History

Kimbro Staken, CTO at JumpBox, published on the corporate blog a procedure to convert a VMware virtual machine image in something working with Parallels virtualization products.

The whole process depends on QEMU capability to understand a .vmdk format and translate it in a raw hard disk image. It also has several major issues:

• once migrated guest OS will not necessarly recognize new hardware exposed by Parallels, it depends on how many drivers are installed
• if the original VMware hardware included virtual SCSI it will not work at all, since Parallels only support virtual IDE
• if the original VMware virtual machine image is splitted on several .vmdk files you have to join them together before converting

Please note that this approach would probably be even more painful when the guest OS is Windows.

If you are not doing an amatorial experiment I strongly recommend choosing a more reliable solution, able to adapt a saved hard disk image to any underlying hardware (something usually called V2V migration). Or wait for Parallels Transporter.

Quoting from JumpBox official announcement:

JumpBox, a new virtual appliance development service, announced today that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program. JumpBox virtual appliances are a way to simplify and speed up the deployment of server-based software both for the software vendor as well as the consumer…

At the moment JumpBox just offers a beta virtual appliance called vTiger, a customer relationship management solution, available for VMware, Xen and Parallels virtualization platforms.

Processor.com published a short but very useful interview with Raghu Raghuram, Vice President for Products and Solutions Marketing at VMware, about common errors of virtualization newcomers:

• Not setting up a good system to track testing before deployment
• Not building enough redundancy into the hardware powering your virtual machines
• Not changing your process workflows to account for virtualization
• Failing to account for virtualization in disaster recovery preparation

Unfortunately such errors happen more frequently in small businesses where, even wanting, budget constrains limit capability to follow some of these precious advices.
So a last warning emerges: virtualization saves big money but the path towards it is not cheap. Even with free virtualization products.

The VMware Technology Alliance Partner ThinPrint, a german company focused on mobility and printing solutions for enterprises, released a special version of its flagship product, .print, for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) environments based on VMware Infrastructure 3.

The solution abstracts real drivers, automatically providing a virtual printer into VDI virtual desktops, compressing on the fly to-be-printed documents and sending them to a remote computer (real or virtual as well) where real printer drivers are installed.

The best feature probably is ability to work in 32 and 64bits environments, since not every printer available today is provided with drivers for new architecture.

Check a demo here.

A recent SearchServerVirtualization article is rather interesting, reporting a survey made among readers reveals 40% VMware customers also uses Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

No reasons are provided to explain this overlapping but in my experience virtualization customers implements both technologies to understand which one is easier to manager, or better integrates in their own infrastructure, or has better performances. More rarely it just depends on political reasons, to avoid vendor lock-ins or to blindly follow advices from preferred system integrator.

The article is also interesting because it implictly compares Microsoft Virtual Server with VMware ESX Server, and reports customer prefer the former when:

• are unfamiliar with Linux (needed to do basic administration under ESX)
• need a faster and cheaper starting solution (since Virtual Server is free of charge)

This comparison is pretty odd since VMware releases Server (formerly GSX Server) which is as free as Virtual Server 2005, and it’s available both for Linux and Windows, so companies using only Microsoft technologies still can spend their knowledge without wasting time in new training.

The inappropriate similarity between VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is unfortunately pretty common and depends on several factors:

• VMware poor marketing message, snubbing GSX Server since ever and pushing ESX Server as the only reliable enough product to be used in production
• Microsoft misleading marketing message, pushing Virtual Server as really able to compete with ESX Server (which, as said so many times, is not the case)
• Hundreds of consultants and tents of journalists, poorly skilled on one or another product, spreading confusing messages to already confused customers

Next version of Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES), actually offering Netware 7 directory services on top of Linux OS, will include Xen and support for the just announced ZENworks Virtual Machine Management.

OES 2 is expected in Q2 2007 and may feature improved Windows guest OSes performances, thanks to the recent company agreement with Microsoft.

Commercial fork of QEMU made by Virtual Bridges, Win4Lin Pro, reached 3.5 release.

In this new build introduces serveral bug fixes and extended support for Linux distributions, including Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

Download it here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

To help web developers testing their designs and applications in the dual-world of Internet Explorer 6.0 and new 7.0, Microsoft released a virtual machine with a pre-installed and pre-activated (no WPA) copy of Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2.

It contains IE6 and IE7 Readiness Toolkit and comes as a 500MB compressed image.
The virtual appliance, named Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC Image, can be used with any Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and 2007 beta (or with any VMware product using Importer 2.0 or Converter 3.0 beta).

Obviously Microsoft doesn’t give away its OS for free so there is an expiration time set to Apri 1st 2007, and to download it you have to pass the Windows Genuine Advantage check.

Download it here.

Strangely it has not been included in the just lauched VHD Test Drive Program site, where Microsoft is starting to push their own virtual appliances.

After less than one month from the first beta, the highly expected XenSource XenEnterprise 3.1, introducing support for Microsoft Windows XP SP2 and 2003 (SP0, SP1 and R2 edition) guest OSes, already reaches release candidate status.

The milestone was indeed expected since XenSource plans to publicly release 3.1 before the end of the year.

No new features has been introduced in this new build. The beta program is still open for enrollment.

SearchServerVirtualization published a nice article providing some suggestions for choosing between Linux and Windows as host OS for VMware Server.

It’s just a big short and the analysis could be much more complex, involving aspects as easiness in virtual machines files backup strategy or in performances optimization strategies, but it’s a good beginning.

Read it at source.

Meanwhile many (including me) are waiting VMware will support Sun Solaris 10 as host OS as well. At that point a deep comparison will be even more interesting.