Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

While I was reading the frequently asked questions at the VMworld.com website I noticed something special:

To reduce the impact on the environment, shuttle service will not be provided. Instead, you will receive a 4 day Metro card at registration when you receive your badge. The Bella Center has its own Metro station and is on the Green M1 line.

The Copenhagen Metro has two lines which run from suburban Vanløse to Vestamager and Copenhagen Airport, both situated on the island of Amager. The Metro opened in 2002. It takes 23 minutes to travel through the entire system. Most passengers, though, spend a maximum of 6-7 minutes at a time in the Metro. The lines cover 21 km. 10 km in tunnels and 11 km on elevated tracks and embankment.

VMware Workstation 8 provides a seamless way to access all of the virtual machines you need, regardless of where they are running.   Connect to Server enables remote connections to virtual machines running on VMware Workstation, VMware vSphere, and VMware vCenter.  Now you can work with local and server hosted virtual machines side by side within the same interface.  You are no longer constrained by the power of your PC to run multiple virtual machines at the same time.In this video you will see how easy you can add another instance of Workstation 8 but also the vCenter server to your inventory.


After you connect to a remote server, the remote host and remote virtual machines appear in the library. If the remote server is running vCenter Server, datacenters and folders appear in the library. To interact with a remote host, you select it in the library. The tasks that you can perform on a remote host appear on the tab for the remote host. For example, you might be able to restart, shut down, or suspend the remote host and create virtual machines.

To interact with a remote virtual machine, you select it in the library. You interact with remote virtual machines in the same way that you interact with local virtual machines, but some features and devices are not supported. Features that you cannot use with remote virtual machines include Unity mode, shared folders, AutoProtect snapshots, drag-and-drop, and copy and paste. Your permissions determine the actions that you can perform on remote hosts and remote virtual machines. When a feature is not supported, or when you do not have permission to use it, the associated menu item is unavailable.

VMware has announced the availability of VMware Workstation 8 -- offering the easiest way to build, share and upload virtual machines (VMs) to VMware vSphere. With more than 50 new features, VMware Workstation 8 advances the way technical professionals can work with multiple virtual machines from their PCs or on enterprise private clouds.

"The users of VMware Workstation pioneer the adoption of virtual environments and private clouds," said Christopher Young, vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. "Our team recognizes the needs of these users and has made significant enhancements to VMware Workstation 8, making it even easier for them to move beyond the virtual box."

Key VMware Workstation 8 features include:

• Remote Connections - VMware Workstation 8 provides a seamless way to establish remote connections to hosts running in Workstation, VMware vSphere, and VMware vCenter™.
• "Share" VMs - New in Workstation 8, users can share VMs so they can be accessed by teammates providing a quick way to test applications in a more production-like environment. 
• Upload to vSphere - Workstation 8 enables users to drag and drop a VM from a user's desktop to VMware vSphere. This feature allows users to deploy a complete application environment from a PC to a server for further testing, demoing, and analysis. 
• New User Interface - The VMware Workstation 8 user interface has been revamped with simplified menus, live thumbnails, improved preferences screens, and a new virtual machine library with enhanced searching. Users can now search and access a large library of virtual machines that can reside on your desktop, a server, or on another PC running VMware Workstation. 
• Improved Virtual Machine Capabilities - With support for HD audio with 7.1 surround sound, USB 3 and Bluetooth devices, Workstation 8 delivers new levels of virtual machine performance. In addition, improvements to virtual SMP, 3D graphics performance and new support for 64-GB RAM allows users to run the most demanding applications in a virtual machine. 

Download a free trial here.

VMware’s Sreekanth Setty who works as a staff member at the Performance Engineering team has published  a great technical white-paper regarding vMotion Architecture, Performance, and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5.

VMware vSphere vMotion is one of the most popular features of VMware vSphere. vMotion provides invaluable benefits to administrators of virtualized datacenters. It enables load balancing, helps prevent server downtime, enables troubleshooting and provides flexibility—with no perceivable impact on application availability and responsiveness.

vSphere 5 includes a number of performance enhancements and new features that have been introduced in vMotion. Among these improvements are a multiple–network adaptor capability for vMotion, better utilization of 10GbE bandwidth, Metro vMotion, and optimizations to further reduce impact on application performance.

A series of tests were conducted to quantify the performance gains of vMotion in vSphere 5 over vSphere 4.1 in a number of scenarios including Web servers, messaging servers and database servers. An evacuation scenario was also performed in which a large number of virtual machines were migrated.

Test results show the following:

• Improvements in vSphere 5 over vSphere 4.1 are twofold: the duration of vMotion and the impact on application performance during vMotion.
• There are consistent performance gains in the range of 30% in vMotion duration on vSphere 5, due to the optimizations introduced in vMotion in vSphere 5.
• The newly added multi–network adaptor feature in vSphere 5 results in dramatic improvements in performance (for example, duration time is reduced by more than a 3x factor) in vSphere 5 over vSphere 4.1.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmotion-perf-vsphere5.pdf