I’m a bit delayed with this edition of the Virtualization Round Up due to some challenges with upgrading my MacBook Pro over the weekend (don’t you just love unforeseen production outages! And over a weekend no less…there’s a couple of blog posts coming out of this…). Slightly delayed, but just still within the best when consumed by date, here’s the latest super-sized Round Up:
VMware Specific Links
- New Releases
- Workstation 7 RC was recently released. No, this is not the official release, but an early version that you can test and play with…
- Fusion 2.0.6 was recently released. A maintenance upgrade that is free for all Fusion 1.x and 2.x users.
- It was announced today that Fusion 3.0 will be available on October 27th, pre-orders are currently being taken.
- SRM 4.0 was released today. This version of SRM works with vSphere 4.0 and NFS support. Make sure you check the SA compatibly matrix to make sure your storage has an adapter available. Some of the EMC platforms are currently not on the list…
- While not an official VMware product, View Open Client 4.0 Beta 1 was recently released. (now that my Mac is working again, maybe I should try installing it…)
- Ricky El-Qasem of VirtualizePlanet recently release his vSphere Plugin Wizard which makes it easy to embed a website or web portal into vCenter.
- Dell and VMware recently announced a broadened partnership on the Desktop front in which Dell will offer VMware View as an option for its Flexible Computing solutions.
- Dave Lawrence has a great post out discussing getting more advanced with View. A few more advance items you can can configure with View.
- Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4 and ESX 4.0 is a new guide available on the communities site.
- As I’ve indicated before, I think Fault Tolerance is one of the key new features within vSphere. In some recent testing that Todd Muirhead did he showed how even with using a 1vCPU Exchange VM, FT is a real value added feature that shouldn’t be overlooked. You may also want to check out Eric Siebert’s Master’s Guide to VMware Fault Tolerance for all the FT details.
- Are you a VMware shop that would love to run Oracle virtualized but hesitate due to support statement confusions? Then you’ll find Oracle on VMware posts at Virtual Geek (including part II) worth the read. The longer you’re in the industry the more you have to laugh at the games…
- VMsafe is another key new aspect of vSphere which I have been disappointed to see hasn’t taken off faster. Every View client of mine has been beating up their security vendors on VMsafe for the past few months. So, What is happening with VMsafe?
- I updated the VMware Network Port list with a link to an interested graphical representation of this information that another colleague of mine here at VMware created.
- An interesting post by Maish Saidel-Keesing & discussion about using memory over commit made me chuckle a bit as I remember ever time I heard a client proud about how they are running their systems memory at the high rate of 50% utilized.
- And those who worry about over committing memory better buckle their seats when they see what the future holds, as Intel and VMware discussed some of the new memory and power management technologies they are working on.
- James Urquhart hits the nail on the head with his recent posts Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 1 and Part 2. His thinking dovetails what Paul Maritz has been saying since before the launch of vSphere. With virtualization creating a huge mainframe, do you need all the bloat of traditional OS? A application specific hosting container running as the “VM” starts making a lot of sense…oh yeah, and VMware bought SpringSource…
- A client recently asked for help in identifying which physical NIC his VM was using for troubleshooting, and luck would have it the VMware Networking Blog just posted a tip for doing this with vSphere. If anyone knows an equivalent method for VI3, please post in the comments!
- I found this recent post Comparing VMware’s Cloud to Amazon S3 comical in it’s mis-understandings. VMware doesn’t host their own cloud (at least not commercially for others to use). They make the software that allows others to create their own cloud. vCloud is just a marketing term to indicate partners who are building upon the VMware vSphere platform.
- As I have a number of clients planning large P2V conversions, Eric Siebert’s article on Removing old hardware after a P2V conversion is very timely.
General Virtualization & Cloud Links
- I found it interesting that Adobe is offering a cloud service for Flash, while this is essentially a CDN for Flash applications, it is another example of how far the cloud front as spread. As Matt Mullenweg recently tweeted, has Cloud jumped the shark? Maybe in marketing aspects…
- Ron Oglesby from Dell shares some great research around the question of is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization? While ever IT shop can argue how the adoption curve methodology doesn’t work for their organization, this is an important topic that all users of virtualization have to be asking themselves as dragging of feet with virtualization in today’s economy has the hardest of business impacts.
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