Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
virtualization.info Editors Citrix has made available the XenServer Virtual Machine Performance Utility. The utility is provided as a virtual appliance running Debian Linux which you can run on XenServer 5.5 or 5.6.
Basically you start with configuring a webserver on the performance VM, providing it with the ip address and credentials of the Pool Master, so the VM can control it. From a web page running on the performance VM you can then start the utilities.
The following test utilities are provided:
The semi-stealth mode US startup Nicira may be near a major launch, virtualization.info has learned.
The company, founded in 2009, left the stealth mode in February 2010 (read virtualization.info coverage), raising a lot of interest because Diane Greene, the founder and former CEO of VMware, is among its investors.
Apparently, Nicira has been the very first public investment in virtualization technologies that Greene made after she was forced to leave VMware in July 2008.
Albeit the official website suggests that the technology focus is about network virtualization, so far Nicira has remained under the radar, without disclosing any additional information.
Now virtualization.info got reports that the startup is significantly increasing its recruiting activity, hiring talents from Google, Cisco, Yahoo! and other major Silicon Valley firms, including VMware.
VMware has released a white paper titled: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1. The paper which contains 60 pages provides performance tips which cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 4.1.
The document covers the following topics:
Pancetera has announced that it has reached a OEM partnership with i365, a Seagate Company for its Pancetera SmartRead solution.
i365 provides data protection solutions which reside in the cloud, called Evault SaaS. I365 will use the SmartRead storage optimization component part of the Unite solution from Pancetera to help reduce data I/O when replicating VMs to the cloud for disaster recovery purposes.
Microsoft just made generally available the Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration for Software Assurance Tool, after releasing Beta 2 at the end of September this year.
The P2V migration for Software Assurance tool leverages the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit(MDT) and Sysinternals Disk2VHD to convert a user’s existing Windows XP SP3, Vista or 7 environment to a virtual hard disk. The tool can also be used from System Center Configuration Manager, when MDT is integrated to provide a Zero Touch Installation (ZTI) solution for P2V migration.
Corporations who want to use this tool, should have Software Assurance licensing in order to legally use the tool.
William Lam, who runs the virtualGhetto blog has discovered more than 1200 undocumented VMware .vmx parameters. Using UNIX/Linux utility strings Lam discovered the parameters in the /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx binary which is used to load a VM configuration file.
Based on the contents he discovered Lam makes the following speculations:
Yusuf Ozturk has released a Debian package which provides Linux Integration Services for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.
The integration services are provides as a Debian 2.6.36 kernel upgrade and provide unofficial support for synthetic Ethernet and for 4 virtual CPUs.
Linux Integration Services are not officially available for Debian, and Microsoft doesn’t support it. But because Microsoft open sourced the Linux Integration Services drivers in July 2009, the community has the ability to extend the LIS to other distributions, like Debian in this case.
Trilead, which provides a backup solution for VMware virtual machines has announced that it made available a Release Candidate of VM Explorer 3.0, build 3.0.005. The current stable version is 2.0 which was released in March this year.
The main new feature is the support for incremental backups, which will work on ESX/ESXi 4.0 and will not work with the free ESXi edition. To keep track of the changes in the VM, VM Explorer uses the VMware Virtual Disk API, giving the following advantages:
VMware has released a paper titled: Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide. The paper contains 69 pages and provides guidance on how to deploy Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere.
The document covers the following topics: