Last week VMWare released the long expected Update 2 for the VMWare 3 Infrastructure products. Besides cool new features like Hot-cloning VM’s, W2K8 Guest support, Storage VMotion and VSS quiescing support, one of the new features is the so called EVC.

This is introduced as just another feature in the VMWare Infrastructure product line but this should not be taken lightly. EVC stands for Enhanced VMotion Capability and it is a technology which Read the rest of this entry »

People who want to have scripting abilities added to their ESX farm can now finally download the Powershell addon for VMware Infrastructure because is has been officially released and thus supported. This addon is far more easy to learn than visual basic or perl scripting (the previous scripting languages you had to learn if you wanted this kind automation). The VI Toolkit added over 120 commandlets which eases the automation and scriptablity of ESX servers or an ESX farm.

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Virtualization.info comes with the news that as of next week, VMware ESXi will be available for free.

During the Q2 2008 earnings call the company announced that before the end of July it will release the Update 2 for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and that will give away the lightweight edition of the product, ESX 3i, for free.

It was already expected and sort of announced that ESXi would soon be available for free, but I expected it to be announced at VMworld 2008. This is going to give a great boost to VMware in the SMB market.

I’m wondering if this affects the pricing of VI 3.5 standard and enterprise, as these products also contains the basic hypervisor…

Update: the source for this info: The VMware partner portal.

Steven Bink, the founder of the well known Microsoft IT Pro website Bink.nu, has started a new site about Hyper-V. You can find all Hyper-V related info, downloads and video’s at hypervoria.com. It is already filled with lots of information.

Tripwire updated their free ConfigCheck utility to assess the security and configuration of an ESX host. The previous version only supported ESX 3.5 and the updated version also checks ESX 3.0.

Tripwire ConfigCheck provides an immediate assessment of the configurations of a VMware ESX hypervisor, comparing them against VMware hardening security guidelines, which are best practice recommendations for optimal security in virtual environments, and provides remediation instructions if any are needed. With Tripwire ConfigCheck, customers gain immediate visibility into risks that might exist in their virtual environment due to misconfiguration and are advised of recommended fixes to any configuration settings that could present future risk.

Read the press release 

Download ConfigCheck

I was looking over the VMWorld 2008 session catalog (I think you’ll need a VMWorld account), and it’s going to be a promising event with a lot of interesting sessions. Off course, there are a lot of best practices sessions, which are always good to attend, but I also found some other interesting sessions. Here is my top 5:

VI Management Assistant (VIMA):
Never heard of this before, it looks like a virtual appliance for deploying agents and scripts to ESX(i) servers.

Virtual Storage Appliances:
How can environments without shared storage still benefit from the high availability features of VC? VMware introduces a new storage architecture: OpenVSA Platform.

VMware Workstation 6.5 Unleashed:
It sounds like VMware workstation 6.5 will be released just before or at VMWorld 2008!

Offline VDI:
This session will introduce the new feature of the upcoming VDM 3.0, I expect to be released at the end of the year.
 
An Introduction to VMO:
The VMware Automation and Orchestration Tool : Find out about the automation engine that powers Life Cycle Manager. I think it’s sort of like Citrix Workflow Studio

Unfortunately, no sessions about Continuous Availability, something VMware showed on VMWorld 2007.

Read the session descriptions: Read the rest of this entry »

When I virtualize a physical server, and the server has a logical disk with multiple partitions on it, I always want to convert those partitions into separate virtual disks. In some cases I want those virtual disks on separate datastores (in case of different RAID types for example). When not using a tool like Platespin Powerconvert, it could be a lot of work. I would convert just the system partition with VMware Converter and I would clone the other partitions with a disk cloning tool like Symantec Ghost.

It was a while ago that I P2V’d a server, but when I converted a server yesterday, it took me way less time, and I only used VMware converter! This is why:

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You might have read about the news that Marathon Technologies recently launched a new product called EverRun VM. This comes as an add-on for Citrix Xenserver and it can protect virtual machines from hardware failures. There are 3 levels of protection, and one of them will come for free with Xenserver 4.2!

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Yesterday VMWare announched that founder and CEO of VMWare Diane Greene is replaced immediately by ex-Microsoft executive Paul Maritz. It needs to be said that Paul Maritz, wasn’t working at Microsoft for over 8 years, but nevertheless it’s an interesting move.

For those who keep close track on VMWare’s public activities and announcements it’s known that the CEO of EMC and the CEO of VMWare had some differences in opinion [understatement].

The direct effect at this point is Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I was a bit puzzled; a client of mine asked me which SCSI interface he should use for his XP test machine on ESX 3.02. Because after he loaded the VMWare SCSI driver the XP setup told him there was no disk present. I told him to use a Buslogic SCSI card instead of the LSI Logic and everything went smooth after that. Last day I did the same except I used the default SCSI Read the rest of this entry »