the high rate of change in Xen’s code base will keep the technology out of the mainstream Linux kernel for some time.

Red Hat has and will continue to chart its own course with respect to the kernel, diverging from the mainstream where and when appropriate, but Xen’s potential will remain somewhat stunted for as long as it remains in heavy flux…

Read the whole article at source.

1000 posts and 434,000 impressions since September 2003.

Dedicating my whole professional life to IT security I started this blog about virtualization mainly for 3 reasons:

1. I sincerely felt the urgency to share my enthusiasm for this technology.

   I’ve always been jealous of a gift developers have: the power to create something from scratch. Someone having a foundation know-how as sysadmin and not enough time to seriously start developing can only be jealous of this huge freedom (and I secretely believe learning scripting is a way to fill that hole).

   When I first discovered virtualization I felt like, as sysadmin, I suddenly had a similar power: I see in the virtualization the power of creating datacenters from scratch. I see the freedom to do.
   I know: it’s pretty naive considering what virtualization really is and what can really do, but I still believe this (and I’m a little less jealous of developers).

2. I wanted to try an emerging phenomenon called blogging, which I read about on many parts but never fully understood.

   Without any experience I probably approached it in the worst way, feeling like I had a sort of imposed task: to cover everything about a topic I chosen to talk about.

   Today, 3 years later, I think this is the worst way to blog: I feel best blogs are ones written for yourself, originally born as personaly diaries where to store important considerations about something you are working with or you are tracking.
   But my unexperienced approach transformed virtualization.info (originally called Blue Alliance) in what it is today. So I won’t regret too much.

3. I thought writing about something you do from morning to evening, 365 days per year, IT security, was simply too boring while blogging on something I was just discovering was much more interesting.

   After so much time I changed my mind and think that if you blog just about what is interesting for you, without the pressure to cover everything (see my second reason), then it’s not boring anymore.
   So I created SECURITY ZERO (originally called False Negatives Blog) and this is the reason why it has much less posts per day than virtualization.info.

Virtualization is spreading every day and I’m totally busy covering and evaluating what’s happening all around the world about this technology.

As I said in my end year’s balance there is so much more to come: expect thousands and more posts on this blog.

Enjoy your stay!

Jeff Alexander is calling for Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) :

This TAP program has two goals:

1. Product Validation
2. Help customers deploy this product in production scenarios and get case studies

The production scenarios that are of high interest are:

1. Production Server consolidation in datacenters
2. Disaster recovery
3. Server consolidation in Branch offices

TAP is a very special program giving access to particular benefits like direct interaction with product team engineering and product education from Microsoft, and is reserved for a very small amount of critical customers, able to dedicate a serious amount of time for testing and usually providing information to create case studies for a new product launch (for more details about TAPs you should check this blog entry). So it’s really hard to get it.

Thanks to Virtualserver.tv for the news.

David Wang answers a blog reader question:

Question:
I was wondering if it is possible not to have the virtual machine additions installation eject the iso image after installing, maybe an undocumented switch.

I have created a custom OS installation CD and anything to be installed after VMA will be left hanging, or if you have more files in the $OEMO$\$$ or $OEM$\$1 directories they are never copied.

If there is a switch please let me know the full command line.

Answer:
The switches are all standard, documented commandlines for InstallShield and MSI. I am not certain why you want undocumented switches – I hate undocumented switches from a supportability and maintenance perspective, and why do you want us to get sued? 😉

Anyways, this is the commandline that I use to automate installation of VM Additions into my Virtual Machine as a part of OS installation – all standard and documented switches:

setup.exe /s /v”REBOOT=ReallySupress /qn”

/s – InstallShield “Silent” install switch
/v – InstallShield “pass arbitrary values to the internal MSI” switch
REBOOT – Standard MSI switch controlling reboot behavior (no, I do not use the newer /norestart switch because I do not want to require MSI 3.0 and I want automation that works from NT4/W2K on up)
/qn – MSI switch which pops up NO user interactive dialog (can use /qb- to get a dialog with cancel button)

Thanks to Virtualserver.tv for the news.

Richard Garsthagen produced a video to demonstrate how VMware VirtualCenter API can be programmed to develop useful applications for managing aspects of virtual infrastructure.

In particular Richard demonstrated how his Virtual Machine Order HOTLINE application.

Richard wears VMware shirt but I’m not sure it’s an official VMware presentation (I also have some doubts about introduction music…) 🙂

Fraser Campbell tracked VMware effort to introduce several patches in Linux kernel to make it compliant to what it’s called Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), or Paravirtualization API 2.0

In the Fraser article there are a lot of interesting informations like a comment from Zachary Amsden:

Zach was asked “Why can’t vmware use the Xen interface instead?” and he responded:

We could. But it is our opinion that the Xen interface is unnecessarily complicated, without a clean separation between the layer of interaction with the hypervisor and the kernel proper. The interface we propose we believe is more powerful, and more conducive to performance optimizations while providing significant advantages – most specifically, a single binary image that is properly virtualizable on multiple hypervisors and capable of running on native hardware.

Read it at source.