Eric Sloof

SxS is a relatively new OS feature supported by Windows on XP, Windows 2003, and Vista. SxS is a must�?have feature in order to deploy most modern software products such as Microsoft Office 2007, Adobe Reader 8, and .NET 2.0/3.0. VMware Project North Star (Thinstall) is the only application virtualization solution which supports SxS. In the early days Microsoft recommend installing DLLs to c:\windows\system32 if you wanted to share them with other applications. This lead to “DLL Hell�? since one applications installer would install one version of a DLL and another installer would install another version overwriting the existing DLL. If the new version of the DLL wasn’t compatible the older application would suddenly break and stop working. This is still how the majority of applications install their DLLs, even Office 2007 installs approximately 7 DLLs to c:\windows\system32. Slowly the industry is moving to deploy shared DLLs using SxS as XP becomes mainstream and Visual Studio 2005 forces this on you if you want to use the Version 8 C Runtime libraries. With SxS technology, applications can install DLLs to version specific directories tell Windows what version of the DLL should be used when they load a DLL by that name. VMware is proud to announce the VMware Project North Star Beta (Thinstall). New features at general availability (GA) will include dynamic linking between "virtual packages" (Application Link) and over the wire updates via HTTP/HTTPS to update deployed virtual applications (Application Sync). Download the VMware Project North Star Beta (Thinstall) today.

Alex Bakman, the founder and CEO of Vkernel announced the beta of the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer on his weblog.

Your virtual data center is growing. You are adding a ton of new VMs every week. Wouldn't it be really cool if you head a "crystal ball" that told you in how many days you will run into capacity bottlenecks and what type of bottlenecks it will be (cpu, memory, storage) ? Now you can. Join Vkernel's beta program for Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer that will kick off in early March.

Larry Loucks, CISSP/VCP/VCI/SCP/MCSE, is a 22-year veteran of the IT industry who has served in many capacities including Novell/Microsoft/Cisco engineering, network design and optimization, and security consulting. During the past 10 years, Larry has worked in consulting with an aim toward improving infrastructure performance while lowering costs of IT to business. Larry joined the virtualization industry around four years ago, and is a former VMware Senior Consultant.