Eric Sloof

VMware's acquisition of Determina, a supplier of vulnerability protection software, could improve virtualisation security, analyst firm Gartner has predicted. Gartner identified two technologies from Determina that could boost VMware's built-in security. The first, the Determina Memory Firewall, is designed to protect an operating system and applications against unauthorised memory and program control-flow manipulation. It will protect against attacks such as heap and stack overflows, buffer overflows, and similar techniques used by hackers.

Author: Cliff Saran over at ComputerWeekly

Will virtualization save the planet ? Since lots of people are worried about the greenhouse effect and the eco system in total more and more companies are offering Energy-efficient products and services. Sun recently announced their Eco Optimization Kit and Eco Virtualization services. Sun's Eco Innovation portfolio of products and services is the industry's most innovative and open energy-efficient solution to these, and many more challenges. Now, going green is the smart and safe way to drive higher profits. It's good for business and good for the planet. I was curies what sort of technique  Sun is using to do this and finally found the answer on the offerings page. Virtualize now with Solaris Containers or VMware ESX Server on a Sun Blade product, the only blade servers with up to double the memory and I/O of competing x64 blades or rack mount servers and at half the cost. Save 25% (up to $5,750) on VMware ESX Server licenses purchased along with a Sun Blade starter kit. It’s going to be a healthy planet after all.

Everyone can make a mistake and build a virtual machine on a Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2. Soon you will discover that you made the wrong choice ;-) and want to convert this virtual machine to the VMware VMDK virtual disk format. Arne Fokkema the Dutch ICT-Freak created a little how to and I translated his document. With the latest version of Winimage (8.10) you can convert the VDH virtual disk format to a VMDK virtual disk file. In this case we are going to convert a Longhorn Beta 3 (Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2) virtual machine to a VMware virtual machine.

Last Friday I discovered that the new version number of ESX server will be 3.5 but (except for the nfiniBand support) didn’t know anything about the new features this version would contain until I red the article from Alessandro Perilli over at virtualization.info.  He has a well informed source within the VMware beta program. On his site you can find the complete list with disclosed features from the ESX3.1 and ESX 3.5 realease.

After two successful meetings in 2005 and 2006 The Dutch VMware User Group announced  it’s time for a third one!  They would like to invite you to attend the 2007 VMware User Group meeting on the 7th of December. With over 1700 members this year’s event will become massive. Join the Dutch VMUG and learn best the practices and optimal use of VMware products, get answers, advice, tips, and suggestions from experts, discover new ideas and gain insight about Virtual Infrastructure, receive special information about new VMware products, network with other technical professionals and be part of the leading edge of VMware users. Keep a close watch to the Dutch VMUG website and stay tuned.

Some software vendors like Vizioncore, Invirtus and Mellanox Technologies have a VMware Community Source co-development contract. Mellanox Technologies is pleased to announce the availability of the InfiniBand adapter support package for VMware ESX 3.5 Beta 2, comprised of VirtualCenter 2 version 2.5 and ESX Server 3 version 3.5. So the next version is VMware® ESX 3.5 instead of ESX 3.1.

John Troyer over at Vmware posted a new article on the VMTN Blog. Is that so special you could ask? The answer is yes. John is a SR. Product manager and manages VMTN Online so you can find new posts of him frequently but this post is special because it mentions the vm4all.com website. :-) You can find the complete article here.

I would like to thank David, Duncan, Jae and Wojtek for all their help regarding the mysterious bug in the VMCDConnected utility. They finally tracked it down to the absence of a CD player in the virtual machine. When such a VM was scanned it resulted in an application errors like “Index was outside the bounds of the array�? and  “Conversion from string to type 'Boolean' is not valid�?. You can find the bug free version under the software menu item of my weblog.

VMware's virtualization technology has become the industry standard for virtualization in the enterprise. More and more people are writing software based on the SDK and created a lot of little handy tools. On the other side there are some larger company’s who also created all kinds of applications to support VMware ESX server and Virtual Center. The vm4all.com website provides a complete list of all these tools and applications.

http://vm4all.com

I have been on vacation to the lovely Island of Rhodes (Greece) the past tree weeks. I didn’t take my laptop with me so besides from a few posts there has been little activity regarding the Virtual Machine MKS Client. I had the opportunity to read your suggestions and think about all the new features in the new version. But first of all since nobody sponsored the development I created a commercial version. The trial version shows a maximum of 16 virtual machines and the registered version has no limit. I added a combo box where you can type in the name of the virtual machine with an alphabetic list. You can also customize the menu bar by enabling or disable menu items from the registry. The last feature I added is the PreSelectVM registry key. After logging on to the server this VM is automatically connected. You can find all the keys involved at the hive HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\NTPRO.NL\Virtual Machine MKS Client. You can find the download link for the Virtual Machine MKS Client v1.9 in the software menu item of my blog.