Xtravirt released a breakthrough for hosting ESX 3.5 Server as a VM on VMware Player. Xtravirt, known for their 'VI in a box' methodology whereby a full version of ESX Server 3.5 can be installed within a VMware virtual machine.

Xtravirt's CTO, Paul Davey comments about the great benefits of this new release. "'ESX on Workstation' was a very popular way of providing a learning and demonstration environment for VMware VI3. 'ESX 3.5 on Player' takes this to a whole new level - VMware Player is freely downloadable and utilises thin disk provisioning, so now the entire package is not only free, but incredibly lightweight.".

Paul also goes on to say, "Current indications from the ESX 4 BETA also look very promising for this to continue."

Additionally Xtravirt have written installer software which fully automates the deployment of the VM, making the process as simple as possible.

The white paper with installer can be downloaded from http://knowledge.xtravirt.com/white-papers/esx-3x.html.

This morning I finally received an email from the VMworld Content team.

Thank you for submitting your session for VMworld Europe 2009!

Your submission: VMware Lab at Home

How to VMotion from your kitchen to you bathroom? This session is filled with tips and trick about building a VMware lab environment at your own home. The average VMware fan doesn’t have enough money to buy hardware that’s on the Hardware Compatibility List. In this session you will learn how to Install VMware ESX on cheap hardware and still get the performance you want. I also will be looking at installing VMware ESX in workstation. There’s also a special focus on SATA and IP storage. These storage techniques can be used to setup shared NFS or ISCSI servers. Like in a production environment, the home lab’s power consumption, noise and heat are most important otherwise you partner may be the one who will pull the plug.

Your submission: VMware PowerShell tools integration

This presentation focuses on the tools that are currently available for PowerShell. It also gives you an insight at the VMware PowerShell extensions and presents a short induction to PowerShell as a scripting language. We are going to take a look at PowerShell integration in the vClient and a lot of other tools like AdminScriptEditor, PrimalForms, PowerGUI, PowerShellPlus and PowerGadgets

We received over 400 submission, but can only select 100 sessions and I am sorry to say that your session(s) did not make the selection. While your session(s) cannot be presented at VMworld Europe, you can still post your content to VMworld.com to share with the VMworld community and virtualization industry as a whole.

View Manager 3.0.1 includes the following enhancements:

• Integrates the ThinPrint Virtual Channel Gateway module so that View deployments can communicate with ThinPrint server. Important: ThinPrint's .print engine for VMware View must be installed on the target print server prior to installing View 3.0.1. Print jobs originating from virtual machines are subject to different licensing criteria on ThinPrint server. In order to provide the print server with information about the origin of a print request, View uses the TPVCGateway module as the print provider.

Continue reading "What's New in View Manager 3.0.1 " »

Last week I had a genuine bloggers-lunch at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration with Matthijs Haverink, blogger at Virtualfuture and Rob Mokkink, the author of the HBA load balance script. We talked about various topics and I told them why I created the Resource Pool Calculator and how important it can be in large organizations, where virtual machines are deployed rapidly. Driven by my enthusiasm Rob completely rewrote my calculator script and added some real cool functions like logging to it.

This Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator recalculates all your resource pools. Depending on the number of virtual machines per resource pool, the number of reservations for memory and CPU is automatically lifted after running the Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator. The script also respects the existing individual virtual machine reservations and adds those value’s to the total RP sum.

You can get your copy here.

Richard Blythe has a breaking news announcement!

A while back I made a post asking all of you for direct feedback on, or comments to, the VMware Knowledgebase Team, of which I am a member at VMware. First, be assured that I have taken every single comment and forwarded it onto my management, who are very interested in this type of interaction.  So much so, that I have gotten the go-ahead to create a brand new official VMware blog, called VMware Knowledgebase Blog here. Bookmark this page now and watch for our welcome message soon.  (That’s how fresh this news is, we don’t have a welcome message yet!) The whole Knowledgebase Team looks forward to getting our word out there and hearing what you have to say.

VMware Knowledgebase Blog

News and announcements from the VMware Knowledgebase Team

Georgia Southern University’s College of Information Technology, the only one of its kind in the Southeast United States, is now one of only 10 universities in the world to teach the cutting-edge technology of virtualization on VMware software, thanks to VMware and a donation of computer equipment by Corus Consulting and Canvas Systems.

Corus Consulting and Canvas Systems values the equipment at $126,000 but professors in the College of Information Technology said it is hard to put a price on what the donation will add to an IT student’s education and career potential long term.

Designated a VMware Academy, Georgia Southern University’s College of Information Technology may teach VMware courses and certify students as Virtualization Certified Professionals. This certification saves future employers thousands of dollars in training costs and makes Georgia Southern graduates much more competitive in the job market. The designation as a VMware Academy was one of the key elements that impressed executives with Corus Consulting and Canvas Systems and prompted the computer equipment donation.

Belgian/Dutch reference case showing the unique benefits of a virtual desktop (VMware View) combined with the special Ultra Thinclients from SUN Microsystems.

Erik is not the first VMTN community contributor who started a weblog, we can find Tom Howarth over at PlanetVM and Alan Renouf (no he isn’t French) shares his ramblings at the redesigned Virtu-Al. If you’re really looking for a VMware Technical Deepdive, you should pay a visit to Erik Zandboer’s VMdamentals Blog. In its short existence it already contains some great articles like

• VMware Infrastructure Resource Settings Sagas
• Scaling VMware hot-backups (using esXpress)
• Performance tab “Numbers” demystified

Idealstor, a developer of disk-to-disk backup solutions, announced the release of iBac VIP for VMware Virtual Center. iBac VIP for Virtual Center was created to simplify VMware backups by offering a single license that backs up every virtual machine regardless of how many ESX hosts have been implemented. Continue reading "Idealstor Releases VMware Virtual Center Backup..." »

BreakingPoint announced the BreakingPoint Application Protocol for VMware VMotion enabling Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) and Service Providers to emulate VMware VMotion traffic at speeds of up to 40 Gigabits per second in their test environment. When combined with the BreakingPoint Application Protocol for NFS and SMB/CIFS, it eliminates the costs and delays of testing a VMware ESX server infrastructure and Storage Area Network (SAN).

Mike Hamilton, Director of Product Marketin:

“VMware VMotion provides enormous benefits for data centers, including high availability and performance, while enabling load balancing and resource optimization. Using BreakingPoint you can emulate this application running on TCP port 8000, the communication between the VMware ESX servers, the TCP connection with the new destination server and even the ICMP echo request to ensure the seamless transfer of the connections between the old and new server. BreakingPoint testing tools provide an unmatched level of testing realism and performance in a small footprint device, supplying people with more accurate performance and security testing results and helping them accelerate the development and deployment of their network equipment.”