History

Softricity hosted an interesting webcast with Brian Gammage, Gartner Research Vice President, about desktop virtualization:

Virtualization is widely regarded as the most important technology to hit the enterprise in decades. The potential benefits for the desktop are tremendous, with improvements in the manageability, security and flexibility of personal computing. By reducing complexity, virtualization promises to streamline support, accelerate deployments and reduce the cost of personal computing. But virtualization is occurring at more than one level; decoupling hardware, operating systems and applications. So, what are these different levels of virtualization technology and how are they being used by companies today? How mature is the technology? How does application virtualization differ from machine virtualization and what role does streaming technology play?

Join featured Gartner Research Vice President, Brian Gammage, a recognized expert in desktop virtualization, to learn what application virtualization and streaming really are, and how they can impact your approach to managing user access to enterprise applications.

See it here.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

As many of you already discovered or read somewhere the upcoming Microsoft Vista operation system features a brand new graphic interface (Aero) with a lot of transparencies, fading effects and other cute things (something usually labelled Glass).

To see Glass in action you’ll need a performant display adapter with a lot of video RAM onboard, which is the opposite of what today’s virtual video cards offer inside virtualization platforms (no matter if they are developed by VMware, Microsoft, Parallels, etc.).
So, for now, you’ll have to run Vista inside a virtual machine without Glass effects. And this won’t change until virtualization softwares will be updated to emulate more video RAM and support enhanced Aero effects.

Meanwhile, since today, there is a sort of workaround.
The just released new build of Vista (February CTP aka build 5308) offers a new Terminal Services technology called Composition Remoting (formerly Avalon Remoting).
This technology delivers rendering informations over Remote Desktop so a remote client can see all available effects locally disabled on a connected server.

So if you have an installed virtual machine with Vista build 5308 and you can install the same build on a host OS you’ll be able to:

• not see Glass effects inside the virtual machine
• see Glass effects inside the host OS (quite obvious)
• see VM’s Glass effects inside Remote Desktop from the host OS

Sincerely, I won’t call this a workaround since the main point of virtualization technologies when applied to betas is avoiding to waste a real physical machine with something unstable, to be deleted in a near feature.
If I’m able to install Vista on the host OS why should I install it also on virtual machines? Well, maybe it could be useful for distributed development and testing but in that case would Glass be necessary?

Mike Kolitz, from the Microsoft Virtualization Team, explains how to work with Composition Remoting here (he refers to Virtual PC / Server virtual machines but the procedure works independently from platform).

Parallels continue to work hardly on its new virtualization solution, and seems no afraid of popular free virtualization products released by VMware in the last quarter.

A second beta for Workstation 2.1 just begun, sporting even better VMs performances, more solid USB support and a revamped GUI.
All other new features introduced since beta 1 are already listed here.

Parallels planned final 2.1 release for early March so stay tuned.

Meanwhile apply for the beta program here.

This one is really interesting…

Quoting from Techworld:

IT professionals are still ignorant about the advantages of virtualization, according to a survey from virtualisation specialist C&C Technology.
…
The survey of 50 IT professionals, from IT directors to network managers, found that 38 per cent of companies taking part had only an ‘average’ knowledge of virtualisation, while 48 per cent felt they were using the technology to their advantage. The biggest barrier to take-up, according to the survey, was the perceived complexity and cost of making the change…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from Techworld:

When it comes to server sprawl, the big picture is bad.

Analyst firm IDC expects the number of servers in the US to grow from 2.8 million in 2005 to 4.9 million by 2009. Data centres “are becoming more and more swollen,” causing IT costs to rise quickly, IDC analyst Vernon Turner said at the IDC Virtualization Forum, which was held here last week.

The constant need for more horsepower, and the accompanying expense, are leading some IT operations to slowly turn to virtualisation technology…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from Ben Armstrong blog:

When you move a virtual machine from Virtual PC to Virtual Server (or from Virtual Server to Virtual PC) you will get a warning message stating that the virtual machine was made by a different program and ‘may not work’…

Ben explains in this article why you receive this message and how you should handle it.

A very appreciated tip this time from Ben Armstrong: how to modify Virtual Server default behavior in checking virtual machines availability:

Virtual Server provides a service where a user can be notified if a virtual machine is not responding. This is called the virtual machine heartbeat. There are two situations under which a virtual machine might not send its heartbeat. One is because the virtual machine has crashed – and no programs are running any longer. The other is because another program on the virtual machine may be using all of the CPU resources and not leaving enough CPU time for our code to be able to send a heartbeat message…

Read the whole article at source.

The Virtualization Glossary has been moved and revamped.

Check the new Virtualization Glossary!

Quoting from Strategiy:

HP has hosted a roadshow in Dubai promoting the mainstream adoption of virtualisation by businesses around the Middle East.
…
Recent additions to HP’s range of virtualisation portfolio include the expansion of the multi-operating system HP Virtual Server Environment for HP Integrity servers, new HP-UX 11i mission-critical virtualisation capabilities, accelerated availability of OpenVMS on virtualised Integrity servers, a new packaged solution with VMware and HP ProLiant Essentials Virtualisation Management software, and new network consolidation service.

HP has also recently introduced new HP Integrity Essentials software products, offering customers the industry’s first and most robust integrated software family for planning, managing and automating virtual servers.

The new software is part of the HP Virtual Server Environment for HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers…

Read the whole article at source.

The worldwide famous QEMU software is now ported on MacOS, under the name of Q:

Run Windows, Linux and a lot more Systems on your Mac. Q is a feature packed cocoa port of QEMU: Switch fast between guest PCs. Save and restart guest PCs at any stage. Easily exchange Files between Host and Guest. Q makes use of OS X most advanced technologies like openGL and coreaudio to accelerate your experience with your guest PC.

More informations and the universal binary (running on x86 and PPC architectures) package are available here.