Eric Sloof

Tuesday the 11th of September at 8 in the morning the VMworld was officially opened by the  VMware President and Chief Executive Officer. Diane Greene talked about some interesting topics like the environment issue, ESX Server 3i, Disaster Recovery and VDI . Hear from an incredible array of industry experts, and virtualization executives discussing the current state and future vision in the virtualization industry—all during the VMworld 2007 General Session Webcasts.



The professional photographer Viktor van den Berg shoot some really nice pictures today.

ESX Server 3i is the industry’s first hardware-integrated hypervisor built on a next-generation thin architecture, giving your organization an efficient foundation for building a dynamic, automated data center. ESX Server 3i represents a significant advance in realizing the vision of virtualization as the standard computing platform for x86 servers, further simplifying IT operations through integration with server hardware.

The IT research firm Ideas International released  a new evaluation that compares the technical capabilities of four x86 virtual machine platforms (VMware Infrastructure 3, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, Xen with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and Xen with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1). The evaluation compares the quality of  40 different functional details in these systems, organized across five categories: performance & scalability; availability; storage Integration; manageability, and deployment considerations. The results of this evaluation are public, and they can be browsed online using a web-based collaborative mechanism. This interface allows visitors to weight the importance of functions covered in the evaluation to arrive at a customized comparison of these VM platforms reflecting their needs. It is also possible for users to contribute their own ratings of individual functions, should they choose to agree or disagree with our "expert" analysis.

In exactly one week the VMworld 2007 in San Francisco will start. A great event with thousands of attendees. Some companies probably will announce new products at the VMworld 2007 . I collected the following information. If you have any news about any announcements please leave a comment.

- VMware will launch VMware Server 2.0.

- Vizioncore will re-launch  the Invirtus products and announce the new prices.

- VMware and Dell will launch VMware ESX Lite.

- Transitive will launce Quick Transit.

Will virtualization save the planet ? Since lots of people are worried about the greenhouse effect and the eco system in total more and more companies are offering Energy-efficient products and services. Sun recently announced their Eco Optimization Kit and Eco Virtualization services. Sun's Eco Innovation portfolio of products and services is the industry's most innovative and open energy-efficient solution to these, and many more challenges. Now, going green is the smart and safe way to drive higher profits. It's good for business and good for the planet. I was curies what sort of technique  Sun is using to do this and finally found the answer on the offerings page. Virtualize now with Solaris Containers or VMware ESX Server on a Sun Blade product, the only blade servers with up to double the memory and I/O of competing x64 blades or rack mount servers and at half the cost. Save 25% (up to $5,750) on VMware ESX Server licenses purchased along with a Sun Blade starter kit. It’s going to be a healthy planet after all.

Everyone can make a mistake and build a virtual machine on a Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2. Soon you will discover that you made the wrong choice ;-) and want to convert this virtual machine to the VMware VMDK virtual disk format. Arne Fokkema the Dutch ICT-Freak created a little how to and I translated his document. With the latest version of Winimage (8.10) you can convert the VDH virtual disk format to a VMDK virtual disk file. In this case we are going to convert a Longhorn Beta 3 (Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2) virtual machine to a VMware virtual machine.

Last Friday I discovered that the new version number of ESX server will be 3.5 but (except for the nfiniBand support) didn’t know anything about the new features this version would contain until I red the article from Alessandro Perilli over at virtualization.info.  He has a well informed source within the VMware beta program. On his site you can find the complete list with disclosed features from the ESX3.1 and ESX 3.5 realease.

Some software vendors like Vizioncore, Invirtus and Mellanox Technologies have a VMware Community Source co-development contract. Mellanox Technologies is pleased to announce the availability of the InfiniBand adapter support package for VMware ESX 3.5 Beta 2, comprised of VirtualCenter 2 version 2.5 and ESX Server 3 version 3.5. So the next version is VMware® ESX 3.5 instead of ESX 3.1.

VMware's virtualization technology has become the industry standard for virtualization in the enterprise. More and more people are writing software based on the SDK and created a lot of little handy tools. On the other side there are some larger company’s who also created all kinds of applications to support VMware ESX server and Virtual Center. The vm4all.com website provides a complete list of all these tools and applications.

http://vm4all.com

I have been on vacation to the lovely Island of Rhodes (Greece) the past tree weeks. I didn’t take my laptop with me so besides from a few posts there has been little activity regarding the Virtual Machine MKS Client. I had the opportunity to read your suggestions and think about all the new features in the new version. But first of all since nobody sponsored the development I created a commercial version. The trial version shows a maximum of 16 virtual machines and the registered version has no limit. I added a combo box where you can type in the name of the virtual machine with an alphabetic list. You can also customize the menu bar by enabling or disable menu items from the registry. The last feature I added is the PreSelectVM registry key. After logging on to the server this VM is automatically connected. You can find all the keys involved at the hive HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\NTPRO.NL\Virtual Machine MKS Client. You can find the download link for the Virtual Machine MKS Client v1.9 in the software menu item of my blog.