Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
virtualization.info Editors On 5th September SWsoft launched the Open Virtuozzo project.
Open Virtuozzo is an open source Virtuozzo for Linux (actually SWsoft doesn’t plan to open it for Windows too) without some features.
After more than three months of development Open Virtuozzo, now called OpenVZ, is now declared stable, becoming more interesting for the virtualization community than ever.
On a News.com interview of 9th December, a Google engineer warned about risks of electrical costs for datacenters hardware.
Google engineer reports that following actual trends within 10 years hardware will cost less than power needed to stay on.
And he suggests the industry to embracing multi-threading chip solutions.
I think following this advice could also lead to lowering the total amount of bare metal deployed in IT infrastructures. And the actual best method to achieve this result is consolidating servers with virtualization.
Google has a very particular hardware needs and server virtualization could not be the best solution for them. But eventually they are evaluating this kind of solution.
In any case all other world companies could find in virtualization a huge help in mantaining low costs for hardware TCO and should start considering it seriously.
VMware Player launch is a really earthquake in the virtualization market, and VMware knows how to drive community attention on a new product like this.
The company just launched a new branch of its VMware Technology Network (VMTN) called Community Virtual Machines:
Community-built virtual machines are built and hosted by individuals in the VMware community. The list of community-built virtual machines contains a growing set of virtual machines designed for a variety of purposes. See what your peers in the community are building.
So you build a cool virtual machine working with the new VMware Player and VMware will sponsorize it on the Community Virtual Machines site.
I bet every mature project outside there will provide a wonderful VM in no time, starting from some security projects where installation can be really difficult.
Community Virtual Machines, which already counts 4 projects, now goes beside VMs provided by various well-known IT vendors in the Virtual Machine Center.
VMware in the official announcement for VMware Player 1.0 reported that the product will have a second release in early 2006 to be extensible and customizable by developers.
In the announcement is included a quote from Jeff Shardell, director of Google Web Search and Syndication, explicitly referring Google is working with VMware to provide search and security features.
This is a big announcement, much bigger than VMware Player itself:
In these months many speculated about an upcoming GOffice (a Google office suite), which has been denied by Google itself, but now, with VMware Player help, I can see Google putting out a GLinux (a self-made Google Linux) very soon. Soon enough to ruin the Microsoft Vista launch…
In the official launch of VMware Player, the Palo Alto company started two initiatives:
virtualization.info will surely adhere to the evangelization initiative, promoting VMware Player on the blog!
VMware finally launched (this time for sure) its free virtualization product: VMware Player.
VMware player had a complicated release history…
Developed in parallel to Workstation 5.5 it was released and annunced as 1.0 final before Workstation 5.5. That was a marketing mistake, since that build is considered beta 2.
Than VMware released Workstation 5.5, embedding a new build of Player 1.0. Even if everybody consider that the final release, it is not, since the stand-alone product was still labelled beta 2.
Now, finally, VMware release a real final 1.0 which has a build number higher than Workstation 5.5. This is an important note cause isn’t clear what users should do with the Player build embedded on Workstation 5.5.
VMware Player is based on the same virtualization engine of VMware Workstation 5.5, with a subset of features.
The world press and the whole virtualization community talked about this product, working on reducing limitations. Related to this you could want check out my Guide to create .vmx files for VMware Player.
You can download VMware Player 1.0 here.
You can also download here the final version of the VMware Browser Appliance virtual machine, based on Ubuntu Linux 5.10.
This could be slightly off-topic but multicore-core CPUs are about to change the processors market forever and virtualization is one of the most sensible segments to this technology.
Both VMware and Microsoft reshaped their agreement terms to bind licenses to physical CPUs instead of core. But this could change again as soon as we go towards quad-core or better architectures.
It worth to read this small article.
Thanks to OSNews for the news.
VMware Player is the free virtualization engine VMware launched since October 2005.
It’s based on the same engine of VMware Workstation and has a lot of features. To see a summary of them check my dedicated post.
Being a scaled down version of VMware Workstation, VMware Player misses some critical features, like creating new virtual machines.
But the VMware EULA doesn’t prevent users from creating new virtual machines in other ways and use them with VMware Player.
So, for example, you could legitimately install VMware Workstation trial, create a new virtual machine, uninstall it and use the new virtual machine inside the VMware Player.
Now, since this an uncomfortable way to go, various VMware enthusiasts created workarounds and tools to produce new virtual machines good for VMware Player.
There is a lot of confusion about these workarounds and tools, also because many of them have the same name.
To create the new virtual machine you just need two files: a virtual machine configuration file (.vmx) and a virtual machine hard disk (.vmdk).
Technics and tools spreading on the web should produce both files to have a working virtual machine.
I will summary in this post various methods and will update the post when a new method or tool come up. So be sure to check it often.
Robert Petruska and Ulli Hankeln did it again.
Robert Petruska created a bunch of great Windows GUIs for many famous VMware utilities.
Ulli Hankeln reversed the VMware virtual hard disks (.vmdk) structure, creating a lot of incredible utilities.
Between them there is a batch for producing new VMware virtual machines configuration files (.vmx) called vmx-builder.cmd.
Why should you need producing new .vmx files from scratch? Simple: to create new virtual machines with VMware Player without installing VMware Workstation trial.
If you wanna know more you better read my previous post and come back here.
Now Robert and Ulli worked together and produced a Windows application easier than ever to creat new .vmx files: the VMX Builder.
Please note that this utility isn’t connected with the online VM Builder.
Quoting from the Paralles official announcement:
After months of focused research, development and testing, Parallels, Inc., (www.parallels.com) today announced the immediate general availability of Parallels Workstation 2.0, the world’s first hypervisor-powered desktop virtualization solution, at the industry leading price point of $49 per license.
…
Parallels Workstation 2.0’s lightweight hypervisor inserts a thin layer of software between the machine’s hardware and the primary operating system that directly controls some hardware profiles and resources, resulting in dramatically improved virtual machine stability, reliability, and performance. The technology also empowers Parallels Workstation to fully realize the features and benefits of Intel Virtualization Technology architecture, an important new technology that optimizes CPUs for virtualization…