VMware - 28

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)

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.

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).

http://www.vmware.com/technology/whyvmware/

Whats new in 1.1
 
- Read and Refresh the Data automatic every x Minutes.
- Sort the Columns.
- Store the Data in a MS-Access DB.

- DatabaseView with Graphical Diagrams for the logical Partitions (You can See now the History from used and unused Spaces) and see what Storage the VM REALLY Needed.

- DatabaseView with Graphical Diagrams for the Memory Usage (You can See now the History from used and unused Memory) and see what Memory the VM REALLY Needed.

- DatabaseView with Graphical Diagrams for the CPU Usage (You can See now the History from used and unused CPU) and see what CPU the VM REALLY Needed.

- In all Graphical Diagrams you can Zoom in and Out in the History (also print the diagram).

You can Download it for free at www.mightycare.de.

You're among the first to learn that VKernel will be previewing its newest virtual appliance called "Modeler". As you continue to virtualize your more important applications, making changes to your production environment can be quite dangerous. Change can lead to performance problems that can cause downtime -- disconnecting users and interrupting important business processes.
Modeler can help you validate proposed changes to your VMware environment to protect its integrity and mitigate the unintended consequences that change can produce. Modeler snapshots real world data from your VMware environment so that you can analyze, simulate, and safely validate proposed changes before you deploy them into your production environment. Examples of change include the following:

• Deploying New VMs
• Moving VMs
• Adding or Removing Hosts, Memory, Storage
• Creating and Resizing Resource Pools
• Creating and Resizing Clusters
• Changing Configurations in VMs, Hosts, Clusters, Resource Pools

Rob Zylowski created an impressive document about pulling VI3 information from the Virtual Center database. This document was meant to be a chapter in the new VI3 Book but was skipped due to the size of the new book. You can download it for free at VMGuru.com.

Rob Zylowski:

Ok, so you purchased VirtualCenter knowing that it would help you manage the new critical environment that you were setting up. You were sold on the many benefits that VirtualCenter had to offer. You installed it and use it every day because it really is a great way to manage your virtual environment. One of the best things about VirtualCenter is that VMware has made it very easy to integrate with. There are API’s that will allow you to automate tasks that are not already automated with the standard product offerings. There is also an excellent database that you can use to create reports to help you manage the VI infrastructure in much better ways.

VMware Studio offers software developers and hardware appliance vendors an easy-to-use virtual appliance authoring tool to create, customize, manage, distribute, and deploy production-ready virtual appliances. VMware Studio leverages the industry's leading virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure (VI), and offers built appliances all the management services that VI offers. VMware Studio is free of charge and delivers:

• A Web Console with appliance templates
• Virtual Appliance customization and build engine
• Update repository creation and publication
• Build process automation using CLI
• Open Virtualization Format (OVF) support
• Integration with VMware Infrastructure
• Integration with third-party management software

Alex Bakman over at VKernel announced the release of SearchMyVM, a free “Google-like” search utility to help you quickly find information within rapidly expanding VMware ESX environments. As dynamic virtual environments continue to rapidly grow in size and scope, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find even the most basic information within VMware infrastructures. SearchMyVM instantly deploys exactly like each one of VKernel’s virtual appliances. With a “Google-like” search interface, you can find virtual machines, hosts, clusters, storage, resource pools, files, snapshots, VMware tools, applications and configuration information. Over 75 different types of attributes are fully indexed and available for you to search.

There's a bug when upgrading from ESX 3.0 to ESX 3.5. This bug has to do with Lunmasking. When performing the following mask command:

/adv/Disk/MaskLUNs =
vmhba2:1:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;vmhba2:2:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;vmhba4:1:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;vmhba4:2:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;"

This should mask all the luns, what you effectively get is:

/adv/Disk/MaskLUNs =
"vmhba2:1:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;vmhba2:2:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,9

This means there is a restriction in the amount of characters that can be set in 3.5 for masking luns.

During the transfer of VM4All.COM to another provider, there went something wrong. I hope to have the site up and running at the beginning of next week. 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.