History

Flores Eken wrote a tool for ESX Server 3.x, using the new SDK, able to manage associations of hosts with VLANs ID and portgroup names in a VMware infrastructure:

Download it here.

Thanks to Run-Virtual for the news.

Altris announced the public availability of its Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) 2.1 beta on the Juice portal:

…
SVS 2.1 will improve support for emerging computing environments such as Dell SmartClient/Ardence, HP CCI and IBM Virtual Hosted Client/VMware VDI.

A client of any type – fat, thin, blade or virtual – will be able to instantly “Subscribe” to SVS layers that are stored on a standard network share. User settings and data will remain persistent on the network even when the user moves to a different physical client or boots to a new baseline virtual client…

Anyway this first beta doesn’t expose new features, which will appear later.

Download it here.

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

Quoting from the CA official announcement:

CA today announced Unicenter Advanced Systems Management (Unicenter ASM) r11.1, a platform-agnostic solution that provides centralized management for virtualized and clustered server environments—enabling customers to continuously assess, manage and optimize system resources to ensure service availability and reliability.

Unicenter ASM automatically balances workloads in complex environments that include clusters and virtualized platforms. Through pre-defined business policies, it performs centralized dynamic resource brokering across virtualized server resources. If the performance of a mission-critical application begins to degrade and additional memory or CPU capacity is required, Unicenter ASM can automatically reallocate available resources to that application. Unicenter ASM can also make resources available by moving the least critical application on the virtual machines to a different server. If and when the demands of the mission-critical application diminish, Unicenter ASM will then automatically reallocate resources to other applications as necessary.
…
Unicenter ASM enables customers to leverage their investments in a wide range of virtualization technology—including HP MC Service Guard, IBM HACMP and pSeries LPAR-capable eServers (P4 and P5), Microsoft Virtual Server and Cluster, Red Hat Advanced Server cluster, Sun Enterprise and Mid-Range servers, as well as Sun Cluster and Sun Fire, Veritas Cluster Servers running Solaris and Windows, and VMware ESX/GSX Servers…

Unicenter ASM is immediately available as a Unicenter Network and System Management add-on module and costs around $30,000. Xen support will be introduced with a following update planned for end of this year.

Quoting from MacNN:

On November 23, the US Patent & Trademark Office published two of Apple’s patent applications which were both filed in July 2006 and respectfully titled ‘Virtualization of graphics resources.’ Apple’s patents relate generally to computer graphics, and more particularly to virtualizing resources for computer graphics.
…
Graphics resources are virtualized through an interface between graphics hardware and graphics clients. The interface allocates the graphics resources across multiple graphics clients, processes commands for access to the graphics resources from the graphics clients, and resolves conflicts for the graphics resources among the clients.

In one aspect, the interface is a graphics kernel that assigns an identifier to a resource when allocated by a graphics client and the client uses the identifier instead of an address for the resource when requesting access to the resource.

Because the native command structure for the graphics hardware is unaffected by the virtualization, neither the applications nor the hardware require modification to operate in conjunction with the present invention. Furthermore, because the virtualized resources appear as unlimited resources to the graphics clients, the clients can be simplified since, for example, they are no longer required to de-fragment or compact their assigned resources…

Read the whole article at source.

Dennis Zimmer wrote a new book about VMware virtualization products, this time (finally) in English language:

VMware delivers the next wave in virtualization software. Server and Player are free and offer huge savings in time and resources.

Many professional IT users now enjoy the opportunities virtualization opens up. If you’ve ever wanted to understand the buzz around virtualiza-tion then this book is for you.

For both the professional and the personal user, it gives a solid overview including all the necessary user tips.
Offering a great introduction into this complex area, this book will answer all your questions.

From installation to the choice of the right hardware, from creation to configuration, it’s all inside.
Basics, concepts, and designs are clearly presented in a way that is easy to un-derstand.

Whether you are a system administrator or engineer, a user of VMware GSX, or simply interested in virtualization, this book is all you need.

Three chapters are available online for free:

• Chapter 8 – Virtual Networks
• Chapter 12 – VMware Tools
• Chapter 15 – VMware Server

Read reviews and buy it in the new virtualization.info Bookstore.

In these hours the operating system (a Fedora Core variant) image which will power thoudands of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) notebooks has been released in public.

You can download it and install inside a virtual machine from VMware, Microsoft, Parallels (also for Mac OS users), or inside QEMU. No paravirtualized image for Xen, sorry.

Some technical steps are required but it works.

Download it here and try from yourself. Or check feedbacks from current testers here.

Aaron Tan, from ZDnet Asia, reported a Microsoft spokesperson statement saying:

For production machines and everyday usage, virtualization is a fairly new technology and one that we think is not yet mature enough for broad consumer adoption.

Sometimes Microsoft marketing strategy is a mistery.
The company is doing a huge investment injecting a new hypervisor (Windows Server Virtualization, formerly codename Viridian) inside the Windows kernel, and catching up the market leader (and almost monopolist) VMware.

It’s hard to believe a Microsoft representative is taking such position just to justify a recent change on Vista EULA, limiting customers capability to run the new operating system inside virtual machines, or to justify technical limitations preventing Aero Glass new interface to be correctly displayed inside a virtual machine.

Anyway it’s worth to remember that other times press capability to distort a statement is amazing…

Quoting from InfoWorld:

…
Gartner’s latest report on servers, released Tuesday, shows that worldwide sales grew by 4.4 percent, based on revenue, to just over $13 billion, and 9.1 percent by unit volume, to 2 billion servers. In the second quarter, sales rose 2.5 percent by revenue and 12.8 percent by unit volume.

“We have seen double-digit growth in the past,” said Jeff Hewitt, research director for Gartner. “Server sales are still growing, but because of virtualization, customers don’t have to buy as many servers.”…

Read the whole article at source.

It really seems the russian virtualization startup Parallels beaten Microsoft on its own game and the market leader VMware as well, releasing before competitors an update (build 2112) for its Workstation product which fully supports Windows Vista, completed just one week ago and already available for MSDN subscribers.

The update is automatically downloaded, free of charge, for current customers thanks to product auto-update feature.

At this point Parallels Workstation is the only virtualization solution officially supporting Vista as guest and host OS.

Download it here.

NetBSD 3.1 has been released, and among new features finally appears official support for Xen 3.0.3 domU.

This way NetBSD becomes second operating system for Xen after Linux. Solaris will come next year.

Download it here.