Ken Novak: Virtual computing

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:38:40 GMT

IDC: Server shipments slow on spread of virtualization: "Growth in the x86 server market revved slightly in Q4 2006, growing 7.0% in the quarter to $7.2 billion worldwide, its fastest growth rate in five quarters, but unit shipment growth continued to moderate with growth at 1.1% year over year, to 1.85 million servers as customers continued to consolidate their IT infrastructures, .. "For the first time in more than 10 years, average selling values in the quarter increased year over year as IT managers move to consolidate IT workloads. This shift toward a shared compute infrastructure is driving additional scalability, memory attachment and I/O needs, which in turn, lead to higher average selling values." ..

Microsoft Windows servers .. revenue grew 9.4% and unit shipments grew 5.1% year over year. Quarterly revenue of $5.3 billion for Windows servers represented 34.9% of overall quarterly factory revenue, the single largest revenue segment in the server market, IDC reported.

After two consecutive quarters of single-digit revenue growth, Linux server revenue growth accelerated once again, growing 15.3% to $1.8 billion when compared with Q4 2005. Linux servers now represent 11.9% of all server revenue, up more than one point over Q4 2005. But Linux server shipments declined 0.8% year over year after 18 quarters of double-digit shipment growth, as IT consolidation extends its reach into the open source domain...

Unix servers experienced 2.8% revenue growth year over year when compared with Q4 2006. Worldwide Unix revenues were $5.1 billion for the quarter, representing 33.5% of quarterly server spending." Itanium, z/OS and blades sold about $3.5B combined."

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:20:49 GMT

The Globus Consortium Journal: Overview of Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing workshop. "Among the highlights was an interesting paper from Intel dissecting the performance of Xen networking. A wonderful adoption scenario was represented in the work from the University of Marburg where suspend/resume properties of VMs are being used to improve backfill strategies in the local scheduler - computations running in VMs are simply suspended when a large parallel job is scheduled to run and resumed afterwards. The remarkable part of this work was that it was very much requirement-driven and has been voted into production by users. Another interesting talk came from the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) described their experiences using virtual machines in production Grids for a couple of years now."

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:18:11 GMT

Clone your Active Directory in 12 minutes using VMWare: Short instructions.

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:17:31 GMT

TechComparison - Linux Virtualization Wiki: Interesting comparison chart of virtualization technologies. Also: a story of a satisfied Xen user.

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 23:38:42 GMT

When to use VDI, when to use server-based computing, and how the Citrix Ardence dynamic desktop fits into all this: Long and thorough article comparing the different desktop models. Also profiles Ardence virtual disks, an "iSCSI-lite" for non-persistent disks that can be delivered for PXE boot as well as run time read.

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 01:11:29 GMT

IE6 on XP SP2: Nov 2006: Microsoft offers a free download of "a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development. The image is time bombed and will no longer function after April 1, 2007. We hope to continue to provide these images in the future as a service to web developers." Even with only 6 weeks to go, it might be a useful device for testing.

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 01:05:30 GMT

Virtualization: Xen vs. Microsoft vs. VMware: Nice short comparison chart of the three platforms in their free and paid flavors.

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:53:29 GMT

Automatically download VMware images: Thoughtpolice.co.uk offers VMware images ready-to-use for Fedora, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD. When they issue a new one, they place a torrent link in a file you can download via rsync to torrent the image, all automatically. Subscribing to virtual appliances is an idea that's been much talked about, and there may finally be a sufficient audience for it.

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:44:01 GMT

Running Windows on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud with Qemu and Linux: At first this seems like a kludge, but it has some other benefits:

"Significantly lower per/hour costs by running several additional Virtual Machines per AMI. This would require a Qemu abstraction / accelerator. You could foresee up to 15+ addition concurrent operation systems.
Able to more effectively simulate varied operating/hardware environments for easy migration from legacy systems.
Backups to S3 - Using the Qemu-img tool, instant snapshots can be saved to S3. Used with a versioning system, this could provide for unlimited roll backs.
VMware compatible - Qemu-img supports vmdk conversion as well as several other formats enabling easy migration from existing virtualized server environments"

Use of QEMU's virtual disk differencing system has appeal. The big question is the speed of the resulting systems, and any possible limitations from the size of the EC2 virtual machines.

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:47:41 GMT

Dell is posting VMmark results: "Dell has recently measured various configurations of two- and four-socket PowerEdge servers running VMware ESX Server 3 using a beta version of the VMmark benchmark. The graphs shows a 4-socket PowerEdge 6950 with dual-core AMD Opteron processors has 57% higher virtualization performance than a 2-socket PowerEdge 2950 with dual-core Intel Xeon series 5100 processors. The 2-socket PowerEdge 2900 with new quad-core Intel Xeon 5300 series processors shows 51% better performance. Equally impressive, all three 8-core servers were able to support the same number of heavily-loaded virtual machines."

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:42:50 GMT

Amazon Tries Hand at Virtual Appliances: "Amazon Machine Images or AMI [is] a packaged environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot Amazon EC2 instances. The company launched their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - Amazon's hosted, on demand virtual datacenter based on the Xen technology - with hopes of creating demand for a pay-per-use model of virtual machines. .. Amazon is now asking its EC2 community members to share their AMIs with other Amazon Web Services developers." Amazon keeps a listing of public AMI's with RSS feed. There's even a Windows AMI running under QEMU under Xen (whew!). XML manifests are required for each AMI.

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:31:34 GMT

XEN and the art of Virtualization: Informative test run or the latest version, with screenshots.

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:48:35 GMT

Replicate Technologies: I resumed blogging for my new company today, with comments on operating systems and virtuailzation. Enjoy.

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:04:21 GMT

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Overview: Concise description of the architecture and pointers to today's products.

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 08:19:36 GMT

VMware Reporting Huge Growth in 3Q 2006: "The company's revenue continues to climb. For the first half of 2006, VMware reported its revenue as $288 million. Compare this to the annual revenue recognized in 2005 - $387 million, 2004 - $218 million, and 2003 - $100 million, the growth is staggering. [approx 6x in 3 years.] More than 20,000 companies now [use] VMware technology, including 99 of the Fortune 100 companies"

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 08:16:26 GMT

Server Virtualization Becoming Norm: "Server virtualization no longer has the same cache it did a year or two ago. And the reason is simple: Now that everybody is starting to do it, there is nothing to boast about. According to IDC, more than three-quarters of companies with 500 or more employees use virtual servers, and 45 percent of all new servers purchased this year will be virtualized."

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:55:43 GMT

Hackers Use Virtual Machine Detection To Foil Researchers: Funny benefit for users of virtual machines -- if you run a vm, increasing amounts of malware will refuse to run. "Hackers are adding virtual machine detection to their worms and Trojans to stymie analysis by anti-virus labs, a security research said Sunday. The tactic is designed to thwart researchers who use virtualization software, notably that made by VMware, to quickly and safely test the impact of malicious code. .. "Three out of 12 malware specimens recently captured in our honeypot refused to run in VMware," said Lenny Zeltser, an analyst at SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) in an online note Sunday.

Malware writers use a variety of techniques to detect virtualization, including sniffing out the presence of VMware-specific processes and hardware characteristics, said Zeltser. "More reliable techniques rely on assembly-level code that behaves differently on a virtual machine than on a physical host," he added. "

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 06:29:34 GMT

Microsoft debuts virtual appliances: Following VMware's lead in promoting software appliances, Microsoft is promoting the idea among its third-party developers for its Virtual Server VHD (virtual hard disk) format. "More than twenty Microsoft partners have already committed to distributing software via VHD Test Drive Program by the end of the year, including Altiris, BEA Systems, Check Point, Citrix, CA, CommVault, Dell, FullArmor, HP, Network Appliance, Platespin, Portlock, Quest Software, SourceCode Technology Holdings, Symantec and UGS." I wonder how Microsoft will finesse the licensing of their operating system in this format.

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 06:25:11 GMT

For PG&E customers, it pays to virtualize: A major California utility creates an incentive for saving energy through server consolodation with virtualization. "They said the company had recently approved a three-year, $950 million plan whereby PG&E will reimburse 50% of the costs of a server consolidation project, including software, hardware and consulting, up to a maximum of $4 million per customer.

"We will calculate the energy consumed by existing servers and subtract the difference in the energy consumed by the new servers," said Randall Cole, senior project manager for PG&E's Customer Energy Efficiency program. "Then we'll pay 8 cents for every kWh saved over the first year of the server virtualization implementation." Electricity rates for PG&E's non-residential customers currently stand at 12 cents to 15 cents per kWh. ..

What's in this incentive plan for PG&E? The motives are fairly obvious: "We don't want to build any more power plants," said Bramfitt. At the same time, "regulators have told us loud and clear that we need to meet certain energy efficiency goals," he said. "We want customers to save energy, and we will pay them to do so." ..

"Virtualization isn't mainstream yet, and once it ramps up, I'm not going to incent it anymore," Bramfitt said. "But, in the meantime, I'm going to do whatever I can to light a fire under peoples' butts."" Nice to see a coincidence between my interests in energy efficiency and my main work in computers. And I wish I knew more about how the electric utilities are regulated in California, so they make money with this program, compared to other states where they do not.

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 04:59:11 GMT

Build A Virtual Machine Template: Making a template for XP, including sysprep and disk compression steps.

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 02:10:35 GMT

VDI Server Sizing and Scaling: VMware white paper on the capacity of its latest software to host multiple desktops. "We looked into two different workloads for capacity planning guidelines. For a light worker workload an HP DL 385 G1 server could support 42 Windows XP virtual machines. For a heavy worker workload the same server supported 26 Windows XP virtual machines... [The] server considered to be at capacity when the client fails either due to a 10 percent increase in the canary time observed for the workload or when a client script fails due to predefined timeouts." This was at approx 70% CPU utilization.

"Hardware Configuration for Server Running Desktops: One HP ProLiant DL385 G1. Two 2.2GHz AMD Opteron dual-core processors, 16GB RAM, 2 Ultra 320 SCSI drives (2 × 146GB disks, 15,000 rpm)"

As expected, powering a VM on takes more CPU than un-suspending it. Buth there's another option: you can "power on approximately the number of desktop virtual machines you estimate the host can support, with the virtual machines configured to go into standby mode after a certain fixed interval. ESX Server 3.0 introduces new power management options [e.g.] Windows XP desktops are configured to Wake on LAN .. When any network traffic arrives for a virtual machine, it seamlessly wakes up from standby mode. .. Compared to the resume from suspended state or cold reset option, this activation scheme offers very fast activation (on the order of a few seconds).."

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 08:31:29 GMT

The future of appliances is virtual: Good summary of the advantages of virtual appliances: "Virtual appliances have some distinct advantages over traditional appliances and servers. So many, in fact, that the age of the traditional hardware appliance could be coming to an end. .. although hardware appliances are usually much easier to deploy and manage than traditional full function servers, they are wasteful when it comes to power consumption, heat output and space requirements. Each appliance also needs cabling to networks and power outlets, and before you can use them, most also need you to connect a serial interface to them to assign an IP address. This last point may seem trivial, but finding a PC with a serial port and a copy of HyperTerminal that’s within a cable’s length of a new appliance is not always easy. Plus, [you may need] two appliances if you want a reasonable degree of fault tolerance.

In contrast, virtual appliances can be run on whatever hardware you see fit, ranging from a cheap single-socket desktop for appliances that you just want to evaluate, through to extremely fault-tolerant multiprocessor server hardware and SAN storage for a virtual appliance that you need to be constantly available." And of course they have advantages for the vendor, allowing them to distribute easily-changed software rather than inventory and ship hardware.

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 07:55:38 GMT

Parallels Compressor Server: In addition to a virtualization engine for the Intel Mac, Parallels offers the Compressor, which "improves the performance of any Windows-powered Parallels, VMware and Microsoft virtual server or virtual workstation by reducing virtual hard disk size by 50% or more. .. Compatible with virtual servers built with Parallels Server (expected late 2006), VMware Server, VMware GSX Server, Microsoft Virtual Server.[or] Parallels Workstation 2.1, Parallels Desktop for Mac, VMware Workstation, and Microsoft Virtual PC." Two versions for sale, $50 and $180, with 15-day free trials.

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 07:37:48 GMT

Let's get virtual: How to convert an old, cheap PC into an iSCSI server (and use an dual Athlon white box for VMware ESX).

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 06:52:19 GMT

Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Or other Debian Linux distros, including ones that don't run X. Good reference.

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:27:52 GMT

Creating Smaller Virtual XP Machines:
Explanation and how-to for manual reduction in Windows images form >2 GB to under 700 MB. The commentary after the article has pointers to many sources, including:

Invirtus, which continues to get good reviews for windows compression
Parallels Compressor Server, a new commercial package
A happy user of 7-zip, a free program with tight (though possibly slow) compression
A very detailed Slimming Down Windows XP: The Complete Guide
TinyXP by eXPerience, a VM said to compress to 120 MB and run in under 50 MB of RAM. Of limited use except in some benchmarking apps.

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 22:05:09 GMT

I present to you, VMware Server 1.0 beta 1: Nice quick summary of the VMware server free release.

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 23:41:26 GMT

Sipura SPA-3000 Small unit that provides voip and gateway functions. Interfaces for ethernet, and for "normal analogue telephone (or cordless) and a standard PSTN line. In technical terms, this has both an FXS and an FXO interface - the FXS interface allows a normal telephone to be turned into an IP phone and the FXO interface provides connectivity to a PSTN line (or of course another voip adapter which is locked by the provider). These interfaces can be configured independantly using the onboard web interface where when you log in as an admin user and switch to advanced mode, there are hundreds of settings ..." Has instructions for remote control by Asterisk. About $100. It ought to would work with a virtual machine Asterisk, I suppose. (Spec sheet here).

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 18:05:45 GMT

How to stress test virtual machines: Helpful test of system performance benchmark tools.

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 17:55:03 GMT

Convert physcial to virtual with NTBACKUP: Instructions on conversion, similar to ghost but using windows' built-in utilities, a fat USB drive, and a Windows install CD.

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 07:28:50 GMT

Virtualized Automaton: Reducing the size of VMs for portability: Has many tricks for reducing the footprint and the boot time of vms (and some for any windows machine).

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 07:25:47 GMT

Thin client server: If you run XP as a VM, you can use RDP into it to control from a desktop. To convert old PCs into cheap terminals, this product from X2 seems promising.

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 17:15:51 GMT

Topologilinux - [Running Linux inside Windows]: Based on slackware and colinux. Last updated 1Q 2005. Also runs native. "Topologilinux is a free Linuxdistribution to be run on top or inside your existing windows system. The main thing with Topologilinux is that it does not require any partitioning at all. (uses a single file as linux root system)..

Topologilinux needs a PC 486 or higher with about 100MB free diskspace and about 8MB ram. If you want to install everything you need about 2,5GB free space. If you want to have a X system it is recommend to have a Pentium PC with 32MB ram or more. And If you want to use colinux and X in windows you will probably need a pention 300Mhz or above with Win2k and about 96Mb ram. .."

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 16:41:38 GMT

How to build new vms with VMware Player: Using a QEMU image file, you can boot up and then install from any CD. Another method uses freedos.

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:05:41 GMT

Update your Linksys router with Sveasoft's firmware: "In its GPL Code Center, Linksys provides the source code for most of its devices. However, unless you're a programmer, this isn't going to do you much good. What can help you out is what Sveasoft has done with that source code. Based in California, this company has taken Linksys' source code and created new versions for replacing factory firmware. Basically, installing this firmware takes a limited functionality $50 consumer router and adds many of the features of an enterprise router. ..

Sveasoft actually sports three different families of firmware: Sveasoft firmware for Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS routers, Alchemy firmware that works with a list of routers (which is free and adds a lot of the features listed above), and the aforementioned Talisman firmware."

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 16:48:23 GMT

IBM open source rHype: Back in Feb 05, IBM released an open source (GPL) virtualization engine called rHype, for 'research hypervisor'. (Updates are posted through July 05). It is a paravirtualizer, so most O/S need modification before running. It runs on several hardware platforms (Power, Sony Cell, x86), and has emulators for others (Mambo, QEMU). "In addition to the rHype project, IBM has a commercial hypervisor running on machines that use its Power processors. Because rHype uses the same interfaces as the commercial hypervisor, Linux doesn't have to be modified to run on an rHype-Power foundation. With rHype on x86 chips, Linux must be modified to work. " rHype is expected to help Xen authors advance their platform. Charles King, principal analyst of Pund-IT Research, notes a trend I'm watching: "Juggling numerous tasks has long been a useful ability for corporate computing centers. Now such abilities are increasingly useful at home as computer networks get more complex and useful, King said. "It's fascinating to me that something that's been seen as a benefit for enterprise data centers is percolating its way down into the set-top box," King said. "

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 06:57:20 GMT

An Introduction to Virtualization: A history from 1959 to now (with a quote using "virtual machine" in 1961), plus a directory of various virtualization projects and products.

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 06:56:02 GMT

VMWare Serial Line Gateway: Not quite sure why I'd need it, but it seems nifty: a gateway connecting a VMware serial device to a named pipe. It's reported to work as a Citrix Access Gateway.

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 03:54:50 GMT

New projects at Sun: "Sun's Squawk project was noted by Gage. Written in Java, Squawk is intended to provide multiple virtual machines and treat an application as an object, Gage said. Squawk would provide more efficient use of memory and power, according to Gage. Squawk was described on Sun’s Web site as a compact, high-performance Java environment. "This is perfect for wireless sensor devices," Gage said."

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 22:37:46 GMT

What is a Hypervisor: Brief summary of how a virtual machine hypervisor relates to its hardware, and of upcoming hardware support. "Intel and AMD are both working on providing full Hypervisor support at the CPU level, introducing a new CPU Ring (-1), with respective project codenames "Vanderpool" and "Pacifica". A thin layer of Windows virtualization technology will move to execute at Hypervisor CPU Ring -1 to take full advantage of hardware innovations from Intel and AMD."

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:03:35 GMT

VMware, Sun Microsystems Partner on Server Partitioning: "VMware will be packaging Solaris 10 in the pre-configured, "shrink-wrap" virtual machines that the company launched a few months ago."

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 03:43:06 GMT

OSx86 in the Wild: Running OSX as a guest VM will be interesting (once it gets released legally). There are several bio and grid apps that run natively on OSX, plus various media products that are better in OSX. "We can confirm that a torrent containing a VMware image of Tiger x86 has been leaked to a major torrent site. This virtual hard drive image has supposedly been hacked to circumvent TPM and run on non-SSE3 machines. .. We obviously have not tested this image (and will not, due to its blatant violation of the DMCA) .."

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 08:54:06 GMT

Q&A: Microsoft's Bob Muglia discusses virtualization plans: Senior vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server division: "Today, we have a product called Virtual Server that sits on top of Windows and provides virtualization capabilities. In the future, we're going to build the hypervisor and the virtualization stack into Windows. So while it's a whole new set of technologies, much, if not all, of what Virtual Server does today goes into the operating system. It becomes an operating system feature. .. I think about the '07 generations of the operating system, say '07-'08 as all being Longhorn, maybe even to '09 for Longhorn R2. .. the virtualization features are in the Longhorn time frame, but it's not in the initial release of Longhorn .. "

The Register's interpretation: "Microsoft has planned a long, slow death for the Virtual Server product it acquired in 2003. Redmond will stop selling a standalone partitioning product when the server version of its "Longhorn" operating system arrives... It looks like Microsoft plans to "featurize" at least basic server partitioning functions and give the technology away with the OS. VMware, however, apparently has little to fear until 2009. The virtual machine market will keep kicking back cash to the software maker and its owner EMC."

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 17:37:44 GMT

Xen developers working on secure virtual desktop: Xen developers are preparing a package like VMware ACE, aimed at banking and homeland security. To be released with version 4.0, no date yet set.

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:23:21 GMT

Meiosys: Interview about an application virtualization technology. The company was recently purchased by IBM. "From our perspective, virtual machine technology is really about resource isolation. It's about creating OS containers that are isolated from other containers on a physical machine. You can run multiple virtualized machines in parallel on a physical machine and have complete isolation. Technology like VMware gives you the capability to run multiple OSs in parallel on the same machine, so you can run Windows and Linux in parallel. You get some utilization benefits out of that on a machine-specific basis, but the real value of that technology is resource isolation.

We're application virtualization so we're above that infrastructure and resource level, and our technology is much more fine-grained. We build a container dynamically around a specific application that runs either on a physical or virtual machine, and we allow the application to be moved from physical machine to physical machine, or virtual machine to virtual machine. We are more granular because we can wrap and move specific applications and application processes, and of course multiple applications can be running within a particular virtual machine.

We also have developed a patented TCP/IP socket migration technology that allows us to preserve state and connection during the relocation of an application from one machine to another. .. Because we provide a fine-grained virtualization at the application layer, our overhead is under 1%, compared to 15% to 40% overhead for some other technologies which enable mobility. .. We abstract the application from the OS. We run for the most part in user space, not kernel space. "

Also has interesting comments about selling data center software into enterprises through channels.

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:22:53 GMT

Red Hat virtually supports Xen: Fedora Core 4 released with Xen. Future versions of Fedora will probably be driven by a new Fedora Foundation rather than Red Hat corporate. Plus, here's a tutorial about Xen on SuSe.

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 16:40:08 GMT

VMware Technology Network (VMTN) for Developers: VMware aims to be a platform for software distribution and development. As John Sequeira recognized years ago, software can be delivered better in vm's (especially open source software). "Pre-built application environments in VMware virtual machines.. [are now] available for download to any software developer. Industry-leading software vendors BEA Systems, MySQL AB, Novell, Oracle and Red Hat are among the first to distribute their software in virtual machines. Entire application environments can be pre-installed, pre-configured and "saved" within a best-practice virtual machine. Developers can eliminate many of the traditional stumbling blocks associated with testing, evaluating and deploying new software by using these pre-built applications within virtual machines."

Also announced: VMTN Subscription for a suite of most VMware products with support and upgrades priced at $299 per developer per year.

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 17:21:56 GMT

Podtech.net: the vMatrix: John Furrier's PodTech.net interviews Amr Awadallah about vMatrix, which moves virtual machines around the net to balance game response times, among other things. (This is the first of John's podcasts I've checked out -- excellent interview style, solid tech background.)

Sat, 21 May 2005 04:31:13 GMT

When disaster strikes VMware: From IBM. "This article gives you some guidance for system failures, including where to look and how to interpret the problems, and offers some answers on fixes, all within the VMware ESX framework. .. To aid in troubleshooting, you can categorize problems when a VMware ESX server fails in several ways, depending on the failure. The most common method is to split the categories into a four-way matrix with server and virtual machine problems on one axis and network and storage on the other axis. .."

Mon, 16 May 2005 16:26:07 GMT

Microsoft Virtual Server Deployment Manager 1.3.0 (VSDM): "The Virtual Server Deployment Manager provides a streamlined way to manage and deploy Virtual Machines. Using this tool, regular users (not just administrators) will be able to create and manage their own machines, without impacting other users' machines... Based on the concept of templates, VSDM manages the virtual library (templates and ISO images) in a simple and productive way. A "must have" tool for Virtual Server customers that manage large number of machines or need to frequently recreate images based on a master image (template). .. This tool does not have PSS support. It is provided AS IS."

Available for download. More info: "The original Virtual Server administration is very powerful, yet very complex to use. Along with all the power it provides, it is complicated to manage to a regular user (not acquainted with administration processes) and therefore suitable to mistakes. One of the most critical mistakes this infra-structure provides support to avoid is when a user inadvertently modifies or damages other user’s machines.. The system also includes a client-side system service which runs inside the Virtual Machine. It is used to pass information from VSDM to the Virtual Machine and perform maintenance tasks, like renaming the machine. This a very important task because if you create Virtual Machines based from some image and they startup, Windows network will crash because another name already exists on the network. The VSDM Client prevents that by keeping the virtual machine name in sync with the VSDM database, avoiding network name collisions"

Thu, 12 May 2005 04:55:39 GMT

Joel Spolsky likes VMware, and has for a long time. Here he gives an example of how to test installation code with it.

Mon, 02 May 2005 16:31:47 GMT

VMware Sales Double: "growth was driven by new license sales, which accounted for 80 percent of its sales in the quarter, about $64 million.. VMware has an installed based of about 3 million seats for its Workstation products, and has about 10,000 customers for its server products"

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 06:42:21 GMT

Microsoft - Introduction to Windows Script Technologies: Useful reference, tailored for system administrators.

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 00:17:56 GMT

Review: VMWare Workstation 5.0: One feature I hadn't noticed before: "VMware moved memory-sharing technology from their high-end GSX and ESX products into this workstation release to make teams more feasible for typical developer workstations. With memory-sharing, if you're running, say, two copies of Windows XP with each one allocated 256MB of RAM, you're not likely to take up 512MB of physical RAM. That's because VMware knows what's on every RAM page, and it will only keep one copy of any page that's identical between the two virtual machines. If the two machines diverge for some reason, the page gets cloned and each VM gets its own copy at that point, but in the meantime your physical RAM is used much more sparingly"

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 18:46:23 GMT

ActiveGrid - Grid Application Server: Interesting take on an application server with grid functions: "The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server is a next-generation application server designed to scale applications across horizontal grids of commodity computers. The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server is built on top of the open source LAMP stack. In contrast to traditional three-tier architectures, where statically defined applications are bound to a particular deployment architecture, the ActiveGrid Grid Application Server interprets applications at runtime and can deploy them using a variety of proven deployment models and multiple data caching patterns. .. The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server extends the open source LAMP stack with grid-aware features such as dynamic node registration, data caching, session management, transaction management and interface fragment caching. These features are implemented as an Apache Module and as libraries that run within ModPHP, ModPython, ModPerl and Tomcat. The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server interprets applications at runtime and can make decisions based on context, such as how to most appropriately cache a set of data across the grid, or how to render a form fragment for a particular type of client and user role."

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 17:13:18 GMT

HP ProLiant Essentials Server Migration Pack: New P2V tools from HP. Features:

Systems Insight Manager Integration - enables all operations required for P2V or V2V migrations to be accessed from the SIM console
Automated P2V - automates the migration of physical servers into VMware ESX/GSX or Microsoft virtual machines
Automated V2V - automates the conversion of Virtual Machines between VMware ESX & GSX and Microsoft Virtual Server virtualization layers
Peer to Peer Migrations - accelerates the migration process and enables the ability to perform multiple P2V migrations concurrently
No boot CD required"

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 17:08:02 GMT

IBM offers VMware apps: "Hoping to inspire more enthusiasm among corporate and smaller users alike for virtualization technology, VMware signed a deal to bundle evaluation copies of its entire virtual infrastructure software line with all IBM Intel-based eServer BladeCenter servers. "

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:39:19 GMT

VMWare Workstation raw disk with WinXP guest: Nifty trick of converting a dual-boot machine into a multi-OS VMware system. Starts with dual boot Linux and XP; adds vmware under linux; creates an XP vm that runs off the XP partition in raw mode. Result is much faster execution of XP, and continued ability to boot XP. The downside is loss of snapshots and other virtual disk functions (obviously). I wonder if VMware workstation 5 can create an unlinked clone of the XP partition, to convert it to a true virtual disk. VMware today probably doesn't support cloning of raw disks, but if it did, it might make a more elegant p2v process -- boot, say, from a USB drive that has vmware, define a VM with a raw disk link to a partition, and clone it. (See also VMware 4.5 docs, caveat, and support comment. Thanks to 'perigrin' in deli.cio.us)

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:29:28 GMT

Oracle-on-Linux VMware Cookbooks: Oracle offers how-to's for installation, and complete VM's, 9 or 10 GB in size, which they call the "Desktop Data Center".

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 16:32:26 GMT

New Virtual Platform: "Chris Stone, late vice-chairman of Novell responsible for its acquisition of SUSE and Ximian, has surfaced on the shiny new advisory board of Virtual Iron Software Inc.. [Virtual Iron] claims it can virtualize anything from a fraction of a processor to large-scale multiprocessors. .. The company was founded in 2003 under the name Katana Technology Inc by chief scientist Alex Vasilevsky, a grid pioneer and Thinking Machines veteran, along with CTO and head of business development Scott Davis, the former CTO of Mangosoft who in his youth was technical director of DEC's VAXCluster, VMS Volume Shadowing and DEC's NT clustering technology." Virtual Iron has raised $20m, has many luminaries on its advisory board.

The product calims to combine multiple servers into a single fabric. "Virtual Iron is betting that Linux will be the big growth driver in data center computing going forward and that many small servers will be racked up in these places like so many books in a library. VMware has spread its bet across the Windows and Linux worlds and believes that, increasingly, data center operators will use fewer machines with more processors in each. Either way, thanks to their advances, get ready to see microprocessors from Intel and AMD make tons of headway in the heavy-duty corporate computing scene. .. Virtual Iron's product, VFe (get it?), allows computing system managers to turn a host of Linux servers into a single virtual server, in real time shifting jobs from one server to another as computing demands dictate. The idea is that the system is much easier to manage this way, since all of the servers run on a single Linux operating system--rather than requiring each computer to run its own operating system. (Linux sellers Red Hat and Novell must be saying "Ouch!") Also, with a setup like this, there's less unused computing power sitting around idle." Commercial availability of VFe release 1.0 will be in Q2 of 2005. Initial support for x86 and SUSE and RedHat only.

Analyst opinions: "Pund-IT analyst Charles King said Xen is likely to be a greater threat to VMware than Virtual Iron, which he said sports an approach so different from VMware's that Virtual Iron will more likely compete with grid computing vendors like Platform Computing or United Devices. .. IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky said .. "On the edges, VMware and Virtual Iron will compete with each other. But VMware can't do what Virtual Iron does, which is spread resources among number of blades or boxes connected by InfiniBand. This is not to say VMware could not implement this, but it would probably take two to three years to implement." [Thanks for the lead, Scott!]

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:26:04 GMT

Fedora Project Wiki - FedoraXenQuickstart: How to run Xen in Fedora. "As some people have noticed, Xen is now available from the Fedora development repository. More information on Xen itself can be found at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/index.html. We're following the -unstable Xen tree at the moment which does occasionally lead to things being broken but also lets us track a lot of the more interesting work going on there. Since setting up to run Xen isn't entirely straight-forward, here's a run-through of what should work for setting up a single Xen guest running the Fedora development tree."

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:48:38 GMT

Solaris Zones Feature: Good intro to "Solaris Containers technology, a way to virtualize system resources and use multiple software partitions with one instance of the OS." Built into Solaris 10. I wonder if it runs on Intel x86 hardware; and if so, if it would run in a Solaris vm under vmware. I don't have an application in mind, just curious.

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 18:02:06 GMT

Vizioncore: Backup and Control for VMWare ESX: Vizioncore provides products for ESX management that grew out of a consulting company. For example, "esxRanger CLI runs on a windows host and can be scheduled to perform online hot backups of guest operating systems on VMware ESX Server. [It] compresses the disks before sending them to the destination server [with] NO Agents needed on the ESX Servers or the guest operating systems. .. esxRanger CLI uses the standard COM interface provided by VMware for adding and committing REDO logs. While it is possible to achieve a similar functionality with scripting, there are many hidden costs and known bugs to consider." 60-day eval available, starts at $125/server. " A hardware appliance for swappable hard disk backup is under development.

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 05:04:11 GMT

John Howard - Virtual Server, Virtual PC: John Howard, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft UK, keeps a blog on many interesting topic, especially MS virtual computing products. Recent samples: how to share a vm desktop with VMRC with 2 or more simultaneous remote sessions; and how to use WMIC (Windows Management Interface Commands) to generate html pages with Windows system info.

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 23:54:35 GMT

Sysprepping a virtual machine: Details on use of the Windows Server sysprep command when cloning virtual machines.

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 23:49:57 GMT

Howto for UML: Steps for installation and use of the mature User Mode Linux platform. For new development, see FAUmachine: "We are working on an Open Source Virtual Machine which started out as a User Mode Linux, and which we therefore used to call UMLinux. Since the project has evolved from a User Mode Linux to a Virtual Machine we have chosen to give it the more appropriate name FAUmachine... FAUmachine development is supported by the European Community."

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 23:48:14 GMT

Linux-VServer: "the vserver project: It allows you to run linux inside linux: Any distributions inside any distributions. Each virtual server has its own packages, its own services, its own users and is confined to using some IP numbers only and some area(s) of the file system. You can think of them as virtual machines." All vms are linux, and they share the host kernel. So there is essentially no CPU overhead. VM disks can be resized, and vms moved easily, just like other vm solutions, getting many vm advantages with almost no overhead costs. Active development.

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 06:45:48 GMT

Intro to Xen: 4-page white paper.

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:52:58 GMT

ISO conversion: How to convert a CDROM to an ISO image file. Useful when working with virtual machines.

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 08:12:32 GMT

Sun Grid: $1/cpu-hour, with storage at $1/GB/month. Maybe they have a future after all :)

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 17:49:36 GMT

Xgrid: High Performance Computing for the Rest of Us: Apple's quick setup grid, in use at many academic institutions. Released Jan 2004. A Feb 2004 presentation has good examples from U Utah, including a PDF with rendered images. Controller and client run only on OS X today; agents can be OS X or Linux. A Stanford project is looking for volunteers to contribute time for chemistry research.

Cringely points out how cheap fast computing is getting. "Imagine a Mac Minicluster running Apple's xGrid software. Start with a 16-port fast Ethernet switch and stack 16 Mac Minis on top. That's a 720 gigaflop micro-supercomputer that costs less than $9,000, can fit on a bookshelf, and can be up and running in as little time as it takes to connect the network cables. High schools will be sequencing genes."

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 07:23:35 GMT

Virtual project at Intel Pittsburgh: "Researchers at the Intel Research Pittsburgh laboratory in Oakland [have] a project they call Internet Suspend/Resume. By taking advantage of the Internet, distributed file systems and a concept called virtual machines, Internet Suspend/Resume allows a user to stop, or suspend, work on one computer and then move to another computer, perhaps at home, or even across the country, and instantly resume that work." Seems similar in structure to VMware Ace, without the corporate IT emphasis. (Thanks again, Roland!)

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 06:13:25 GMT

Jon Udell: VM-enabled polycore computing: Pulls together comments on the massively parallel computing that's coming from multi-core processor chips. Jon points out the different models for these parallel systems, most of which involve one type of virtual machine or another (Java, .NET, LAMP, Erlang). These can function well with thousands or tens of thousands of parallel virtual machines. More prosaically, I also imagine the multi-core and hyper-threaded x86 machines that have arrived with more on the way, that today's simple monitors like vmware could exploit.

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 07:43:26 GMT

Using MVS2005 with VS.NET: Article on scripting MSVS 2005, with sample code you can download from Surgient. "virtual images voraciously consume large amounts of disk. This means that a typical host may not have enough space to store many idle 4-10 GB virtual image files. VS2005 partially solves this problem by allowing VMs to chain image files into differencing layers that share a common base image. The VS2005 differencing layer technology is called differencing disks (undo drives are a variant of differencing disks). This technology enables you to create a base image of the operating system and then install applications into a difference disk layer. A single base image can then be used by several VMs that each have a unique differencing disk. ..

[In a resource-heavy testing scenario] Toggling the VM power states and working with shared base images addresses the resource limitations of the host. To use our testing environment, we must create a small .NET application that toggles between server configurations by changing both the VM's power state and its differencing disk configuration. "

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 19:52:30 GMT

The Soul of a Virtual Machine: Microsoft tech writer keeping a categorized blog on MSVS, including categories for P2V and other specific how-to's.

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 19:48:24 GMT

Flexbeta seems an interesting site for investigating beta software releases. They have articles, and also links to recent software, like VMware Workstation for Windows 5.0 Build 11888 Beta, with a direct link to a 51mb .exe download.

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 19:46:23 GMT

Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1 - features and availability: MSVS will support new hardware and software, plus a "Disk Precompactor, a utility that is designed to "zero out" — that is, overwrite with zeros — any available blank space on a virtual hard disk. A public beta is slated for the end of first quarter 2005, with product release planned for the second half of calendar year 2005"

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 08:05:08 GMT

VMWare for OpenBSD: "With the help of OpenBSD's Linux emulation, and a kernel module, it is possible to run VMWare on OpenBSD. .. Currently, VMWare 3.x is supported, VMWare 4.x support is .. nearly complete. "

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 07:49:46 GMT

VM-based gateway to Grid computing: "Grid middleware is enabling resource sharing between computing centres across the world and sites with existing clusters are eager to connect to the Grid. However, the hardware requirements for access to the Grid remain high: a standard Grid-Ireland gateway requires four separate servers. We propose the use of Virtual Machine (VM) technology to run multiple OS instances, allowing a full Grid gateway to be hosted on a single computer. ..

We evaluate implementations of this architecture on two popular open-source VM solutions: Xen and User-Mode Linux (UML). Our results show that Xen outperforms UML for installation tasks and standard gateway operations. Performance is close to that of standard Linux, and more than acceptable for everyday use.

The Grid gateways support remote installation and management to facilitate integration with a national Grid infrastructure. Configuration is similar to that of sites running multi-computer gateways, making it easy to keep site installation profiles synchronised. Our VM gateway architecture provides a low-cost entry path to the Grid and will be of interest to many institutions.. "

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 07:45:26 GMT

Installation of OpenStep 4.2 in VMware: How cool, Open Step and even the old NextStep are still alive, running under VMware. (See NEXTSTEP 3.3J on VMWare for English and German screenshots running in Japan.)

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 08:21:22 GMT

Understanding Citrix's SpeedScreen Latency Reduction (SLR): Description of how Citrix improves upon terminal server on high-latency links. Reminds me of mainframe terminals and the "local echo" and "keyboard lock" buttons! "Citrix has long talked up as a benefit of MetaFrame Presentation Server.. imagine a situation without SLR where a user is typing a document via an ICA session with 400ms of latency. .. To the user, it would appear that there is a half-second “lag” when typing.

To address this, SLR’s Local Text Echo causes the ICA client to behave a bit differently. When enabled, a user pressing a key on their keyboard causes that key code to be sent to the server. However, at the same instant, the local ICA client software also draws the appropriate character on the user’s screen even though the actual screen drawing instructions from the server are bogged down in the 400ms latency between the client and server. Then, once the ICA client finally receives the actual updated screen from the server, it doesn’t have to update that character on the local screen .. [It] works really well. It works with all different fonts and font sizes. .. complex things such as highlighting and deleting large chunks of text exhibit the lag associated with the actual latency...

The other major SLR feature is something called “Mouse Click Feedback.” This addresses another common problem in Citrix environments with high latency, namely, the fact that users click on a button, become impatient, and click on a button again before the first click registered. Then, when the application’s response finally makes its way to the user, whatever the user clicked on comes up twice. Mouse Click Feedback works by adding the hourglass symbol to the arrow cursor the instant the user clicks the mouse anywhere within the boundaries of the remote ICA application. [The mouse isn't locked, but users generally respond to the hourglass by waiting] ..

SpeedScreen is automatically used on a MetaFrame server whenever a user connects to a session that has between 150 and 500ms of latency. As long as the client supports it, it's used." In another article, the author notes that SLR consumes more bandwidth, sometimes as much as 20% more; thus it's a tradeoff of more bandwidth for less latency.

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 07:43:43 GMT

Gentoo Forums :: VMWare Workstation raw disk with WinXP guest: "on a laptop with a 10GB NTFS partition loaded with WinXP pro, with the rest of the 40GB disk used for Gentoo. I can successfully dual boot, but rarely do as I'm sort of allergic to Windows. However, I do need a few things in Windows from time to time, so I have had a small XP installation on a virtual disk which has worked fine, but uses a few GBs of space on my rapidly filling HDD. Using the existing 10GB XP install was the logical solution. Results: Well, it works! I can now successfully run WinXP from within Gentoo using VMWare, or boot natively into WinXP upon reboot. Besides saving space, I am very impressed with the speed increase. Booting WinXP from the raw disk is MUCH faster than from the virtual disk. Opening applications is MUCH faster. " (e.g., photoshop loads in 10 secs instead of 21). "Suspending the OS is not advised with raw disk use. Snapshots won't really work. Basically you lose the ability to undo things like you could with a virtual disk. "

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 07:40:21 GMT

coLinux for more than one vm: It appears the last change to coLinux was May 2004. It supports running Linux on XP. One upgrade feature I did not notice before was the announced ability to run more than one vm: "Support for running more than one instance of coLinux is now functional"

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 07:29:32 GMT

MetroPipe: "MetroPipe released a technology review of their Portable Virtual Privacy Machine. The product allows traveling professionals to carry their entire communications and presentation environment on a single portable memory device.

"The Portable Virtual Privacy Machine (or PVPM) is basically a virtual machine which boots a Linux operating environment, and runs a variety of communications software - a browser and email client . It also includes a beta version of our Tunneler product, which anonymizes and encrypts the user's Internet communications while using the PVPM, " said Kenny Kaputa, Chief Technology Officer. "Because the PVPM is a self-contained operating environment, the user is able to use relatively insecure systems in order to conduct personal and business communication. For example, the PVPM is excellent for use within the world's Internet cafés - you don't have to worry as much about hackers eavesdropping on your communications. Or bothering with long searches at airport terminals - you can wear your computing environment around your neck!" "Oh yeah, " continued Kenny, "you can put the PVPM on virtually any read/write memory device: USB drives, Flash memory, an iPod, etc. It really doesn't matter.""

Their overall mission is extreme privacy: "The Metropipe Tunneler application allows even novice Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux users to experience completely private web communications. The Tunneler creates an impenetrable channel for anonymous browsing, chat, and file transfers that encrypts and anonymizes every bit of Internet data that you send through it.."

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:41:50 GMT

VMware Upgrade Release: Mostly SAN interface and SDK improvements. Also pricing update: "VMware ESX Server 2.5 and VMware VirtualCenter 1.2 are available today. Pricing for ESX Server starts at $3,750 for a 2 CPU machine; pricing for VirtualCenter starts at $5,000. ESX Server and VirtualCenter are available from Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, NEC and the VMware VIP network."

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:34:53 GMT

Presentation Tips for People running Virtual PC or VMWare: Good tips for tech demos, even if you aren't running VMs.

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:21:52 GMT

Inside VMWare Workstation 5.0 Beta: Short report with good screenshots of key VMware 5.0 features:

snapshot manager, for more than one snapshot per VM
V2V function, to convert images from MS Virtual PC 2004
movie maker, to make file (.avi format) of a VM session
an improved command line interface for simple scripting

Performance of graphics appears improved. Support for special USB devices (eg, webcams) is reported. Update: Beta program is now public, with many screenshots.

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:02:47 GMT

A Mobile Semantic Web: CMU's testbed for mobile apps built on the Semantic Web. "MyCampus consists of several task-specific agents that automatically capture contextual information. Each MyCampus user has a database, called a "Semantic eWallet," which is a repository for users' personal information, such as class schedules, list of friends and classmates, and lifestyle and event preferences. Location data is generated using Pango's WiFi access-point triangulation. All the data is marked with Semantic metadata so that MyCampus agents can make use of it. User's can set access privileges to allow certain people to know where they are at any given moment, or what their schedule for the upcoming week is.

One of the most popular applications is the “restaurant concierge” agent, which recommends places based on a user's dining tastes, schedule, location, and weather conditions. If there's a storm brewing, the concierge will recommend a place that doesn't require stepping outside, and if the user has a study group meeting in 30 minutes, it'll suggest a fast food joint within a block or two.

Recently, a group of students at CMU developed an application for MyCampus called InfoBridge, which lets users post and read "virtual posters" about upcoming events. For example, say a user has indicated that she likes track and field events. She’ll be notified about events as soon as another person makes a virtual poster about it, unless she’s sitting in class. If that’s the case, she won’t be notified until class is over. If she wants to attend the event, she clicks on a link and, because the data has been tagged with Semantic Web metadata, it’ll be added it to her calendar. If there’s a scheduling conflict, it’ll notify her and present her with options. All this data exchange is done with agents -- no human screen scraping." Seems potentially useful for GIS info in remote data-gathering projects also, to notify and sync info that's relevant by location or type.

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 08:43:35 GMT

Adeos virtualization layer, from Philippe Gerum "A direct application of Adeos is having a real-time system run in parallel of Linux on the same hardware. Because real-time applications are more prioritary than regular Linux ones with respect to hardware interrupt handling, the real-time machinery must always be given a chance to process any incoming interrupt before the Linux kernel, so that the real-time processing can take place as soon as possible. Real-time is all about being deterministic when processing events, and Adeos provides a convenient layer.."

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 06:26:05 GMT

virtualization.info - Is VMware going to launch hardware based virtualization solutions?: "Vodafone project manager Doug Colvin said his firm will deploy up to 300 new Wintel servers in 2005, and will manage most of them with VMware virtualisation tools. He added that in the longer term, virtualisation could let Vodafone outsource its server operations. "Why not contract third-parties such as HP to own and operate VMware server farms and pay them to host our virtual server systems?" he said. This new hosting scenario could make it easier for firms to retain control of mission-critical applications and speed up the deployment of new applications.

Vodafone's research found that virtualisation technology would cut the maximum time to acquire and deploy a new server from 40 days to 32.5 days. It also found that upgrading a single site of 140 servers to run across two sites using VMware's ESX Server would save £270,000 each year. This approach would also give firms the flexibility to move between server hosting firms with minimal disruption, because virtualisation insulates applications or operating systems from server hardware."

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 06:18:35 GMT

VMware cuts virtualization software price: "VMware has cut the price of its GSX Server software, the lower end of two products that let multiple operating systems run on the same hardware. The software now costs $1,400 for a dual-processor server and $2,800 for systems with as many as 32 processors; previously it cost $2,500 for a dual-processor server, $5,000 for a four-processor server and $10,000 for an eight-processor server. " Still more than MSVS, but not by much...

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 06:12:35 GMT

MetaVNC -- a window-aware VNC: Neat way to remote control multiple machines. "MetaVNC is a window aware VNC. MetaVNC merges windows of multiple remote desktops into a single desktop screen. MetaVNC also comes with its own task bar and application menu, which makes it easy to control applications or windows on different hosts. Furthermore, MetaVNC trys to merge remote desktops with local desktops."

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 01:35:31 GMT

Serenity Virtual Station: A new PC virtual computing platform aimed at workstations, priced at $99/user. Press release online. A second company site has more details, including materials from IBM on some larger installations.

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 06:53:48 GMT

Microsoft whitepaper: Using Domain Controller Virtual Machines: "Running domain controllers in virtual machines is best suited for test and pre-production piloting environments. With strict adherence to the requirements described in this document, domain controllers running in virtual machines can also be used in a production environment."

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 17:00:07 GMT

VMWare Book Preview Chapter Available: "VMWare ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide will be a real-world architectural field guide that shows you how to design VMWare ESX environments. .. The book will be available in April 2005. A preview chapter is now available for download. .. This huge chapter goes into all the details you need to understand to design a guest environment, including master installation, ISO management, virtual machine networking, controlling resource usage, managing DSK files, and virtual machine deployment. We'll bring more chapters online over the next several months. "

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:06:12 GMT

Microsoft ponders licensing for app virtualization: "Noting two evolving areas of software licensing, Microsoft is pondering how to license when multiple instances of an application are run on a single computer, but is not eyeing a plan for utility-based computing, in which charges are based on individual usage. .. Right now, Microsoft charges based on hardware capabilities irrespective of software partitioning or virtualization. A user site might have 1,000 virtual machines running 1,000 instances of the same application, deployed on a four-processor computer, he said. Under current policy, the user would be charged for four processors, not for running the application 1,000 times. " MS also announced it would charge single-processor prices for multi-core processors.

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 19:08:39 GMT

VMware ESX Beta: "VMware invites you to participate in the beta program for VMware ESX Server, version 2.5 and VirtualCenter version 1.2."

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:05:43 GMT

Script Repository: Virtual Server: Microsoft has collected a number of sample scripts for controlling virtual machines under MSVS.

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:31:34 GMT

CherryOS turns your PC into a Mac: "Hawaii-based MXS has released a piece of software that turns a Windows computer into a Mac. CherryOS turns a PC into a Macintosh clone, allowing you to run MacOS and Macintosh applications directly on your PC. The software works by running the Mac OS as a virtual machine on your Windows PC. The virtual machine has full network capabilities, according to the company, including the ability to share folders, access the Internet, and create multiple profiles. It purportedly runs at about 80 per cent of the performance of the host CPU, according to the developer. Note that a Mac operating system and application software is not included. "

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 06:08:27 GMT

VMware ACE Takes Virtual Machines Mobile: "VMware ACE (assured computing environment) administrators can put everything from operating systems, applications and data onto a DVD, which can then be loaded onto a worker's PC, said Michael Mullany, vice president of marketing at VMware.

They also can set policies, via Virtual Rights Management technology, that range from how long the environment will be in effect to who can access what information in the network, Mullany said. In addition, the hardware-agnostic software offers copy-protection controls and automatic encryption, protecting against unauthorized copying of network information.

ACE's isolated computing environments will enable enterprises to give telecommuters and contract workers a way to securely get onto the network without the company having to give them a company computer while at the same time protecting the network from various viruses. Businesses also don't need to build specific hardware images for the computers. Instead, for example, if contractors are hired for 60 days, ACE is loaded onto their computer and administrators can set it to expire after those 60 days. "

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 17:13:31 GMT

VM Guru: Two Chicago-based VMware consultants. They have some Visio templates under development for charting virtual network elements.

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 16:27:25 GMT

Set up VMware to install Windows clusters: How to install a Windows 2000 Cluster on a group of VM's, for learning or testing without buying specialized hardware.

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 06:39:14 GMT

Open source startup interruptus? A skeptical opinion of startups SourceLabs and SpikeSource, aimed at supporting enterprise open source applications: "I find it hard to see how either company will be anything more than minimally succesful against the likes of Red Hat, IBM or HP. The semi-logical conclusion is that both companies were started with exit strategies already in place. Some free advice to the founders: Sell your companies. Sell them quickly. Take the first offer that comes in. "

A member of SourceLabs replies in a comment, "The goal is not to sell a certified stack, it is to sell support for a certified stack. We will give away the certified stack. You will only have to pay if you want support for it. Certification carries two purposes: the first is to make customers feel comfortable enough to run the stack, and the second is for us to make sure that it is stable enough to provide support for it."

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 17:03:25 GMT

User-mode Linux Community Site: Home site for comments and news from users of UML. Via Phil Windley, who started a project for teaching system administration under UML.

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 16:55:40 GMT

RAID 1 on Linux: Some of the fine points of configuring disks on Linux.

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 08:19:08 GMT

Polese steps into open-source fray: Kim Polese, a former Sun Microsystems executive who was the original product manager for Java, is now at the helm of SpikeSource, an open-source software services company that launched on Thursday .. Services will include support and product certification as well as consulting for corporate IT staff during the application development and installation process, according to the company. .. By the end of the year, the company intends to launch a beta test of its services for the LAMP and LAMPJ "stacks" of open-source infrastructure software, according to the company's Web site. ..

SpikeSource appears to already have a competitor. Another group of industry veterans, including former Microsoft executives Brad Silverberg and Adam Bosworth, is backing SourceLab, which launched last week. The company intends to offer similar support and installation services around bundled open source components on a subscription basis"

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 08:02:21 GMT

IBM Virtualization Capabilities with Linux and POWER5: Info on machine architecture and issues from their point of view. " It’s now putting the number of services per administrator as the metric to measure your IT infrastructure, as opposed to the number of servers per administrator. That’s revolutionary, because originally we would measure an IT administrator’s relative skill set based on the number of physical boxes he or she could maintain.

And those administrators with different platform expertise had different expected numbers. A Sun admin may be able to do 30 or 40, where a Microsoft admin would be expected to do 10 to 20. That’s based on the number of problems, support required, updates, packages, problems of that nature. Essentially now we’re taking those physical boxes out of the equation. "

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 08:00:40 GMT

Red Hat builds on Netscape security acquisition, virtualization plan: "The company is also planning to add server virtualization functionality to the Open Source Architecture with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. "Virtualization right now with regard to Linux is the next big thing, it's the next evolution of the operating system opening up many more possibilities," said Cormier.

Red Hat currently partners with VMware Inc for its virtualization technology, but the indications are that the company will turn to open source virtualization projects that will be tightly integrated into the Open Source Architecture. .. "What happens more often now with our customers is they say: 'I'm watching the development going on with Xen or UML [User-Mode Linux] in the virtualizations space, do what you did in the operating system for that, commercialize that'." Xen is an open source virtual machine monitor project for x86 systems from the University of Cambridge, UK's Computer Laboratory, while User-mode Linux is a patch for the Linux kernel that enables virtual machines." The article implies that Enterprise Linux 5 will come in the second half of 2005.

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 16:42:33 GMT

Topspin Communications, Inc.: "Topspin Communications today debuted Grid-to-Go, a program to deliver an open standards-based starter-kit for rapid, easy deployment of utility computing in the enterprise. Grid-to-Go can be used with commodity servers, and includes all of the infrastructure and software required for a grid architecture that unifies applications, servers, and storage. Compared with existing proprietary utility computing solutions, the Topspin solution offers comparable functionality with better performance and greater scalability-- all at as little as approximately 1/20th the cost.

Topspin server switch technology creates a scalable, flexible fabric for building a grid out of industry standard server, storage, and I/O resources. Whether attached via Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or InfiniBand, the server switch can seamlessly map these resources together into virtual servers, which can then be automatically provisioned with the right application(s). With Topspinâ019s VFrameâ122 software, the server switch can be programmed with business policies to determine the conditions for creating different types of virtual servers and with which applications to load them. " The kits includes software, 10Gbps InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) for PCI-X with remote boot capabilities, and an Infiniband switch.

Fri, 24 Sep 2004 16:40:26 GMT

Develop, Test, and Deploy Faster with VMware Software: This whitepaper claims that VMware is very widely used in large enterprises. "Used by 80 percent of the Global 100 companies’ IT organizations, VMware virtual infrastructure software simplifies test configuration management and eliminates the need for a physical machine for each configuration to be tested."

Fri, 24 Sep 2004 07:40:31 GMT

VMwarel Case Study at the Spring Independent School District: Replacing 40 Novell and light-duty Windows servers with four VMware multi-processor systems. "VSM: How has server virtualization affected hardware purchases?

PD: The first six servers were old 933 MHz/1GHz boxes with 1GB of memory. We were in the process of getting rid of them. We were able to use them for VMware GSX servers. We added an additional processor and they work great for hosting four VMs each. Later, we added an additional 1GB of memory and reduced the number of physical servers to four, hosting 6-7 VMs each.

We recently decided to purchase two quad Xeon servers with four 73GB HDD and 12GB of memory to host up to 32 VMs each. Instead of buying additional servers for new projects that require low usage servers, we can make VMs on the ESX servers or use the old dual 933/1GHz servers with 2GB RAM. "

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 15:44:35 GMT

Dell bundles VMware on PowerEdge: "Dell also announced yesterday that it would be pushing VMware's ESX Server virtualization product on its PowerEdge 1850 (1U) and 2850 (2U) Xeon-64 servers. While Dell has had a partnership with VMware for quite some time to sell its GSX Server and ESX Server, this offering goes a little bit further in that Dell is selling pretested systems (but not preconfigured) that have been certified to run specific VMware virtualization software and offering front-line technical support for the whole shebang. Dell is only offering ESX Server as part of this deal, which is the low-level virtualization software from VMware that has the best isolation between virtual machines, in that it runs on the bare metal server, not within another operating system that could, in theory, fail and take down all of the virtual machines. Dell is selling ESX Server 2.1.2, which has been tweaked to support the 64-bit "Nocona" Xeon processors, as well as VMware's Virtual Center Management Server. Dell is also supporting the CX300 and CX500 SAN arrays that it makes in conjunction with EMC. Dell pricing for ESX Server starts at $4,688 for these two PowerEdge servers, including Dell support, which is backed by VMware's Platinum support. Dell is also supporting the Virtual SMP features of ESX Server (which allow a single virtual machine to span across two physical processors) and VMotion technology, which allows the workload running inside one virtual machine on one physical machine to be transported across the network to another partition on another machine. This offer is available in the United States and Europe.

Dell is not, by the way, offering pretested GSX Server configurations on these machines, although GSX Server will work on it. GSX Server allows multiple virtual machines to run inside a host operating system."

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 17:10:02 GMT

IBM mulls blade desktops: "Blade desktops were pioneered by US company ClearCube, which sells racks of blades, each one containing a motherboard, processor, memory and hard disk. ClearCube's solution has a small user port sitting on each desk, to which as many as four monitors, plus a keyboard and mouse are connected, with a Category 5 Ethernet cable running back to the blade where all the work is done.

IBM already resells ClearCube hardware, but is now looking at the possibility of manufacturing its own as it looks for an ever larger market for its blade server infrastructure .. [one way] "would be to virtualise the whole blade centre and give a piece to everybody." Wandarugala said IBM is looking to VMWare for virtualisation software.

IBM was a relative latecomer to the blade market, but since its first launch has grabbed 44 percent of the market, according to analyst firm IDC. .. Last week, IBM and Intel announced that they have opened their BladeCentre specification, meaning that anyone can now make blades to fit in the company's chassis. However, development of the BladeCentre technology remains firmly in IBM and Intel hands; although the plug-in interfaces have been openly published, the chassis design remains closed, meaning that only IBM, Intel and their business partners will be able to sell them."

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 01:53:16 GMT

Lisencing under Virtual Server: "This brief describes virtualization and alternative technologies, covers several volume licensing issues related to virtual machines"

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 15:47:14 GMT

vmktree for VMWare ESX server: "vmktree is a free web tool that shows you the graphs of resource usage of VMWare ESX Server. .. While vmkusage does a descent job of collecting performance data, vmktree is presenting this information in a slightly different and more flexible way. vmktree generates graphs interactively as needed while vmkusage generate static graphs every five minutes. Screen shots are available here: Screen shot 1 Screen shot 2"

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 07:37:05 GMT

VMware q&a: "What are the best practices for creating copies of my Windows 2000 virtual machines?"

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 08:45:39 GMT

VERITAS First to Deliver Wide Area Disaster Recovery Capabilities for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005: "VERITAS Software Corporation (Nasdaq: VRTS) today announced that VERITAS Storage Foundation™ HA for Windows software is the first to deliver the combination of enhanced high availability and wide area disaster recovery capabilities to Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 customers (see today’s Microsoft news release). VERITAS Storage Foundation HA for Windows integrates VERITAS Volume Manager™, and VERITAS Cluster Server™ the industry’s leading1 independent heterogeneous clustering and availability software, to help ensure continuous availability of mission-critical applications and data."

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 07:58:24 GMT

GSX Server review: Short note, interesting comment: "There are no hard limits to the number of concurrent virtual servers outside of available RAM and disk space, and I had no trouble running four to five concurrent virtual servers on a dual 2.8GHz Xeon server with 4GB of RAM. Individual server performance can definitely suffer when other virtual servers are heavily engaged, but at no time did any virtual server suffer systemic problems. For host servers running multiple processors however, there is a caveat; if Intel processors are used with hyperthreading, a guest OS can only use a single CPU thread rather than the entire CPU. On a four-CPU system, this limits each guest OS to 12.5 percent of the host OS CPU resources. Therefore, it is generally best to disable hyperthreading on VMware host servers."

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 07:54:10 GMT

Microsoft Virtual Server Migration Toolkit (VSMT): Microsoft "announce the release candidate of the Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit (VSMT). You can download the release candidate from the VSMT beta site. The release candidate includes support for migrating VMWare GSX virtual machines to Microsoft Virtual Server as well as fixes to bugs encountered with the beta build. Sign up for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit Beta.

Details: "VSMT automates the migration of an operating system and installed applications from a physical server to a server running within a virtual machine that is provided and managed by Virtual Server 2005." Primary usage scenarios involve general server consolodation, esp for legacy Windows NT systems.

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:58:30 GMT

Microsoft releases virtual server, sets low price: "VMware may have gotten a three-year head start on Microsoft with its server virtualization software. But Microsoft is aiming to make a splash based on price. .. Eric Berg, a Microsoft group product manager .. said Microsoft evaluates customers' needs based on workloads, focusing on three areas: software testing and development, legacy application rehosting and targeted production workloads, such as Active Directory domain controllers, networking and departmental applications.

Berg said Microsoft has a Component Object Model application programming interface that can be used to create scripts to automatically deploy new server builds and "great integration" with its server management tools, so customers don't have to buy a specific tool to manage both virtual machines and physical servers.

Tom Bittman, an analyst at Gartner Inc., predicted that VMware will keep 80% market share for the consolidation of servers to run production-ready applications. But he added that Gartner expects Virtual Server to command at least 50% of the market for test and development workloads by the end of 2005. "The price differential is going to kill [VMware] unless they change it," Bittman said. ..

Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, said the underpinnings of what Microsoft is doing are different than what VMware is doing. He said Microsoft is using its Virtual Server technology to help customers running older stacks of applications on Windows NT 4 migrate to new hardware rather than continue to run them on separate machines. Kusnetzky said VMware's focus is to help users move to a highly virtualized environment "so they can tune what they do to their business needs" and assign IT resources as needed. "

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:55:58 GMT

Microsoft Announces General Availability of Virtual Server 2005: "Sept. 13, 2004 -- Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability and pricing of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. .. Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition supports up to four processors, with an estimated retail price of $499 (U.S.). Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition supports up to 32 processors, with an estimated retail price of $999 (U.S.). Both versions will be available within 30 days through retail and volume licensing and will be licensed on a per-physical server basis." System images are compatible between the two editions, and with a small change to virtual PC 2004 images. Enterprise edition is available for 180-day downloadable evauation. FAQ is helpful.

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:49:59 GMT

Hardware: IBM, Intel Open Blade Server: " IBM and Intel jointly announced that the design specifications for the eServer BladeCenter platform would be made widely available to other vendors to encourage hardware support [and] more third-party hardware and software. The companies said they will both provide technical support to assist product development, including design guidelines and fee-based support. ..

IDC analyst Jean Bozman told TechNewsWorld that the lower-end blade server market has typically had high numbers of shipments and lower revenue figures in the overall server market, where blades accounted for an estimated 8 % of server sales in 2004. By 2006, that market share is expected to be at 18 %, with wider adoption, more solutions from more vendors and announcements such as the one from IBM and Intel, according to Bozman."

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:43:15 GMT

SAVVIS offers Egenera/VMware virtual computing service: from WSJ: IBM, EDS and others "typically employ a team of consultants to evaluate and manage a client's infrastructure. While most clients still find that less expensive than running an in-house information-technology department, the consultants don't come cheap. ..

Savvis doesn't send a team of consultants to evaluate a company's infrastructure, although it does have staff on call to help clients with questions. "I can have a new server up for you in a minute, not a month," Savvis Chairman and Chief Executive Rob McCormick says. "Now it's just a simple software command to bring someone online. We give you a slice of a big carrier-class" machine. ..

Gartner's Mr. Chamberlin [says] the cost reduction from Savvis's service could reach 70%. The consulting-heavy model used by IBM and others saves only 15% to 30%, the analyst estimates. IBM and EDS declined to comment. Savvis's low-cost model lets it consider contracts too small for IBM to bother with, contends IDC analyst Melanie Posey. "There's a certain contract level where it's not worth IBM getting out of bed." ..

The new Savvis service, unveiled earlier this month, runs tasks for all clients on the same set of powerful computers. Running everything on Savvis's own hardware and doling out resources as needed — as opposed to clients having their own dedicated machines — eliminates waste.. Savvis can activate programs that run a wide variety of applications, including e-mail, Web sites and billing software. Savvis can also activate a large-scale network, complete with software defenses against security breaches. The company guarantees that data from different clients will remain separate and secure. ..

Savvis has built a platform whose core, the processors that drive the system, doesn't care what software it is running. These so-called blade servers are made by Egenera Inc. The brains that tell the blade servers what to do reside elsewhere on the Savvis network. ..

Getting potential customers to trust Savvis to handle their critical technology infrastructure may be a tricky proposition, given its financial history. Savvis, which was split off from Bridge Information Systems Inc. in February 2000, has had $534 million in losses on $918 million in sales from that year through 2003."

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 06:43:29 GMT

VMware Community Discussion Forums: Discussion site for public tech support. Includes section on API programming.

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 06:53:49 GMT

Limits to movement of a VMware Linux virtual machine: "Copying, moving, and backup operations are as simple as manipulating the virtual machine's files and selecting File | Open from the VMware menu to make VMware aware of a new or moved virtual machine. Note, however, that when moving a virtual machine to a different physical machine, you will need to edit the guest's device settings for the new hardware. Further, if the new computer uses a different processor, a Linux guest may not work on the new machine. This is due to the fact that Linux installations choose a kernel optimised for either an Intel or AMD processor. "

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 06:50:12 GMT

Virtual Server 2005: Program Customized Testing Environments Without Trashing Your Machine -- MSDN Magazine, August 2004: Windows COM code that automates system setup tasks in a testing environment. Code is downloadable.

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 18:39:55 GMT

The SoftGrid Platform: Interesting approach to application virtualization. Oriented to delivering Windows apps to desktops or to terminal servers by monitoring their use of Windows resources (e.g., DLLs, registry keys, files, etc). In latest release, application elements can be delivered offline in advance of use to minimize bandwidth requirements. Has just been certified for use with MS Virtual Server 2005.

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 18:49:52 GMT

Troubleshooting common problems in Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. Long webcast transcript, several useful nuggets for Virtual PC users.

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 07:03:40 GMT

Streamlining Software Testing with IBM Rational and VMware Test Lab Automation: "Software test teams that have deployed Rational TestManager to improve productivity are still challenged by the difficulty and expense of testing in multiple system configurations. Testing on all necessary combinations of hardware, operating systems and installed software normally requires labor-intensive setups on many dedicated test machines. The only alternative has been a large investment in banks of test machines. VMware virtual machines vastly simplify configuration management and eliminate the need for a physical machine .. IBM Rational and VMware have jointly developed the IBM Rational and VMware Test Lab Automation Solution to address the challenges of configuration testing. "

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:21:47 GMT

Enhancing Rollback by Using Virtual Machines: Many tips on using Virtual PC, including how to convert physical to virtual machines by hand. (Comment: one techie here says it may be more typical to "run a repair installation" rather than do his method for cleaning up drivers after a migration.) Here's a similar document on conversion under VMware.

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 08:36:48 GMT

Microsoft touts Virtual Server as NT migration tool: "Microsoft is pushing its upcoming Virtual Server 2005 software as the means for partners to migrate customers from NT Server 4.0 systems across to Windows Server 2000 and 2003. .. Microsoft Australia product manager for servers, Michael Leworthy, .. said up to 25 per cent of Microsoft server customers were still operating on a NT 4.0 platform. Of these, some 60 per cent were still running line of business applications incompatible with the newer 2000 or 2003 server products, including Microsoft’s Exchange 5.5 and SQL 7, as well as third-party business applications. Using Virtual Server 2005, customers could continue to run these applications on a virtual NT environment, underlined by a Windows 2000 or 2003 platform. This would give customers the benefit of the additional performance, resources, and stronger management and security buffers promised by the newer server software, while also taking away the costs of running multiple NT 4.0 server boxes, Leworthy said. It would also free up funds to invest in upgrading business applications or buying newer software products, he said. "

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 08:33:18 GMT

SWsoft: Control Panels, VPS and Hosting Automation Solution: "Mainframe-like dynamic partitioning, resource management with full isolation of each partition, OS virtualization that allows migration of a VPS to another physical machine, and templating to manage mass deployment of updates and applications"

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 08:27:50 GMT

Virtual Server 2005 Released to Manufacturing: "August 5, 2004: Virtual Server 2005 is released to manufacturing, a Microsoft spokesperson said Thursday. RTM marks the final development milestone in the server virtualization software's odyssey .. The precise delivery date is not public, although general availability usually follows RTM by less than two months. "

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 08:08:32 GMT

About IP Fabrics: "IP Fabrics’ technology stems from the premise that future networks will demand three attributes that are often at odds with another: 1. True wire-speed performance; 2. Much more intelligence directly in the network; 3. Readily extensible to new protocols, new threats, and new silicon. We believe highly parallel NPUs (network processors) present the best opportunity for satisfying these objectives.. The radically different approach consists of a very-high-level packet processing language and a virtual machine environment for it. The language and environment are well suited for any application based on IP technology, including firewalls, VPNs, security gateways, intrusion detection, content switching, application-layer firewalling, SPAM filtering, traffic monitoring, and many more. "

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 01:17:56 GMT

Virtual Machine Shootout: Concise overview of the VMware workstation and MS Virtual PC products, with a performance comparison. VMware averages around 10% worse than hardware, VPC 20% worse.

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 06:44:26 GMT

John Sequeira's wiki on virtualization: Quite a large collection of links, content, and comment on the field.

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:01:44 GMT

U Cambridge Computer Laboratory - Xen virtual machine monitor: "Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. " It's open source. OS's must be modified to run under it. Interesting comparison of performance vs. vmware and user mode linux, and an Oct 2003 academic paper. Running PostgreSQL or Apache specmarks, vmware runs under 50% of raw Linux and Xen runs 90%.

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:52:31 GMT

Plex86 - An x86 Virtual Machine: "Plex86 is an OSS virtual machine project for x86. It can be used on its own to run Linux VMs using lightweight VM technology, or in conjunction with the bochs emulator as an accelerator to run non VM-friendly OSes." Last activity mid-2003.

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 21:08:32 GMT

VMWARE scripting: This forum post says that full scripting (called VCOMAPI) is available on GSX and ESX versions, but only limited control is available on the Workstation version. In particular, there are command line options for starting vm's on Workstation, but real control requires GSX and ESX. The cost of GSX as of June 04 is $1250 per processor ($2500/2 proc, $5000/4) plus a required annual support package (about $1100 for 4 processors).

There was also a note on using Norton Ghost for expanding the size of VMware disks, which implies a way to do a manual PtoV.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 19:23:45 GMT

Virtualization Wiki: New wiki being built on the topic, with many links to related technologies.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 19:15:14 GMT

virtualization.info: Key blog on developments in the virtualization market. Good coverage of developments in Europe. Low static -- only a few entries per week.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 19:13:04 GMT

VMWare Workstation 4.5 Review: Tour of latest release with many screenshots, and with performance results that show the processing cost of vmware to be small for server apps -- around 10% for most CPU operations and random disk I/O, 30% for sequential disk I/O (in dynamically allocated disks). Graphics runs about 50% slower.

The author is Hernán Di Pietro, an Argentine hacker, who runs both Virtual PC an VMware on his workstation. His bottom line: "now I'm using VMWare running Linux, FreeBSD and Windows 2003 and I've left VPC 2004 abandoned in the Start Menu and being clicked few times a week .. I still prefer VPC to run WIndows 95 in small development projects on antique Pentium II systems. Go, buy a copy of VPC 2004, which is relatively cheap, install it, put your guest OS and all we'll be fine.

I looked seriously to VMWare after I was in need of a strong and flexible networking support for a professional virtualization project. I've to face it: VPC 2004 can't do what VMWare can. So I'm now with VMWare for professional and complicated projects. And I still stay with VPC 2004 for small development projects with my friends, since it's cheap and very standard on the emulated hardware. "

Related: Virtual Machines & VMware reviews 3.0 release, which has more history and technical details, and sample of configuration files.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 19:10:17 GMT

Virtual PC 2004 FAQ - Robert Moir's Website: Unofficial FAQ and reference site to everything about Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. See also the oft-cited list of guest OS's.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 19:05:45 GMT

An Introduction to Virtualization: Excellent brief into to the history and value of virtualization. The author is an IIT graduate, whose other writings on the subject are also first-rate.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 18:59:47 GMT

The Open Source IA-32 Emulation Project: Interesting open-source vm platform, started 1999 and still kicking. Mostly for kernel debugging, but used for various purposes.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 18:48:03 GMT

Why I Love My Virtual PCs: Nice tour of how workstation-scale virtual computing works, with snapshots from Virtual PC. Shows virtual hard disks on base windows operating systems from 2 gb (for windows 2003 web edition) to around 5 gb. Linux ranges all over the place, with 50mb cited for Damn Small Linux. Virtual PC uses a short XML file to store the vm configuration.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 18:36:25 GMT

Gartner on Server Virtualization: 2004 is their "year of virtualization:" Here's an interesting note on implications: "Whereas mainframes are commonly utilized above the 80 percent range, RISC server utilization usually averages half of that, and Intel servers running at 10 percent to 15 percent utilization are common. Unlike mainframes, RISC and Intel servers are usually deployed with a single operating-system copy and a single application. The growth of virtualization technology deployment will create a significant discontinuity in the RISC and Intel server market. Utilization of RISC server capability should increase by 30 percent or more. Intel server utilization should double.

Even assuming an increase in the cost per server for hardware, software and space, with a reduction in the number of servers and a reduction in the cost of administration per server, enterprises will realize significant overall savings. If mature virtualization technologies could be applied to RISC and Intel servers today, a conservative rough estimate is that overall IT spending in support of RISC servers would decline by 10 percent to 18 percent, while overall spending in support of Intel servers would decline by 20 percent to 30 percent. Enterprise savings would primarily occur in administrative costs. However, spending on hardware would decline by as much as 18 percent (due to fewer servers)..

Action Recommendation for 2004: Enterprises should start now to build a multiyear strategy for server virtualization. "

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 18:29:49 GMT

I have created a new category in this blog to carry notes culled about virtual computing, including virtual machines, virtual storage networks, and distributed and grid computing. Earlier blog entries on grid and distributed computing have been spread between General Networking and Network Software categories. I have a backlog to blog in the new category today; my apologies to subscribers to the whole blog if this isn't your cup of tea...