History

Parallels is aggressively marketing out and doesn’t seem afraid at all of upcoming free VMware Server.

They will be present at Intel Developer Forum 2006, usually a good place where virtualization vendors emerge with new releases or annoncements, presenting their implementation of Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) inside Parallels Workstation 2.1, actually in beta phase.

Vizioncore esxCharter is a performance monitor tool for VMware ESX Server, to be run on host and not on guest OSes.

The last updated of esxCharter 1.0 includes:

• database backend
• reporting
• automated reporting sending
• data exporting in CSV format

The new version is available now on the official site.

Altiris is seriously entering the virtualization market focusing on applications. They are going to compete against Softricity with a product called Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) 2.0, expected for public release on 23th March.

News.com published the news of a free version for personal use:

…Altiris will focus on what it describes as a service-oriented management concept, encompassing service-oriented architectures (SOAs) as the technology backbone, products that address management processes and a service-based delivery model.
…
To help its virtualization software gain more traction, Altiris next month will offer a free downloadable tool which users can deploy to change the settings of applications on their PCs according to their personal requirements…

Read the whole article at source.

At the same time InfoWorld published a review of pre-release version giving it 8.8 points:

…
SVS worked flawlessly during my testing. I was able to record, enable, disable and reset both simple (Office Web Components) and complex (the full Office 2003 Professional suite) installation layers on the fly, with nearly instantaneous results. Each local SVS management function was replicated within the Altiris Console, allowing me to activate, deactivate, and control application layers centrally. That’s a real boon for help desk professionals trying to diagnose installation or runtime errors.

As I put SVS through its paces and enjoyed the ease of managing the software virtualization layers, I couldn?t help but think that Altiris SVS is the kind of paradigm-shifting technology that one normally associates with Operating System evolution at the platform level…

Read the whole article at source.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

Digi International produces a network-enabled USB hub able to connect remotely any kind of USB devices: AnywhereUSB.

The company released a 7-pages document to make it works with VMware ESX Server virtual machines’ network interface.

Thanks to Peter Erleshofer for the news.

Diane Greene, President of VMware, is going to present at Morgan Stanley Semiconductor & Systems Conference, 6th March 2006.

The presentation will be webcasted and you can register for it here.

Is VMware going to shoot another big annoncement?

Quoting from ComputerWorld:

VMware, the global provider of virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, will host the first major virtualisation event in Singapore. The VMware Solution Day “Virtualise Now” event will be held on Wednesday, March 8, 2006 at Raffles City Convention Centre.

VMware Solution Day creates a forum for IT and business executives to learn about VMware’s latest virtualisation solutions and features presentations from VMware Solution and Technology Partners on how companies can get comprehensive virtualisation solutions by integrating leading edge solutions…

Read the whole article at source.

After releasing the first public wave of beta 2 invitations VMware closed registrations for Virtual Infrastructure 2.0 (aka ESX Server 3.0 & VirtualCenter 2.0) beta program.

They reopened it back due to overwhelming demand. Hurry up signing cause they will accept new registrations unitl 26th April.

Not everybody knows that VMware doens’t organize just the VMworld conference in US.
There is another very important event in EMEA every year, called Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX).

TSX is different from VMworld cause it’s reserved to VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) bringing in very technical advanced sessions. Until today.
This TSX 2006 edition, taking place in Paris on 26-27th April, will be open for every customer and VMware (non-Enterprise) Partners for the first time.

The event will take place in Dysneyland Resort (wow!) and entrance fee will cost $399 for non VMware partners.
Sessions descriptions are not available at this time.

With this move VMware could start morphing TSX in a sort of VMworld for EMEA (just like Microsoft does with TechEd).

This is a good and a bad thing at the same time: is good cause TSX becomes an aggregation event in Europe (and I feel it’s really needed), it’s bad cause VCPs chances to know new/reserved things could be reduced or nulled.

In case I’ll attend the TSX 2006 I’ll write another post, hoping to personally meet every european virtualization.info readers.

In an animated thread inside VMTN Forums just appeared a neat witness of how important and how reliable VMware VMotion is.
In my humble opinion it’s worth more than a thousand of case studies.

I quote it integrally:

My Virtual Center console shows 215 VMs provisioned, 806 VMs migrated.
I move live production servers around ALL the time via VMotion and have never had a problem.
And I work at H&R Block, and it’s tax season. Believe me, I DON’T want servers going down this time of the year.

I had a memory module show as degraded the other day. The server didn’t go down, but Insight Manager was telling me to replace it before it failed. I moved all the VMs off in the middle of day and replaced the memory, and then moved them all back.

Beautiful.

This server was hosting 18 VMs. I don’t even want to think about hard it would have been to find a common maintenance window for 18 different servers in order to take them all down at once.
I’m sure I would have had to drive 45 minutes into work at 3:00 am, replace ONE memory module, and then drive 45 minutes back home.
Instead I VMotioned 18 VMs off (2 or 3 to each of my other servers), replaced the memory module, and VMotioned 18 VMs back. While eating my lunch.

The trick is design your capacity to give yourself the ability to recover from a completely failed VMware server or in case of maintenance work like this.

VMware launched the biggest challenge ever just 2 days ago and apparently nothing happened…
I bet people are so busy to start their projects to not have even time for blogging 🙂

I’m not going to partecipate so I’m happy to share with all virtualization.info readers some suggestions to reach the yearned prize:

1) Try to stay simple
Creating a multiporpuse all-in-one virtual appliance could be a temptating path but 25% of your vote will be influenced by this aspect.
Also you have a limit of 2GB.

A virtual appliance doing greatly a single job is much more appreciated than one doing many job in a poor way.

2) Contemplate to write a new application
Distro ultimate customization is an easy approach but won’t help you winning the challenge.
In the same way, taking an existing liveCD distribution and recreate it inside a virtual machine isn’t exactly a great effort.
Try to be original.

3) Focus on benefits of virtualization
Virtualization isn’t just having a ready-to-go self-contained server, to avoid too many packages installed on your host OS.
Virtualization is also bringing a technology where it’s not available (e.g.: a Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris feature that Windows users cannot have).

If you find something achivable only with virtualization you’re already half a winner.

4) Focus on killer technologies
The more you’ll provide something useful today the more votes you’ll receive. Pretty obvious, huh? 🙂
Today’s hot technologies are VoIP, multimedia centers, documents sharing/collaboration (not just P2P), endpoint security, internet content filtering, privacy defense.

5) Take care of size
Small is better. But if you don’t have an idea of that small could mean consider the way your virtual machine will be delivered from computer to computer.
I would use as metric the actual stardard size for USB keys.

I think that the most sold today is the 256MB. So, I woudn’t create a virtual appliance occupying more that this size (including VMware Player and documentation).

6) Consider enterprises as audience
Choose carefully your audience. VMTN community is made by a large amount of enteprises administrators, not just self-employed professionals.
A virtual appliance for an enterprise audience could bring much more benefits than expected winning the challenge.

7) Don’t forgive security
Trimming down your virtual appliance isn’t just a suggested step dictated by judging criteria. Is also a mandatory process to grant security.
Be sure to put real effort on security, mostly if you are targeting enterprises.

8) Reconsider VMware Tools role
VMware Tools provide a lot of features you could use for innovative use of virtualizaiton.
I’m thinking about drag-n-drop for example…

9) Avoid Player hacking
A lot of hacks for VMware Player appeared since its release, to add multiple network connections, to create new disks, to change virtual network interface card.
Avoid them and stay with standard features, permitting everybody to enjoy your work immediately.

10) Team with others
This work isn’t just for money. VMware will promote your work in many ways using it as indirect, viral marketing. And 3 months to do something great aren’t that much.
Evaluate to join forces to create something really unique.

11) Simplify your development lifecycle
If you are not so proficient in Linux distros customization, or simply you want to speed up ideas evaluation, evaluate the use of online service rBuilder I covered in this post.

Again, good luck to everybody!

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