VMware Blog: October 2005

Monday, October 31, 2005

TaoSecurity's short review of VMware Workstation 5 Handbook

virtualization.info: Create VMware VMX configuration files easily

Alessandro finds a gem of a utility which makes VMX files. Very useful for the VMware player.

Saturday, October 29, 2005

Podcast: VMware co-founder Diane Greene: ZDNet Australia: Insight: Software

Matt Tett from RMIT's IT Test Labs spoke to VMware co-founder and president Diane Greene at the recent VM World conference in Las Vegas. Listen or download [14MB].

Techedge - Server Consolidation seminar

Seminar was in London. ESX server and VMware in general were main players.

Friday, October 28, 2005

Bink.nu | Microsoft changes its support for Vmware!

Slight changes...still not all the way there. Will Microsoft ever recognize the validity of third party virtualization solutions for the average shop? It seems like this distinction is just for convenience without any technical justification. Haven't run into any issues yet but if I do, it will be time to break out the escalation path at Microsoft. My experience shows you just have to appeal to the right person...even if it's a VP.

The Desktop Has Two Faces - CFO.com

Virtualization makes the most of hardware investments. We've seen tremendous gains by consolidating 15 physical servers to 2 ESX servers...and we still have room to grow! Lower power costs from less hardware and less of a need to cool the server room as well as actually accessing the real potential of server hardware make VMware's solution financially sound.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

VMworld 2005 Conference Sessions

According to the site, Monday, October 31, 2005 there will be audio and presentation materials available from these sessions. There's tons of stuff here. I'll have my time booked up for a while.

Tom's Hardware Guide Processors: Virtual Infrastructure Summit At VMWorld 2005 - Will New CPU Technology Impact Our Virtuality?

Tom's Hardware explores ESX, VMWorld 2005 and the relationship of VMware to processors. I agree wholeheartedly with the IBM quote in the article's closing thought "Virtualize everything - Virtualize now!"

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Server Pipeline | Are Virtual Servers Reliable Enough For Critical Apps?

Desert Schools Federal Credit Union is doing it and so are we. Critical applications running on VMware's ESX is where businesses get to put skin in the game. I recently heard of some organizations running ESX but only in their development area. Now don't get me wrong, it's great there but putting it into the high availability production environment is where ESX can really shine.

I'm excited that the new version will support higher end resources for VM's but we're running SQL 2000 and Exchange 2003 without any resource issues today. SQL is about a 60GB data set and Exchange is about 80GB. In both cases, we've given the VM's the maximum amount of processor and memory ESX 2.52 is capable of. This has addressed any issues we experienced early on in our migration. Oh, yes, they were both physical server which have been P2V'd.

virtualization.info: Unsupported GUIs for VMware command line utilities

Alessandro picks up some great (unsupported) GUI for VMware scripts.

» Why you should try VMWare's free virtual machine runtime | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

David Berlind weighs in with some ideas on why to try the free VMware player and what he's doing with VMware. It sounds similar to what I've done with my desktop. More on that soon.

Monday, October 24, 2005

VMTN Blog

VMware Technology Network started their blog last Thursday. I highly recommend that you check out what John Troyer, Senior Product Manager of VMTN Online, and his gang are doing by boosting the visibility of virtualization in general and VMware in particular. I look forward to the continued innovation and resource VMware is bringing to the table.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

VMware Player

Now everyone can get access to a VMware VM. Just have a full blown user of VMware Workstation 5 make a VM for you to work with and try out a new OS. Like Windows Vista or the latest Linux flavor. Very cool tool.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

VMTN Discussion Forums: VMTN User Solutions

As Mr. Perilli pointed out yesterday, VMware has introduced a place for user solutions to be exchanged. You may want to browse the items located there to get a feel for the kind of things which will be showing up on a regular basis. If you have any contributions, please take part in the community and share your secrets.

Monday, October 17, 2005

TechWeb | News | VMware Upgrades Virtualization Gear

It's official! ESX Server 3 and Virtual Center 2...

Friday, October 14, 2005

virtualization.info: VMware totally revamps web site

I agree the redesign is nicely organized, clean and contains very helpful information. I'm excited about everything they're doing at VMworld. Next week should have a lot going on.