Wednesday, September 24. 2008
VCDX Design Exam Blueprint Now Available
Power up to VMware Infrastructure: Design
This hands-on training course explores how to design VMware Infrastructure 3 architectures with a focus on manageability, availability, and scalability. Objectives: At the end of the course, you should understand the principles involved in designing VMware Infrastructure 3 architectures:
• Implementing best practices and evaluating design considerations to meet business needs
• Distributing resources across ESX clusters automatically and ensuring high availability
• Architecting remote and branch offices
• Designing to support Microsoft Active Directory, SQL Server, and Exchange Server
VMware Server 2.0 GA
It look like VMware Server 2.0 is available for download.
http://www.vmware.com/download/server/
VMware Server 2
Version 2.0.0 | 116503 - 09/23/08 575 MB EXE image
VMware Server 2 for Windows Operating Systems. A master installer file containing all Windows components of VMware Server.
VMware Server provides a superior introductory experience to virtualization with a stable, easy-to-use hosted virtualization platform that supports a broad range of operating systems and hardware. This next-generation version introduces a new intuitive Web-based management interface to provide a consistent management
experience for Windows® and Linux users. VMware Server allows quick provisioning of virtual machines by supporting over 30 flavors of guest operating systems, including Windows Server® 2008, Windows Vista and various Linux distributions. Using proven and stable technology, VMware Server leverages the built-in virtualization capabilities in the latest generation server hardware to deliver higher performance.
VMware Workstation 6.5 Released
Major New Features
Enhanced VMware ACE authoring — Use ACE (Assured Computing Environment) features to package and deploy Pocket ACE and desktop virtual machines with encryption, restricted network access, and device control. VMware ACE authoring features are now fully integrated with Workstation, and no special ACE Edition is required. In addition to the new features listed here, be sure to read about new ACE-specific features in the VMware ACE 2.5 release notes.
Unity mode — Integrate your favorite guest applications with your host. Open the application window, enter Unity mode, and the Workstation window is automatically minimized. The guest application windows look just like host application windows, but with color-coded borders. You can access the virtual machine's Start menu (for Windows virtual machines) or Applications menu (for Linux virtual machines) by placing the mouse pointer over the host's Start or Applications menu, or by using a key combination.
Accelerated 3-D graphics on Windows XP guests — Workstation 6.5 virtual machines now work with applications that use DirectX 9 accelerated graphics with shaders up through Shader Model 2.0 on Windows XP guests. Hosts can be running Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Linux.
More powerful record/replay of VM execution activity — Easily enable this powerful debugging tool, which records full system behavior, including all CPU and device activity. You can now insert markers while creating or playing back a recording and quickly navigate to these markers during replay. You can also browse a recording to replay from any spot.
Virtual machine streaming — You can now download a virtual machine from a Web server and power it on without waiting for the download to complete. Use the command-line startup command (vmware for Workstation or vmplayer for VMware Player) with the URL of the virtual machine. The download can also be paused and restarted. Note that this feature is not available for ACE instances.
Better internationalization support and mobility with Unicode — Workstation 6.5 now stores and processes your virtual machine data with a Unicode (UTF-8) encoding. This means you can now create virtual machines with international text in their metadata and that same virtual machine can be used by other users of Workstation 6.5 (Windows and Linux) or Fusion 2.0 (Mac), even if they are using a system with a completely different host language encoding. For instance, you could create a virtual machine on a German Windows XP host with an umlaut character in the virtual machine's name, and then give it to a user of Workstation 6.5 on a Linux host using a simplified Chinese encoding. The virtual machine still functions properly and the umlaut character is properly displayed in the virtual machine's name. (Via ICT-Freak)
Tuesday, September 23. 2008
Cisco Nexus 1000V Virtual Switch
The Cisco Nexus™ 1000V virtual machine access switch is an intelligent software switch implementation for VMware ESX environments. Running inside of the VMware ESX hypervisor, the Cisco Nexus 1000V supports Cisco® VN-Link server virtualization technology, providing:
● Policy-based virtual machine (VM) connectivity
● Mobile VM security and network policy, and
● Non-disruptive operational model for your server virtualization, and networking teams.
When server virtualization is deployed in the data center, virtual servers typically are not managed the same way as physical servers. Server virtualization is treated as a special deployment, leading to longer deployment time with a greater degree of coordination among server, network, storage, and security administrators. But with the Cisco Nexus 1000V you can have a consistent networking feature set and provisioning process all the way from the VM to the access, aggregation, and core switches. Your virtual servers can use the same network configuration, security policy, tools, and operational models as physical servers. Virtualization administrators can leverage predefined network policy that follows the nomadic VM and focus on virtual machine administration. This comprehensive set of capabilities helps you to deploy server virtualization faster and realize its benefits sooner.
Saturday, September 13. 2008
VMware launched the -6 Reasons to Choose VMware- campain
From working with analysts, customers, and partners, it is apparent that companies need a solution that meets ALL of the following requirements:
Is built on a robust, proven foundation
Delivers a platform for shared IT services
Provides a complete solution for virtualization management
Supports your entire IT infrastructure
Is proven across tens of thousands of customer deployments.
As you’ll see, it quickly becomes clear that only VMware delivers on all of these important requirements. And best of all, VMware delivers while providing low total-cost-of-ownership (TCO).