latoga labs

VMware Converter Public Beta Announced

November 14, 2008 Leave a Comment

VMware recently announced the Public Beta of VMware Converter 4.0. Converter 4.0 will support physical to virtual (p2v) conversion of Linux and W2k8 system. For more information and to sign up for the Beta, see the full announcment on the VMware Converter Community Forum.

VMware Lab Manager 3.0.1 Released

November 7, 2008 Leave a Comment

Another release today from VMware: Lab Manager 3.0.1 was recenty released. While this is a maintenance release, some of the items inlcuded in this release are:

Support for running Lab Manager on English (US, UK, AUS), French, German, Italian, and Japanese versions of Microsoft Windows 2003
Optimization for higher scalability and lower response time
Support for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Update 3
Ability to transfer ownership of Lab Manager objects such as network templates, virtual machine templates, configurations, and media files between different organizations.

Full details about this release can be found in the Release Notes.

(Unfortunately, this announcement comes a day late for my customer who was upgrading his LM2.x installation to 3.0 last night… :-O ).

Virtualize Your Solaris Apps with Transitive

November 7, 2008 3 Comments

I recently came across a very interesting application virtualization technology that I thought would be of interest to a number of my readers. Transitive QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC to Linux X86-64 allows you to wrap a native Solaris application in a virtualization wrapper so that the application can be run on X86 Linux OS.

Transitive’s Henry Kwok, Systems Engineering, explained this best:

“QuickTransit is a cross-platform virtualization solution that allows applications compiled for Solaris/SPARC to run on Linux or Solaris/x86 without any changes to the binary. We use a technology called DBT (Dynamic Binary Translation), which is very similar to Java JITs, i.e. we generate native instruction at run-time and specially optimize the frequently executed portions.

It is important to understand that this product is orthogonal to the VMware virtualization approach, in that we do not migrate entire systems (i.e. OS and everything else), but instead are focused on the application level. There is no Solaris kernel or OS running. Instead systems calls are mapped to Linux systems calls. “

As I have walked around my customers, I notice pockets of Sun boxes here and there. I know customers would love to be able to migrate those systems to their enterprise standard virtualization technology of VMware. Well, with Transitive it appears that now they can.

(Note: I have had no direct or indirect experience with Transitive’s technlogy. Mileage may vary, consult your doctor before starting any excercise regiment, yadda, yadda, yadda…)