History

From the company management blog, The Console, Bogomil Balkansky, Director of Product Marketing at VMware, talks about a rarely discussed benefit of virtualization, power saving, and provides some interesting numbers:

We estimate conservatively that for every workload moved from a physical to virtual environment, customers can save about $290 in electricity costs, and about $360 a year in cooling costs. The more important thing is that these savings accrue year after year.
…
Beside the company bottom line effect, there is something to be said about the environmental impact of virtualization. The $650 per virtualized workload represents 8,000 kWh of electricity saved. With more than 1 million workloads running in VMware virtual machines, the aggregate power savings are about 8 billion kWh, which is more than the heating, ventilation, and cooling electricity consumed in New England in a year…

Read the whole article at source.

Dennis Zimmer, owner of german blog VMachine.de, wrote his second book in german language about virtualization.

VMware Server und VMware Player Release Date: August, 2006 ISBN: 3898428222 Edition: 1 Pages: 360

Note: this book will not appear on the Virtualization Bookshelf because is not in English language.

IBM RedBook department released another book about virtualization. This time about the z/VM engine and how to use it with RHEL 4:

In this IBM Redbook, we assume that you have a general familiarity with IBM zSeries technology and terminology. We do not assume that you have an in-depth understanding of z/VM and Linux. This book is written for those who want to get a quick start with z/VM and Linux on the mainframe.

This book describes how to set up your own Linux virtual servers on zSeries and IBM System z9 under z/VM. It adopts a cookbook format that provides a clearly documented set of procedures for installing and configuring z/VM in a logical partition (LPAR) and then installing and customizing Linux.

You require a zSeries LPAR with associated resources, such as a z/VM 5.2 media, and a Linux distribution. This book is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 for zSeries and it addresses both 31-bit and 64-bit distributions.

In addition, there are a few associated REXX EXECs and Linux scripts to help speed up the process. These tools, which are on the Web, are not IBM products, but they are informally supported. They are available on the Web.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Introduction to z/VM and Linux
• Chapter 2 – Planning
• Chapter 3 – Configuring a desktop machine
• Chapter 4 – Installing and configuring z/VM
• Chapter 5 – Servicing z/VM
• Chapter 6 – Configuring an NFS server
• Chapter 7 – Installing Linux interactively
• Chapter 8 – Installing Linux with kickstart
• Chapter 9 – Cloning Linux
• Chapter 10 – Three virtual servers
• Chapter 11 – Miscellaneous recipes
• Chapter 12 – Monitoring systems
• Chapter 13 – Red Hat Network and up2date

Download it here.

Massimiliano Daneri, of VMBK fame, did it again: this time released a very simple SSH console for the new VMware ESX Server 3.0, which is reachable by any browser.

vmSSHjwc (Virtual Machine SSH Java Web Console) is based on the popular AppGate MindTerm and has been modified to run on the ESX Server 3.0 console.

Download it at source for free.

VMware and Provision Networks arranged a webcast for November 1st:

Provision Networks solutions embrace and extend the Microsoft Terminal Services platforms, delivering resilient and scalable on-demand access for enterprises worldwide. A charter member of the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure alliance, Provision Networks is at the forefront of the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

The Virtual Access Suite (VAS) from Provision Networks is a comprehensive framework that leverages the VMware Virtual Infrastructure to transform the physical desktop computer and its applications into on-demand virtual services. More than a traditional connection broker, VAS empowers a hosted desktop infrastructure with extensive VM management and monitoring capabilities, as well as a complete access and application delivery infrastructure.

Register for it here.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

Quoting from the Insystek official announcement:

…INSYSTEK CTO, Richard Carlsen, stated publicly Monday that virtualization management will be an enabled technology to all INSYSTEK solutions.
Initial support for VMware VirtualCenter is expected to be in beta with in the next couple of months.

INSYSTEK Virtualize IT technology provides the ability to effortlessly manage complex virtual infrastructures from the same console used to manage the physical one.
Automatically discover virtual assets, determine resource usage and performance.

This year we can expect the Virtual IT enabled solutions with several features:

• Enterprise management support for thousands of physical and virtual machines
• Discover virtual infrastructure systems and resources
• Create virtual servers and desktops
• Automatically track and manage physical and virtual relationships
• Deploy software applications to your virtual environment
• Run reports for virtual resource configurations and usage
• Audit all virtual machines for resource configurations
• Audit guests for operating system and software configurations

…

VMware published a very interesting yet brief 12-pages whitepaper about how to handle a migration from ESX Server 2.x to the new VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3):

…there are four stages in a typical upgrade project.

• VirtualCenter components, including VirtualCenter Server, its database, and all associated clients
• ESX Server hosts and all their related VMware VMFS datastores,whether local or shared
• Virtual machines, particularly the virtual disk files and virtual hardware
• VMware Tools

Because of the tight coupling between ESX Server 3.0 and VMware VMFS You must plan the upgrade process carefully to ensure there are no unrecoverable losses.

Many of processes invoked during an upgrade are irreversible, meaning that once they have been performed, you cannot roll back to the previous state. However, the methodology based on the four stages outlined at the beginning of this section was designed so that, at every stage, you can perform an appropriate backup…

Read the whole whitepaper at source.

Thanks to About Virtualization for the news.

InfoWorld published a review of the recently released Scalent Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE) 2.0, scoring it 8.5/10 (Very Good) and providing this conclusion:

Scalent?s V/OE promises much, and it delivers. By separating the server from the hardware, you can move server instances among physical hardware and even among virtualization platforms in a seamless manner that retains all network, iSCSI, and FC connections. Combined with a very attractive and usable Flash-based GUI, V/OE 2.0 is a glimpse of what a truly adaptive datacenter could look like.

Pretty interesting if you never saw the product in action.

Read the whole review at source.

Microsoft published a webcast about Windows codename Longhorn in the The .NET Show.

In the second part of it Volker Will, Technical Evangelist in the Developer and Platform Evangelism group at Microsoft, describes and demonstrates Virtual Server 2005 R2, installed on Windows Vista and running virtual machines with Longhorn and Vista.

The overall discussion is very introductory but it’s an occasion to see Volker Will presenting.
The webcast also includes a complete transcript.

Watch the webcast at source.

PlateSpin and Double Take arranged a new interesting webcast for September 27th:

Traditional backup and recovery tools may not provide the real-time protection and streamlined recovery an organization needs to meet their RPO and RTO goals. Attend this webinar to find out how PlateSpin and Double-Take Software have combined their expertise to provide a solution to this challenge.

In this hour long webcast you will learn how to:

• combine continuous data replication of whole servers and hardware independent recovery to protect your business-critical systems in real-time
• quickly recover to a new server or a even a virtualized system regardless of the hardware differences
• leverage PlateSpin PowerConvert and the replication technology within Double-Take to reduce costs by achieving an unprecedented level of restore flexibility and speed over traditional restore procedures

Register for the webcast here.