Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
virtualization.info Editors Dave Jaffe published on VMTN User Solutions forum a great C# source code for automating virtual machines cloning inside a VMware environment.
It requires VMware Virtual Infrastructure SDK so this is going to work with GSX and ESX Server only if you have VirtualCenter also, not Workstation.
The compiling instructions are inside the source code.
Adding a simple GUI would be very simple starting from here.
An old news indeed since PlateSpin announced this on 17th October, but now that IBM released Virtual Machine Manager 2.01 for IBM Director 5.10 it worth to mention.
Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement:
PlateSpin Ltd. today announced that its patent-pending PowerConvert product is now integrated with IBM Director 5.10.
Released in September 2005, IBM Director 5.10 is the latest version of a widely deployed, integrated suite of software tools that provides a consistent, single point of management and automation for complex IT environments. IBM Director facilitates hardware configuration, deployment, monitoring and inventory management.
When combined with PowerConvert, customers have the ability to manage the migration of data, applications and operating systems from physical servers to virtual machines from a central point of control, making it ideal for server consolidation projects….
IBM annonced its new Director 5.10 on 23th September and released it on 25th October.
Director is an enteprise management platform free for IBM xSeries and BladeCenter customers, also managing any kind of operating system.
Since December 2004 IBM also released a great add-on for Director called Virtual Machine Manager, able to interact with VMware ESX Server, GSX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server hosts (since version 2.0) to discovery and manage even virtual machines, performing some tasks VMware VirtualCenter usually offers, like migrating virtual machines from a managed host with high CPU usage to a managed host with the lowest CPU usage.
Till today IBM annonced the new Virtual Machine Manager without releasing it, so who switched to Director 5.10 lost control of virtual infrastructure.
Now the Virtual Machine Manager 2.01 is out, bringing a couple of bug fixes and support for the new Director release.
Download IBM Director 5.10 and Virtual Machine Manager 2.01 here.
You could also be interested in reading the related IBM Redbook (in updating for Director 5.10): Implementing Systems Management Solutions using IBM Director
VMware just published a new wonderful 23-pages paper on ESX Server 2.x on how to benchmark VMs performances and apply different resources allocation methods.
It covers the following topics:
Download it here.
Quoting from Windows Networking:
This article examines how to use Sysprep to create a library of operating system images which you can then use to deploy virtual machines on Microsoft Virtual PC for testing purposes. Such a library can help you save valuable time when creating test networks using Virtual PC.
In two previous articles on Windows Networking, we looked at how to use Microsoft Virtual PC as a testing and learning platform and how to get the best performance when using Virtual PC. This article discusses how you can use Sysprep to build up a library of virtual machine (VM) images that can make testing/learning even easier.
Sysprep (System Preparation tool) is a Microsoft Windows tool used for preparing reference systems for image-based deployment to target systems. Sysprep is found in the Deploy.cab file in the \Support\Tools folder on your Windows product CD, and the latest version of Sysprep for each Windows platform can also be obtained from the Microsoft Download Center by searching for “deployment tools”.
While the primary use for Sysprep is preparing systems for deployment using disk imaging (you also need a third-party disk imaging tool like Ghost to do this however), another use for Sysprep is simplifying the creation of new VMs for testing and learning purposes using Virtual PC. To see how this works, let’s walk through the process of “sysprepping” a VM running Windows XP and then using it to create additional XP VMs with minimal extra work…
Read the whole article at source.
Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement:
PlateSpin, Ltd today announced that it has closed an investment with Insight Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in New York, N.Y. for Round B financing in the amount of $7.4 million US. The investment follows multiple consecutive quarters of double digit quarter-over-quarter growth and the milestone of surpassing the 500 customer mark. The proceeds of the investment will be used to further accelerate growth in software development, sales, marketing, and customer support. PlateSpin added an additional 162 new customers during the last quarter alone achieving a 95% increase in revenue over the previous quarter, recording the most revenue in any quarter to date and its first profitable quarter overall….
Microsoft already started an aggressive marketing launch for Virtual Server 2005 R2 annoncing a pricelist of $199 for Enterprise Edition and $99 for Standard Edition.
Now they go even further launching a new promotion, valid till 30th June, for having Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition at $99, as reported by Redmondmag.com.
The product already available for download in evaluation form and for Volume License and Software Assurance customers, will be made available for the general public in February.
Steven Bink reports the long awaited Virtual Server 2005 R2 is finally available for download in 180-days evaluation form: x86 Enteprise Edition.
Volume License and Software Assurance customers can also download it here.
Remember to also download the Updated Additions to better performances for Windows Server 2003 SP1.
MSDN versions should follow at short (Microsoft reported it should be available for middle December).
Beta testers should soon receive a letter with their Enterprise free copy as Microsoft promised.
Update: Microsoft just informed me that the evaluation product changed download location. I already updated the link.
As you can notice they removed the x64 Enteprise Edition trial availability.
Along with the new Xen 3.0, its creator company starts offering commercial products.
First of all they start supporting the technology with a 3-tier architecture: support engineers (within 3 levels of agreements), classroom instructors and professional services consultants.
Then XenSource officially launched a commercial add-on to Xen for simplyfing enterprise-wide virtual environments: XenOptimizer.
XenOptimizer has the following features:
Along with the new Xen 3.0, a new CD appeared called Xen 3.0 Test CD:
You can help the Xen project by testing Xen 3.0 on x86-based hardware and sending us the results. Community testing is the only way that we can test Xen on a wide range of hardware platforms, and the more test results we get, the better Xen will get.
To test Xen 3.0, all you need to do is download the Xen 3.0 Testing CD (ISO image), burn it onto a CD, and boot your system from it. The tests run automatically, and will not make any changes to your existing system installation except to write a file of test results to a safe place on a local drive or a USB stick. When the tests are done, the CD will try to upload the results to our website via http. If you don’t have an internet connection on the test machine, you can copy the file and upload it to us via our test feedback web form.
So download it here and help this great project!