virtualization.info Editors

VMware announces Production Seminar Series

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Quoting from official announcement:

Production-Ready: A Guide to Scaled Virtualization Deployment

Preparing your company to deploy Virtual Infrastructure for competitive advantage

Whether you are experienced with VMware and virtualization concepts or just beginning to utilize the technology, it is never too early (or too late) to understand the implications of large-scale production rollout in your company.

This seminar is designed for IT staff, architects, system administrators, department heads, or anyone else involved in the practical technical and business aspects of widespread systems deployment.

Attend this seminar to:

Learn how scaled virtualization deployments provide competitive advantage via faster time-to-market, lower cost, and better reliability

Understand planning and sizing considerations that could dramatically lower your current purchasing, provisioning, management and maintenance costs

Discover the complementary services and products that can further simplify your environment

Hear real-life descriptions in customers? own words of their scaled VMware production environment success – and how they got there.

Registration is free, but seats are limited ? so sign up today!

Dates: September 21 to 23, 2004
Locations: Nationwide
Agenda: 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. – Presentation, Demonstration, Customer speaker, Q&A
Continental breakfast will be served
Registration: http://www.vmware.com/seminars

Sign up today, space is limited!
Attendees will be entered into a drawing to win one of three copies of VMware Workstation.

VMware ready for its first EMEA VCP Technical Symposium

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Quoting from an official VMware letter to its partners:

Dear VMware Partner,

Announcing the VMware EMEA VCP Technical Symposium, 7th-8th September, Amsterdam

VMware is proud to present the inaugural EMEA VCP Technical Symposium to take place in Amsterdam. This event is designed to bring all of our VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) up to date on our products and to outline the future of VMware technology.

The key areas we will cover include:

Product roadmap
Virtual Infrastructure
ESX Server 2.1 and GSX Server 3.1 technical presentations
Typical SAN configurations
Disaster Recovery and High Availability configurations
Technical objection handling
In-depth Virtual Networking (failover, VLAN etc)
VMware support tools
How to engage VMware in deals

Why should you attend?

By the end of the symposium, you will have:

A closer alignment to VMware as an organisation
Up-to-date knowledge of our products and processes
The ability to communicate VMware technical and business benefits to customers
More confidence in supporting customers during the sales process

Who should attend?

Attendance at this event is mandatory for all VMware Enterprise Resellers, with at least one VCP representing each organisation. We also welcome our Alliance Partners to attend.
Attendance is free of charge and includes lunch, dinner and refreshments during the course of the symposium. However, delegates will need to pay for their own travel to the venue, overnight accommodation and breakfast costs.

Please keep 7th and 8th September free in your diaries (delegates will need to arrive at the hotel on the evening of 6th September).

If you like to let everybody know you’ll be there write down a comment for this post.
Thanks to an anonymous for forwarding me this information.

VMware presents VMworld 2004 conference speakers

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Here they are:

-) From VMware Executives:

Diane Greene
President
VMware

Edouard Bugnion
CTO
VMware

-) From VMware Customers:

Jon S. Stumpf
CTO, Corporate Infrastructure
AIG

Bob Mathers
Vice President of IT Operations
Guardian

-) From VMware Partners:

Susan M. Whitney
General Manager, IBM eServer xSeries
IBM Systems and Technology Group

Brad Anderson
Senior Vice President and General Manager, Industry Standard Servers, Technology Solutions Group
Hewlett-Packard Company

Paul Gottsegen
Vice President, Worldwide Enterprise Marketing
Dell Product Group

This list seems to me a bit incomplete since I really doubt Diane Greene in person will speak about new memory optimization routines in Workstation 5.0…
I hope to see in this list at least every VMware product manager and some researchers.
I also can see IBM, HP and Dell (take a note about this very interesting order) but cannot see an EMC Corporation representative. Very strange.

So I suggest to check back often the speaker page.

P.s.: The VMworld 2004 agenda suddenly disappeared. IMHO this can mean just one thing: something actually under NDA will be included.

A new book about VMware from Rob Bastiaansen: “Rob’s Guide to Using VMware”

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As my readers already know Rob is a very active VMware expert, providing since ever tips about two hot arguments: Netware on VMware and guestOS clustering with VMware Workstation.
Now he wrote a book you can buy on his website: “Rob’s Guide to Using VMware”.

Rob’s Guide To Using VMware
Release Date: January 15, 2005
ISBN: 9080893412
Edition: 1
Pages: 268
Size: 9.4″ x 6.8″ x 0.79″

What this book covers

If you’re a newcomer to VMware products, this book tells you exactly what VMware is all about, and how to setup your first Virtual Machines. You will learn about networking, virtual disks and more.

This book continues where the VMware manual stops: real life. Users are doing things with VMware that were not planned by the developers. This book fills the gaps between what users want to do and what is described in the manuals. This book introduces new uses for VMware, for example how to configure a cluster with NetWare and Windows, and how to perform Physical to Virtual conversions with simple low cost tools. The configurations in this book are explained in detail for VMware Workstation, based on version 4.5.2. Most topics also apply to VMware GSX Server and VMware ESX Server.

Major topics in this book are:

  • Fast track to VMware Workstation for new users
  • Virtual Machine configuration and optimization tips
  • Network configurations for NAT and routing
  • Tips for Windows and NetWare in VMware
  • Physical to Virtual conversion with low cost tools
  • Clustering for NetWare and Windows with shared disks in VMware GSX Server
  • Clustering for NetWare and Windows based on iSCSI for VMware Workstation

Where’s Linux?
If you’ve read the title and the table of contents of this book, you’ll notice that there isn’t much on Linux. You’ll find information on Linux guest operating systems, but not on configuration of all the available topics on a Linux host. A second version of this book covering Linux configurations has been planned for release in late 2004 or early 2005.

IBM releases a new redbook: “Implementing VMware ESX Server 2.1 with IBM TotalStorage FAStT”

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Abstract:

This Redbook is a compilation of recommendations for planning, designing, implementing, and maintaining FAStT storage solutions and, more specifically, in a VMware ESX Server based host environment..

Setting up a FAStT Storage Server can be a complex task. There is no single configuration that will be satisfactory for every application or situation. Part one provides the conceptual framework for understanding FAStT in a Storage Area Network and includes recommendations, hints, and tips for the physical installation, cabling, and zoning. Although no performance figures are included, we discuss the performance and tuning of various components and features to guide you when working with FAStT.

The second part of the book is dedicated to the VMware ESX 2.1 Server environment deployed on either IBM Eserver xSeries or BladeCenter equipment. It provides substantial information for different configurations and attachment to FAStT.

Table of Contents:

Part 1 – FAStT introduction, planning, configuration and maintenance
Chapter 1. Introduction to FAStT and SAN
Chapter 2. FAStT planning tasks
Chapter 3. FAStT configuration tasks
Chapter 4. FAStT maintenance tasks

Part 2 – VMware ESX Server and FAStT
Chapter 5. Introduction to VMware
Chapter 6. VMware ESX Server terminology, features, limitations and tips
Chapter 7. VMware ESX Server storage configurations
Chapter 8. Installing VMware ESX Server
Chapter 9. Redundancy by configuration

Download link.

A new VMware product is in development

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Quoting from Virtual Strategy Magazine:

A VMware Managed Desktop product is in development and is scheduled to be released end of this year or early in 2005. A beta program is available now for users who want to test this.

VMware Managed Desktop provides the following features:

-) Virtual Rights Management – Centralized Management and Local Enforcement: Administrators can centrally configure policies that enforce IT processes such as access control, patch compliance, configurations. These policies are then enforced on end-user PCs whether they are local or remote, connected or disconnected.

-) Data Confidentiality: Data and configuration information stored in a virtual machine can be encrypted to maintain data confidentiality and comply with Personal Identification Information (PII) regulation.

-) Streamlined Deployment: Administrators can streamline deployment by packaging the virtual machine, the interface required to run the virtual machine and the policies along with an installer so end users can get started easily.

I hope to provide more news about this in the next days.

Release: VMware VirtualCenter 1.1.1 released!

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VMware just released a maintanaince update of VirtualCenter. Here the resolved issues of this build:

-) Cancelling an upgrade causes only partial the VirtualCenter database conversion
Upgrading from VirtualCenter version 1.0.1 to version 1.1 may take an unusually long time if you have a large database. Canceling the installation in the middle of an upgrade might result in an inconsistent database state that cannot be used with either VirtualCenter 1.0.x or 1.1. VirtualCenter 1.1.1 substantially reduces the time required to upgrade the database and allows your to cancel and resume an upgrade at any point during the installation process without impacting database consistency. VMware continues to recommend that you back up your VirtualCenter database prior to any product upgrade.

-) VMotion fails when creating a new unique identifier (UUID)
Customers attempting to VMotion virtual machines between IBM x445 servers running ESX Server 2.1.0 might encounter an error when VirtualCenter prompts the user to generate a new UUID or keep the existing UUID at the destination host. Since prompted question cannot be answered during VMotion, the VMotion fails.

-) Cannot create a second SCSI controller through VirtualCenter
When adding a second SCSI disk, if you selected 1:0 as the ID, the choice reset to 0:2 and did not create the second virtual SCSI controller.

-) The virtual machine hard disk Properties dialog is blank
VirtualCenter Administrators were not able to edit the properties of virtual machines. The Properties dialog display was blank. This may have occurred after changing the memory allocation of the virtual machine. The range of memory supported is 4 MB to 3600 MB and is no longer limited to the physical memory of the host where the virtual machine resides.

-) Reducing Performance intervals may cause VirtualCenter server failure
When you select File > VMware VirtualCenter Settings > Performance tab, you can modify, create or remove interval types. For example, a default interval type of “Past Day” consists of 288 samples at 5 minutes per sample. If you removed an interval and then later added an interval with the same number of units per sample but specified a fewer number of samples, VirtualCenter might have failed. For example, if you removed the default interval “Past Day” and added “Past 6 Hours” with 72 samples at 5 minutes per sample. This example uses the same interval of 5 minutes, but reduced the number of samples from 288 to 72.

For more information refer to support page here.

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is Released To Manifacturing (RTM)

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Quoting from ENT News:

Virtual Server 2005 is released to manufacturing, a Microsoft spokesperson said Thursday. RTM marks the final development milestone in the server virtualization software’s odyssey from a third-party beta version to an official Microsoft product.
RTM means Microsoft developers are finished writing and testing the code, and that the final build had gone to be packaged and posted or shipped. The precise delivery date is not public, although general availability usually follows RTM by less than two months. “Virtual Server 2005 is still on track to be available broadly to customers this year,” the spokesperson said. “We will provide additional information about the product in the near future.”

Microsoft acquired a beta version of Virtual Server in February 2003 with the acquisition of the assets of Connectix. Microsoft flipped two shipping Connectix desktop products, one for PCs and one for Macs, with Microsoft branding in 2003. The company also originally hoped to get Virtual Server finished and shipped late last year.

While that didn’t work out, the product still did better than its peers. Virtual Server was originally grouped with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2003 for 64-bit Extended Systems as three products aimed at a fourth quarter of 2003 ship date. Last week, Microsoft disclosed that Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows Server 2003 for 64-bit Extended Systems won’t be ready until the first half of 2005.

Virtual Server allows several operating systems to coexist on a server, with each behaving as if it had exclusive access to the underlying hardware. The virtualization software manages the hardware resources and prevents conflicts. Microsoft hopes customers will use the software for testing and development, to migrate Windows NT 4.0 applications onto Windows Server 2003/Virtual Server 2005-hosted systems and for server consolidation.

Virtual Server 2005 will be available in a standard edition that supports up to four processors and an enterprise edition supporting up to 32 processors. Although Microsoft frequently discusses pricing at RTM, the company was not immediately ready to disclose its price plans. Bob Muglia, senior vice president for Microsoft’s Windows Server Division, has promised that Virtual Server will be the lowest cost way of virtualizing servers in the industry.