History

VMware opened up the beta phase of its most “unknown” product: P2V Assistant. As many customers probably experimented having a P2V trial isn’t so easy.
So this is a great chance to try it and understand how it works (the trial will offer you 5 P2V conversions).

The new 2.1 beta brings a major feature: the product is now based on the 3.8.1 version of the best-known Linux livecd distribution: Knoppix.
Knoppix is a revolutionary approach to desktop computing, providing a so flexible architecture that everybody can custom the product to create its own live desktop OS, bringing it everywhere without hardware installation hassle.

VMware customized Knoppix for physical to virtual needs and this will grant an always updated and improved platform. Knoppix also will provide a huge hardware compatibility to P2V Assistant, simplyfing the use on many physical hardware server.
This support could eventually grow if VMware choose to adopt the just released Knoppix 4.0, distributed on DVD by default, on future releases.

Read other changes on the release notes and sign-up for the beta here: http://www.vmware.com/programs/6/p2vBeta.do

“The VMware Workstation 5.0 Handbook”, written by Steven Warren is finally available on Amazon.

Virtual machine software is the foundation for next generation computing as it allows users to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on the PC. VMware Workstation enables administrators and software developers to develop, test, and run networked, server-class applications on Microsoft Windows, Linux, or NetWare all on a single desktop.

The VMware Workstation 5.0 Handbook covers the nuts and bolts of VMware Workstation, including how to install and upgrade VMware as well as use it guest operating systems. It teaches administrators everything they need to know in order to use VMware Workstation effectively, including how to configure, run, and troubleshoot virtual machines.

Step-by-step tutorials allow readers to work with the product as they read, and real-world examples and software screenshots reinforce the tutorials and make understanding this powerful new technology easy. This book teaches all the skills necessary to use VMware effectively in corporate IT infrastructures.

FEATURES

• Provides the only complete guide to VMware Workstation 5.0
• Covers essential features such as virtual networking, live snapshots, drag and drop and shared folders, and PXE support
• Teaches the nuts and bolts of VMware Workstation, including how to install it on a Windows and Linux platform, troubleshoot and trace common problems, configure complex virtual networks, move, share, and work with virtual machines and disks, and performance tune virtual machines to fit various needs
• Presents the material through step-by-step, real-world tutorials that allow users to work with the software as they work through the projects
• Includes a CD-ROM with a trial version of VMware 5.0 and custom VMware scripts.

Quoting from Virtual PC Guy blog:

I have been running Windows Vista for a while now (one of the benefits of being a Microsoft employee) and now that the rest of the world can access it I thought I should pass on some information about running Virtual Server / Virtual PC on top of Windows Vista Beta 1.

There are a number of issues that you should be aware of:

Virtual Networking does not work on top of Windows Vista Beta 1. Yup, this is really annoying – but it does not work. Thankfully for Virtual PC users shared networking continues to work just fine.
Upgrading to Windows Vista Beta 1 on a machine with Virtual PC or Virtual Server installed will generate an error: AddDriverPackageIntoDriverStore:Failed to install the driver package. So you should uninstall VPC or VS before attempting to upgrade your host.

Some Virtual Server specific issues are:

A number of host crashes have been reported running Virtual Server on the x64 version of Windows Vista Beta 1.
IIS is installed, but disabled by default on Windows Vista Beta 1. You will need to start the World Wide Web Publishing Service from services.msc
Connecting via VMRC to a running VM will lock the mouse to the window. The host key will not work to break out of the VMRC session. To break out of the VMRC window, use CTRL-ALT-DEL and then click Cancel.

Some Virtual PC specific issues are:

Starting a virtual machine causes Glass (uDWM) to crash (for those who do not know – the uDWM is what implements the ‘cool 3D effects’). This is actually kind of interesting to see as the entire desktop seamlessly switches back to 2D mode – and when you exit Virtual PC it goes back to 3D mode.
When LUA is enabled, you must manually launch Virtual PC with elevated privileges, otherwise Virtual PC cannot write to / or launch any virtual machines.

Eh… I know that that sounds kind of grizzly – but as I said I have been running Windows Vista for a while now and have been happily using Virtual PC on top of it. And don’t worry – we will have this all sorted by the time we ship 😉

A huge news today: SWsoft choosed to start and sponsor an open source project about its flagship products, Virtuozzo.
The project is called Open Virtuozzo and its a subset of Virtuozzo product:

Open Virtuozzo is an Operating System-level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. Open Virtuozzo creates isolated, secure virtual private servers (VPSs) or virtual environments on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each VPS performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; VPSs can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.

The Open Virtuozzo project is an open source community project supported by SWsoft and is intended to provide access to the code and ultimately for the open source community to test, develop and further the OS virtualization effort. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may evolve into the regular Virtuozzo product offering. We encourage the community to access, use, develop and comment on the software and references on this site.
Open Virtuozzo is a subset of Virtuozzo — a commercial virtualization solution offered by SWsoft.

Since Virtuozzo (and Open Virtuozzo) approaches virtualization in a different way from VMware, Microsoft and Xen, I strongly recommend you to read SWsoft virtualization introduction before proceed.

You should also read how Open Virtuozzo differs from Virtuozzo in this comparison.

Then you can go further and try to download it at this location: http://openvirtuozzo.org/download

Expect to see a review of this product on virtualization.info in the near future.

Please help donating money for New Orleans and other cities victims.
You can see what’s happening in many places. This, this and this are reliable sources.

You can donate at American Red Cross or Convoy of Hope.

You can pay in many ways. I found simple donating American Red Cross through Amazon.

(informations online claim that donating $100 will feed a 4-members family for 2 days)

I already talked about the new VMTN subscription for developers. VMware is now offering a way of upgrading your standard Workstation 5.0 license to this new subscription.
Quoting from the VMware Newsletter:

Offer Expires September 15th.
For a limited time, VMware is offering Workstation 5 customers the opportunity to upgrade to VMTN Subscription and receive a full rebate for their Workstation 5 upgrade or license.

VMTN Subscription includes VMware Workstation, GSX Server, ESX Server Developer Edition and P2V Assistant for development and testing purposes. The subscription gives developers and testers an enterprise-proven virtualization platformcombined with product
updates, upgrades and supportfor only $299 per year.

This upgrade offer expires on September 15th, 2005, so act now.

Learn more about VMTN Subscription:
http://vmware.rsc02.net/servlet/cc5?NuOpQTBDQAVHtLkkHgKjhQiLjpttpxnuHptQJhuV2VW

Learn more about this rebate offer:
http://vmware.rsc02.net/servlet/cc5?NuOpQTBDQAVHtLkkHgKjhQiLjpttpxnuHptQJhuV2VY

This could be a good moment to do the upgrade since Workstation 5.5 is coming and it would be included in the Workstation / VMTN license.

PlateSpin guys just started a corporate blog: the Spinblog.
This could be a good way to learn more technical details about Platespin products and how the company foresees the server consolidation market.

The Linux Journal published a good technical introduction to Xen VMM architecture. This is the kind of article I’d like to see more often: virtualization and paravirtualization are changing the way we work and more companies everyday want to understand technical details before adopting the technology.

Quoting from the article introduction:

This article is intended mainly for developers who are new to Xen and who want to know more about it. The first two sections, however, are general and do not deal with code.

The Xen VMM (virtual machine monitor) is an open-source project that is being developed in the computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge, UK. It enables us to create many virtual machines, each of which runs an instance of an operating system.

These guest operating systems can be a patched Linux kernel, version 2.4 or 2.6, or a patched NetBSD/FreeBSD kernel. User applications can run on guest OSes as they are, without any change in code. Sun also is working on a Solaris-on-Xen port.

I have been following the Xen project closely for more than a year. My interest in Xen began after I read about it in the OLS (Ottawa Linux Symposium) 2004 proceedings. It increased after hearing an interesting lecture on the subject at a local UNIX group meeting.

Full virtualization has been done with some hardware emulators; one of the popular open-source projects is the Bochs IA-32 Emulator. Another known project is qemu. The disadvantage of hardware emulators is their performance.

The idea behind the Xen Project (para-virtualization) is not new. The performance metrics and the high efficiency it achieves, however, can be seen as a breakthrough. The overhead of running Xen is very small indeed, about 3%.

As was said in the beginning, currently Xen patches the kernel. But, future processors will support virtualization so that the kernel can run on it unpatched. For example, both Intel VT and AMD Pacifica processors will include such support.

In August 2005, XenSource, a commercial company that develops virtualization solutions based on Xen, announced in Intel Developer Forum (IDF) that it has used Intel VT-Enabled Platforms with Xen to virtualize both Linux and Microsoft Windows XP SP2.

Xen with Intel VT or Xen with AMD Pacifica would be competitive with if not superior to other virtualization methods, as well as to native operation.

In the same arena, VMware is a commercial company that develops the ESX server, a virtualization solution not based on Xen. VMware announced in early August 2005 that it will be providing its partners with access to VMware ESX Server source code and interfaces under a new program called VMware Community Source.

A clear advantage of VMware is that it does not require a patch on the guest OS. The VMware solution also enables the guest OS to be Windows. VMware solution is probably slower than Xen, though, because it uses shadow page tables whereas Xen uses both direct and shadow page tables.

Xen already is bundled in some distributions, including Fedora Core 4, Debian and SuSE Professional 9.3, and it will be included in RHEL5. The Fedora Project has RPMs for installing Xen, and other Linux distros have prepared installation packages for Xen as well.

In addition, there is a port of Xen to IA-64. Plus, an interesting Master’s Thesis already has been written on the topic, “HPC Virtualization with Xen on Itanium”.

Support for other processors is in progress. The Xen team is working on an x86_64 port, while IBM is working on Power5 support.

The Xen Web site has some versions available for download, both the 2.0.* version and the xen-unstable version, also termed xen-3.0-devel. You also can use the Mercurial source code management system to download the latest version.

I installed the xen-3.0-devel, because at the time, the 2.0.* version did not have the AGP support I had needed. This may have changed since my installation. I found the installation process to be quite simple. You should run make world and make install, update the bootloader conf file and that’s it–you’re ready to boot into Xen. You should follow the instructions in the user manual for best results.

The article is too long to be full quoted so proceed to http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8540

Microsoft released a couple of very interesting papers about Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 only available for Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCP).

Article 1: Build a virtual laboratory with Virtual Server 2005

As a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), you’re constantly faced with the need to have access to running technologies such as Active Directory, DNS, or Exchange, for all sorts of reasons. Whether it is for training, testing or development, it’s really handy to have a readily available working environment you can jump into within minutes. That’s why you need a Virtual Laboratory. Since Virtual Laboratories provide this kind of support to your everyday work, they need to be treated as official systems that have their own places in the production network. This is why you need a structured and standard approach for their creation.

That’s what this article series is all about: How to build a Virtual Laboratory, set it up, use and reuse it, and manage it for long term operation. The strategies outlined in these articles stem from real-world projects that cover all sorts of usage scenarios. These strategies will help you obtain value from your laboratory and ensure that you get a solid return on investment (ROI) for your efforts. One customer was able to build an entire collaboration testing environment in less than 32 hours. Think of it: less than four days to build three physical hosts with more than ten virtual machines playing roles as varied as Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint Portal Server, Content Management Server, SQL Server, Live Communications Server, and more. In addition, they are able to reuse this environment for other testing purposes. There is no doubt that this level of ROI is simply not available with physical laboratory environments.

When you’re building a laboratory you need to focus on four different areas:

• Laboratory Description-Here you will outline the strategy you will use to create and implement the environment.
• Laboratory Deliverables-In this area you identify how the deliverables from the laboratory can be used to support other testing or development scenarios. With virtual laboratories in particular it’s really easy to include pre-constructed machines as deliverables to other projects. This is because virtual machines (VM) are really only constructed of a few files on a disk-large files admittedly, but files that can be transported, copied, or downloaded from remote locations.
• Laboratory Management Practices-The third area focuses on the practices you’re going to use for the management and operation of the laboratory. Once again, file management will be a big part of this activity.
• Future Plans and Projected Growth-The fourth area looks beyond the immediate, and covers both best practices and recommendations for future lab usage as well as the creation and management of a distributed virtual laboratory structure as more members of the organization require access to running technologies.

These four pillars will help you build and prepare a Virtual Laboratory that can be used to support any number of scenarios. The following are some examples:

• Enterprise Development Environment-Developers need to have a certain amount of freedom on the machines they work with, but since these machines are enterprise systems, they must be controlled. Within a virtual environment, they can be granted the level of privilege they need without compromising production security.
• Test Environment-New technologies, new products, new patches, and new hotfixes all need to be tested before they are introduced into the production environment. A Virtual Laboratory can be used to create a low-cost reproduction of the production environment in support of these tests. This is especially useful when you need to test applications which affect the structure of your Active Directory.
• Support Environment-Help desk operators supporting levels 1, 2, or 3 can use the virtual environment to reproduce any problem. This avoids having to give them multiple systems, and lets them test out multiple scenarios without impacting the production environment.
• Training Environment-A Virtual Laboratory is the ideal environment for MCP preparation. You can install any technology and simulate any situation, allowing you to gain practical experience in the technologies in which you want to be certified. The virtual lab will let you test out scenarios that you are unable to reproduce in your production network.

You might be already using technologies such as Virtual PC or Virtual Server (if you’re an MCT, you’re definitely using Virtual PC),but the practices outlined here will help you move from ad hoc usage of virtual machines to an officially supported implementation from which multiple members of your organization can profit.

Article 2: Working with a virtual laboratory

The first part of this series focused on the preparation of a permanent virtual laboratory. It also outlined the particular deliverables you can expect when building a production virtual laboratory, one that is controlled and can provide permanent services to your testing community. Now that your virtual laboratory is up and running, you’ll need to focus on maintenance and operation. In fact, you’ll need to make sure that you have developed processes for the following activities:

• Reuse of the deliverables – these procedures will let you reuse the four deliverables created during the preparation of your laboratory.
• Laboratory management – these procedures will ensure the continuing good health of the machines making up the virtual laboratory.
• Best practices – as in all situations, you’ll want to derive best practices from your laboratory effort to ensure even better implementations in the future.

This is the gist of this article: to provide you with additional information on how you, as an MCP, can make the best of your virtual laboratory, letting you learn key features of the products you need to be certified on.

Both can be downloaded at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=3550069 (you need to login in Passport network and you need to have MCP credentials).

Server virtualization changed the way we develop, test and deploy software.
Actually it could even change they way we sell and buy hardware.

Few weeks ago VMware revamped its web community launching what is called VMware Technology Network (VMTN), and opened a new Virtual Machine Center: a place where users can download preconfigured virtual machines with various preinstalled operating systems, servers and applications.

VMware partners like Novell, Red Hat, Bea, Oracle, MySQL, SpikeSource and others to come are providing virtual machines with their flagship products aboard, from SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 to Oracle Database 10g, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 to Bea Weblogic 8.1. And any of them will be able to run on any VMware product from Workstation to ESX Server.

This move could start a new trend on selling hardware and someone is already trying to take the most of it.
The site VMdrive.com for example offers preconfigured virtual machines with various operating systems and softwares, making them available for Microsoft and VMware virtualization products.
Customers buy online the DVD image and get a brand new machine with any committed application, working out-of-the-box. It’s just virtual instead of physical.

If this seems a good idea the site Run-Virtual.com is producing something even better: the Virtual Machine Order HOTLINE is an on-demand bulding web script that let customers choose virtual machine configuration details before buying.
This approach drops down many configuration steps hardware vendors usually need to take, greatly reducing costs already cut by virtualization adoption.

Is this the beginning of a virtual-OEMs era?