Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

JanusVM is software that allows you to surf the Internet without oppression or censorship, while protecting your privacy, security, and identity. It has advanced filtering capabilities for modifying web page content, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk. JanusVM was designed to be used on Microsoft Windows (2000/XP/2003) and Linux.


JanusVM Features

• Works with WiFi.
• Support multiple users in a LAN.
• Protects you from most man-in-the-middle attacks.
• Protects you from Javascript, Java, and Flash based side-channel privacy attacks.
• Protects your identity and your true location by masking your IP Address.
• Encrypts and re-routes your DNS request and ALL TCP traffic to ensure strong privacy.
• Strips out most privacy sensitive information your web browser may leak.
• Blocks popups, annoying ads, banners, and other obnoxious Internet junk.
• Very simple setup and operation.
• Works transparently for applications using TCP. (No UDP or ICMP support)

How does it work?

JanusVM is powered by VMware, built on the Linux 2.6.14 kernel, and brings together openVPN, Squid, Privoxy, and Tor, to give you a transparent layer of security and privacy that is compatible with all your TCP based applications. DNS request are also passed through Tor so even your ISP doesn't know what web site you are looking at. All your web traffic is passed through squid and privoxy to filter out unwanted internet junk & prevents your web browser from leaking information about your computer system. One of the core components that make this possible is an awesome piece of software called Tor. Tor is what allows you to re-route your traffic around the internet anonymously. A more detailed explanation of this can be found here.

Draw your virtualization challenge or help the community define virtualization. Create your own diagrams to illustrate your point with the WHITEBOARD by GRAFFITI.

VirtualizationConversation.com is a website owned and operated by IBM and Intel. The following bloggers post their virtualization stories on a regular basis: Dave Altavilla, Johan De Gelas, Matthew Shaw, Steve Kovsky and the The Insight Community.
The Insight Community engages communities of experts within a proven framework to generate the best insightful analysis about business, government policy, and technology issues. Floor64, the company behind both the Insight Community and the analysis blog, Techdirt, has been providing insights to companies for nearly a decade. Through its sites, Insight Community cases can tap into a network of over 800,000 subscribers.

VMware handles I/O somewhat differently from the manner in which IBM handles it. In the case of VMware, instead of a separate partition and dedicated I/O system, the hypervisor handles I/O itself. "We provide a virtual device or virtualized drivers for Intel E1000 and AMD VLANCE," said VMware's Chief Platform Architect Richard Brunner. He said that the company also provides a virtual device called VMXnet. "When these devices attempt to access physical hardware, all their writes are trapped to the hypervisor, which turns around and places the request in a stack in the hypervisor," said Brunner. He added that the hypervisor has a queue that the physical device driver then has to take care of.

Read the full interview by Wayne Rash at Server Watch

According to Bogomil Balkansky, senior director of product marketing at VMware, the naming convention for the future ESX Server (or ESX Servers, as the case may be) has not been set, even if people are referring to this future product as ESX Server 4.0. He says that there will be some product rebranding in 2009.

The current ESX Server hypervisors support up to 64 GB of main memory to be allocated to a single virtual machine on a server, and the VirtualSMP feature of the hypervisor (which allows a VM to span multiple cores or processor sockets) can only span up to four x64 cores right now. Balkansky says that in 2009, the hypervisor will double VirtualSMP capability to eight cores and with quadruple memory to 256 GB maximum per virtual machine. By the way, that is cores, not threads. While the ESX Server can certainly see and use multiple threads in a processor core, if they are there - some Intel chips have virtualized threads created by the chip hardware to boost their efficiency, while Advanced Micro Devices' Opterons do not have simultaneous multithreading (which is silly, really) - these threads are not seen by the hypervisor as a core even if applications riding atop the operating system treat threads as if they were separate cores.

Read the full interview by Timothy Prickett Morgan at Channel & Register

A month ago Hany Michael launched his weblog called Hypervizor.com. Today he posted an impressive article, a video tutorial about installing VMware SRM.

This is the first video tutorial in a series to come for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), one of the most interesting and efficient products from VMware. It’s my very first video in my blog also so please leave your comments and let me know your opinion. Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to be notified in time for future videos.

Update : The second video tutorial is online, SAN Setup using the Lefthand VSA.

Update : This is the third video in the SRM series, here we configure the SAN replication between the two datacenters, and then configure the ESX hosts to connect to the new  iSCSI SAN.

I signed up for the VMworld Europe 2009 Partner Day. Europe's largest virtualization partner community event is due to take place on Monday, 23 January at the Palais des Festivals, Cannes.

Partner Day showcases the latest partner programmes, sales and training programs and marketing initiatives. Partner Day is the place for all partners (including VIP, SIs, OEMs etc) to:

• Hear from the senior VMware management team about the vision for our partner community
• Get the inside scoop on new partner programmes and training roadmap
• Learn about new sales and marketing tools
• Network with your peers and the VMware team 

I just received Season’s greetings from VMware, their online Christmas card looks like some kind of a Sphere.

"Please enjoy this festive period with your friends and family, Have a great xmas and new year."

Windows PowerShell V2 CTP3 introduces several significant features to Windows PowerShell 1.0 and Windows PowerShell V2 CTPs that extends its use, improves its usability, and allows you to control and manage the Windows environment more easily and comprehensively.

Selected New and Updated Features in Windows PowerShell V2 CTP3

Community Website for Benchmarking Virtual Machine Resource Allocations CompareMyVM.com, a free website tool that allows visitors to exchange and compare VMware ESX Server virtual machine (VM) resource allocations with that of the community at large. If you’re unsure about how much resource capacity (CPU, memory, and storage) to allocate to an Exchange VM supporting 1000 users as an example, you can use CompareMyVM to find detailed information on similar VM profiles submitted by the user community. When you visit CompareMyVM, you can take the following actions on the site:

• Submit – Anonymously contribute by submitting VM profiles via the ‘Snapshot My VMs’ Java applet or manually loading the info.

• Browse – Peruse the community submissions to learn how other are allocating resources and how to better provision specific application VMs.

• Edit – Make changes to your VM profile submissions as you change resource allocations.

• Vote – Help rank user submitted VM profiles based on proper resource allocations

The download seemed to take forever and after the first 30 MB it stalled. It took more than two hours to receive the full 100 MB. Finally I installed Veeam Monitor with the local SQL2005 Express database. I tried to monitor a vSphere server but after the initial connection, it greyed out. Adding an ESX 3.5U3 server succeeded. I could even add my VC server. The tool looks great and has a feature I didn’t see before. Veeam implemented the remote console ActiveX object. I tried out some features like generating a report and alarm modelling. Everything works great, good job Veeam.

Veeam Monitor 3.0.2 features a new functionality mode which is automatically enabled when you install the product without a license, of if your license expires. Veeam Monitor Free Edition has the following limitations compared to the full version.

- Performance history lookup is limited to 24
- Number of alarms is limited to 10
- Performance and trend reporting is disabled
- Alarm modelling is disabled

Veeam is pleased to announce a new free version of Veeam Monitor. The Veeam Monitor Free Edition is an easy-to-use VMware monitoring solution designed to meet the day-to-day needs of VMware administrators who need real-time performance monitoring and alerting. Built from the ground up specifically for the virtual world, Veeam Monitor provides a bird’s-eye view of key performance metrics across your virtual ESXi infrastructure.

With Veeam Monitor, you can view real-time resource usage data for any virtual infrastructure object or collection of objects, as well as known infrastructure events, all on a single screen. This allows you to finally see your virtual infrastructure as a unified entity, not just a collection of isolated hosts and guests.

Take screen captures and recordings in just one click using TechSmith's Jing Project. Designed to automatically work with Screencast.com, every time you create a new capture or video with Jing, it uploads to Screencast.com. You can share or organize files however you want, using all the options available with Screencast.com. (Via Cody Bunch)

Wow, the yellow ball really rocks, just try it out. It’s one of the coolest apps I’ve seen. Maybe even better then Veaam’s upcoming free monitor tool.