virtualization.info Editors

Automated Deployment Services (ADS) is the new Microsoft free solution to deploy a Windows image onto large bare-metal server farms (like Symantec Ghost and Drive Image do).

One thing every virtualization technologies enthusiast tried to do is to use ADS to achieve (today quite expensive) Physical to Virtual (P2V) migration. But actual ADS 1.0 cannot do that (usual HAL problems prevent successful migration).

But Microsoft now announced a new strategy for advanced server deployment and management called Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), where, among other things, ADS and Virtual Server cooperate achieving eventually free P2V migration and server consolidation.

The new virtualization portal VirtualStrategyMagazine, after a beta phase, seems to be ready for community.

You’ll find inside news, articles, webcast and web forums about some virtual products (by Microsoft / VMware / Leostream for now). This last one is good since doesn’t exist an official web forum about Leostream: now we have an unofficial one.
An “Event” empty column also suggests someday they could organize conferences about virtualization: hope to see them soon.

VMware just asked GSX Server customers to fill an anonymous survey. This is strange now that GSX 3.0 is just arrived…
I think during last product development phase many wanted features are emerged (but not included) and VMware folks are trying to priorize them for next minor releases inclusion.

Microsoft just released a non-commercial, non-supported tool to stress test I/O subsystems.SQLIO states for “SQL SERVER I/O GENERATION PROGRAM ” and in fact it simulates a typical SQL I/O workload.
Together with the MSI package you’ll receive a raw how-to for SAN and DAS configurations, but you can use SQLIO to benchmark any kind of system.

I usually don’t post any news about benchmarking tools but this one comes directly from MS and could be really useful to benckmark and fine tune your Microsoft Virtual Server or VMare GSX Server environments.
Grab it for free here.

I talked about m0n0wall several times and you know: I love this firewall.
To celebrate m0n0wall anniversary and 1.0 release, a new Gallery section has been opened and an enthusiastic user, Bart Smit, sent an interesting configuration diagram where m0n0wall is installed on a VM and it protects all other VMs as well as HostOS.

I already wrote in a previous post about a new expected feature of incoming SUN Solaris 10 called N1 Grid Containers, which will permit virtualization much better than, for example, chroot on Linux systems.
The core components of N1 Grid Containers are so called Zones, and here we have an interesting preview about how you can use them.

Is Solaris 10 going to be the preferred OS for unix honeypots deployment?

Kenji Kato just updated his page about Solaris 8/9 VMware drivers: now they work also with XFree 4.3.0.1.
Grab them here.

Clint Boulton wrote some interesting new features Microsoft Virtual Server will bring on this article. Take a look while waiting for release date 🙂

Everybody doing some business with server virtualization technologies sooner or later need (or hope) to move a physical existing server into a virtual machine. This not so simple process is called Physical to Virtual (P2V) migration and many tools exist to (semi) automatically achieve the task. VMware itself already offers a product called P2V Assistant to do that.

But what to do when, for example, you just created a perfect VM, after testing days, to be deployed as standard client for your enterprise? You did the tests and arrived to an accepted lab configuration, now you need to replicate it on a real machine, clone it and deploy the clone on every hardware client desktop around. This process can be prone to errors…

Won’t be simpler to move the perfect VM from virtual to physical (V2P)? Well, VMware suggests you how to do this in a 28 pages technical PDF.
In a near future we could see a V2P Assistant too?

Here another old good stuff found thanks to Google: a great whitepaper presented at OSDI 2002 Conference by Carl Waldspurger from VMware.

Since it’s two year old something could be changed in ESX memory management, but was too good to not post it. This also could better answer to yesterday question of GSX vs ESX comparison.