virtualization.info Editors

Your Virtual PC Guy, Ben Armstrong, posted another technical insight for running the old Novell Netware 6.5 in a Virtual Server virtual machine.
He has really good suggestions and warn you the performances are under acceptable level. But if you need to have it for troubleshooting or other better check his post.

After virtualization.info guide for running LiveCDs with VMware Player, other guides are surfacing on the Net.
Adrian Crenshaw produced a flash video to show how configure the Player for launching your preferred bootable ISO.

You can see (and save) it here.

Thanks to VMTN Blog for the news.

Gartner and Akimbi prepared an interesting free web seminar on how software engineering can receive great help from virtualization technologies:

Hosted by InformationWeek, join Gartner and Akimbi as they explore how new developments in virtualization technology impact software development and IT organizations worldwide. Learn how a new category of software dramatically improves application development (AD) lifecycle processes while simultaneously reducing server sprawl and eliminating the burden, often borne by IT operations, of repetitive and tedious test lab setup and provisioning.

The one-hour event is scheduled for 7th February. Register here.

CMPnet Asia published an interesting review of a virtual machines provisioning tool: BMC Virtualizer for Capacity on Demand.

Virtualizing servers with VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 in the enterprise can reduce hardware costs, but does little to decrease the time and labor needed to set up redundant, scalable systems. In short, virtualization lacks automation. BMC Software aims to remedy that with Virtualizer 2.4, a policy-based automation tool that provisions servers, applications and storage on demand.

I tested Virtualizer in our Syracuse University Real-World Labs®, installing it on a Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server 4. I also implemented Virtualizer Service Agents on virtual machines (VMs) running on VMware ESX Server 2.5.2 and a conventional Intel PIII server (dual 1,400-MHz processors) with 1,024 MB of RAM running Microsoft Windows 2003. Virtualizer scaled out new servers and other enterprise resources on demand. However, it didn’t create new virtual machines on the fly. I’ll have to wait for the next version for that…

Read the whole review at source.

Just 10 days from my speculations on Intel MacOS virtualization (acting as a guest OS), today I found an interesting post on PowerPage blog.

The author, Jason O’Grady, inquired VMware Sales department for VMware availability (possibly referring to Workstation product) on Intel MacOSes (acting as an host OS).
The Sales department didn’t answer something like at today is not in our plan but we do not provide information in advance of an official press release.

So I assume an official press release is coming annoncing VMware products for MacTel…
This would make perfectly sense after the Microsoft annoncement of working with Apple for future of Virtual PC on MacOS.

After virtualization.info How to install Sun Solaris 10 inside VMware Workstation 5.5, another unofficial installation guide appeared.
This time the author is Juergen Winkelmann which details how to install Solaris 10 (03/05 or 01/06) inside a VMware ESX Server 2.5.2 virtual machine.

Read it here.

Thanks to VMTN Blog for the news.

Ulli Hankeln restless mind created a new Windows command script to generate VMware preallocated disks from scratch, much faster than VMware engine itself and unfragmented: Flatmaker.

Donwload it here.

Ron Oglesby, author of VMware ESX Server : Advanced Technical Design Guide, created 2 great Microsoft Excel spreadsheets:

• Lunsizes for calculate the number of farms, LUNs per farm, and average LUN size to host your VMs
• VM Oaglator for calculate the price of VMs based on different configurations in your environment

Download them here.

Alexey Shvechkov created an interesting utility for debugging virtual machines operating systems:

To date of this writing there was no terminal client capable of connecting to named pipes on Windows (neither locally nor remotely).

There may be various reasons for such type of access. In my case I was doing some kernel debugging on Linux/Solaris virtual machines that were running under supervision of VMware(or Virtual PC) software and I needed to access Guest OS serial consoles (virtual com ports emulated as named pipes) from the Host OS or remotely using TCP connection.

Named Pipe TCP Proxy is a utility which provides access to named pipes on Windows via TCP/IP. Utility has intuitive GUI and allows to create “tcp port” “named pipe” mappings.

Download it here.

Since the Apple switch on Intel architecture for its MacOS operating system, many developers started to port their community projects.

An interesting one is Wine, already able to run Windows application on Linux, which is being ported on MacOS for Intel (or MacTel as someone calls it) under the name of Darwine.

The last released version is 0.9.6.