virtualization.info Editors

Philip Langdale, a VMware employee, reports on his blog that the VMware driver responsible for mouse device handling is now open source and included in Xorg.

This means that new Linux distributions will have a fully performant mouse movement when installed inside virtual machines without having to prior install VMware Tools.

As Philip suggests, being the driver open source, it could be used to develop virtual mouse drivers for other platforms like Solaris and FreeBSD.

This article was moved to the new section virtualization.info TechTalk.

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In a recent CRN article about Xen, Paula Rooney wrote:
It [Microsoft] announced plans this year to integrate a virtualization hypervisor directly into Release 2 of its Windows Longhorn Server operating system due in the 2009-2010 time frame.

While I don’t remember of such an announcement, actual confirmed plans for Windows Hypervisor (or whatever is going to be called) is to release it immediately after codename Longhorn Server release, which should mean around 2008.

So if Ms. Rooney is right Microsoft virtualization roadmap should be as follow:

• 2006 – new Virtual Server (actually referred as vNext)
• 2007 – Longhorn Server
• 2008 – Windows Hypervisor (coming in a Service Pack format?)
• 2010 – Longhorn Server R2 (embedding Windows Hypervisor R2?)

In a recent interview Diane Greene, VMware President, declared that Mellanox partner is putting InfiniBand support for ESX Server.

Are we going to see this on upcoming ESX 3.0? Or the next release?

On the interview another declaration is particularly interesting:
We’ll see where it goes. We’ll certainly embrace Xen if it gets to a point where it’s something our customers want to use. But it’s a long way from being in that situation.

What this means? I’d really like to ear your comments.

Search CIO published an introductory article on virtualization explaining what is, who are market leaders, what can be done with it and what’s coming.

It’s incomplete and won’t be enough to have a detailed overview of the virtualization market, but it’s a welcomed starting point.

Read it here.

DELL released this nice whitepaper about a (still) very niche VMware VirtualCenter feature: VMotion.

…
The VMotion migration of running VMs from one ESX Server host to another is especially useful in enterprise data centers. The scenarios where VMotion is utilized include dynamic load balancing of VMs across an ESX Server farm; graceful failover of VMs off a failing ESX Server host; and movement of VMs off
an ESX Server host to bring that host down for routine maintenance. In all cases it is desirable that any performance impact due to VMotion be negligible as seen
by the end user running applications on the VMs.
…
The purpose of this study is to quantify the impact on typical VMware operations of having two network connections available for each ESX Server host
running on a set of PowerEdge 1855 blades…

Download the whitepaper here.

Thanks to VMTN Blog for the news.

Christmas is passed but ZDNet gifts are still there to be caught.

The online technology portal offers 5 copies of VMware Workstation 5.5 to winners of its online competition.
Just answer the simply question and write what you would do with a VMware Workstation copy, but do it fast: competition closes on 16th January!

Good luck and no, I won’t suggest answers in any case 🙂

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.