Eric Sloof

This morning I posted an article about the Yankee Group report regarding the comparison between Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn) and VMware ESX. This report contains a lot of errors and is pulled from the Yankee Group site to be reworked. But why is the report still available at the Microsoft website ?

  What's New in VMware Workstation 6.5

- Use Unity to integrate your guest apps with your host
- More Powerful VM Record and Replay
- Support for Smart Cards & Smart Card Readers
- Enhanced ACE Authoring
- Link State Propagation Networking
- Improved 3D graphics Support

Plans for Workstation 6.5 include adding support for additional host and guest operating systems such as CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Asianux, and newer editions of operating systems already supported. Windows Server 2008 is experimentally supported as a guest. You are welcome to try Workstation 6.5 on these operating systems and send feedback. Precompiled kernel modules are not available for the newly added Linux operating systems. Therefore, when you start Workstation for the first time, a dialog box might prompt you to compile the kernel modules. If you experience issues with this new module updater feature, run the following command: vmware-config.pl --compile.

The bottom line of the Yankee Group report "Virtualization Price War: VMware’s Little Big Horn?" is - Rapid commoditization and intensified competition in virtualization technology has precipitated a price war, which is a key element of emerging Anywhere Applications environment. This war is a boon for corporate enterprises who can pick and choose from a wide array of products at discounted prices.�? And makes a comparison between Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn) and VMware ESX. - I didn’t know that Longhorn has HA and where is Hyper-V in the comparison? Don’t make me laugh!

This course is open to anyone but is designed for students who have already taken a VMware Infrastructure 3 instructor-led course. It assumes a strong working knowledge of VMware Infrastructure 3. The course contains sixteen brief eLearning modules. Topics include: an overview module of many the new features, a module on upgrading an existing VMware Infrastructure to ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, and several guided demonstrations on how to operate three of the key new features: Storage VMotion, VMware Update Manager, and Guided Consolidation. In addition, the course provides eight interactive simulations, which give the student hands-on practice with the procedures being demonstrated.

Vizioncore's vCharter Pro is the first enterprise-class, scalable performance monitoring solution for companies running hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual machines.  Powered by Foglight®, vCharter Pro has built-in awareness of VMware® Infrastructure, which provides layered views encompassing VirtualCenter, Datacenter, clusters, resource pools, ESX Server, VM and datastore levels. vCharter Pro can help administrators pinpoint resource contention issues among CPU, memory, disk or NIC.  Collected metrics are filtered via rules and customized alarms and stored in a central database for unattended monitoring and historical trending.  With just a few mouse clicks, administrators can drill from the top down through lower layers to uncover problems, and by clicking on alarms, can obtain further information through pop-up windows.

NetCmdlets V2 is packed full of exciting new features including PowerShell Server (formerly PowerShell Remoting), Parameter Sets, Object Pipelining, and new Cmdlets for SSH Enabled Remoting and Amazon Web Services (S3) Integration. The /n software NetCmdlets extend the features of Microsoft Windows PowerShell with a broad range of network management and messaging capabilities. The current release contains more than 30 Cmdlets providing access to network and host protocols such as SNMP, LDAP, DNS, Syslog, HTTP, WebDav, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, Rexec/RShell, Telnet, and more.

VMware plans to improve virtual infrastructure through technologies such as high availability, automatic restart, better tolerance and masking of hardware failure, and site disaster recovery, the company's chief scientist and co-founder, Mendel Rosenblum, told reporters in Bangalore last Monday. A virtual machine would, for example, be able to record its execution on another virtual machine in a compact form, so that if one of them dies the other one takes over, Rosenblum said. He did not disclose the time frame when products based on these technologies will be available.

On the same day Marathon Technologies Corporation announced everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization. Based on the same everRun® automated availability software employed by over 1800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

1. Companies can now reliably run high value production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications.

2. It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies.

3. A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption.

Many bloggers already discovered the video on YouTube showing that Hyper-V Quick Migration breaks network connections. In other words quick migration in the beta of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor leads to network connection failures in virtual machines. VMware created their own page on blib.tv showing a comparison between VMotion and Quick migration and  VMware VMotion does not break network connections. VMotion in VMware Virtual Infrastructure leaves network connections intact as virtual machines travel from one physical server to another. Sometimes a video says more than a hundred words ;-)

Scott Herold over at VMguru.com is building up his lab. He is still waiting for the Dell server to arrive, but today he completed the installation of the iSCSI server.

I was able to finally build my iSCSI server a while back and wanted to highlight some of the details of this particular system. I wanted to try to do something unique with this configuration that would help to support a higher-end workload than a typical server.

VMware is the king when it comes to virtualization. Windows PowerShell has gotten huge accolades as an extremely powerful tool for automation of IT tasks. These two technologies make a lot of sense together, and VMware is now making that happen with the release of their VI Toolkit for Windows. In "Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell", you will learn how to perform everything from simple ad-hoc reporting at the command-line ("are any of my virtual machines powered off?") to complex scripts to automate a a massive deployment of hundreds of virtual machines. Simple, yet powerful; concise, yet robust; you will enjoy using this new language to solve your old problems using less code than you thought possible. If you are a system administrator responsible for managing a VMware Virtual Infrastructure (version 2.0 or above), or a standalone ESX Server (version 3.0 or above), then you need this book. Aimed at scripters of every level, the book starts off with a PowerShell primer and continues well into the internals of virtualization on the VMware platform.

More PowerShell Goodness: The SAPIEN Blog includes a complete section on Windows PowerShell news and tips, and the SAPIEN Knowledge Base has a growing list of PowerShell-related articles. You may also enjoy www.ScriptingAnswers.com, which offers discussions, training, and free resources for administrative scripting - including Windows PowerShell.