Some details of the next version of Hyper-V are coming out of Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference this week in Los Angeles. Hyper-V 2.0, as Microsoft has stated recently, will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft's roadmap says R2 will be out in 2010. Whether early, mid or late, no one knows.
The big upgrade, as most everyone knows, is Live Migration, or the ability to move running virtual machines (VMs) from one physical host to another with no downtime.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/30/20080 comments
One door opens, another closes. It's that way in life, and certainly in the magazine business. Thus, it's my bittersweet duty to let you know that one columnist has left, and a pair of new columnists takes over.
First, the gloomy news: Greg Shields, our "Virtual Architect" columnist, is no longer with the magazine. The September/October issue was his last column with us.
Greg has been with Virtualization Review since the first issue, and will be missed tremendously. There aren't many writers out there with a better grasp of virtualization and the skill to explain it so clearly to readers.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/27/20081 comments
It's the same reason as always for my reduced blogging output lately: print issue of the magazine coming up. I hope you won't mind so much when you get the results -- the first-ever print buyers' guide for virtualization.
We've put a lot of work into this special issue, the first of its kind. The buyers' guide contains more than 90 products, broken down by virtualization category:
- Server
- Storage
- Application
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
- Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery
- Management/Optimization
- Security
- Miscellaneous (a category for products that didn't fit into one of the other categories, like training, power and cooling and outsourcing.)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/27/20080 comments
The latest beta of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is out now, and includes a new "green" feature.
The toolkit, which Microsoft says will be available after 3 p.m. PT today, is version 3.2. It includes a "Power Assessment" feature, Microsoft says, which looks at your environment and advises on ways to save energy.
MAP, which is free, is essentially an infrastructure inventory tool that is expanding into other areas. Of interest to virtualization admins, it recommends good candidates for server consolidation with Virtual Server and Hyper-V. According to a blog posting, it can now give advice on good candidates for App-V, Microsoft's application virtualization product formerly known as SoftGrid.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/16/20085 comments
It's been awhile since I went computer shopping, so I was in for a surprise when I started looking around for a new laptop.
First, some background. I'm a confirmed Macophile, and love my three-year-old dual-core Intel MacBook Pro to death. It's my main work machine, and has never let me down. But I needed another laptop, and for various reasons, decided to go with Windows Vista. One big factor was that I wanted a machine with lots of power and RAM to run serious virtualization. It needed to have at minimum a dual-core proc, 4GB RAM and 200GB hard drive. And, most importantly, fit into my limited budget.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/16/200814 comments
I just came across an annoyance that might seem small to some, but to others looms larger. I recently bought a 64-bit Windows Vista laptop (HP Pavilion, if you're curious -- great deal at Best Buy for a dual-core Intel, 4GB RAM machine). One of my primary reasons for the purchase was virtualization. All that RAM and dual-core (along with a decent sized hard drive) means I should have lots of room for loading virtual machines (VMs).
One other thing I was looking forward to was running VMware's virtual infrastructure client on it. But alas, it's not to be. That's because VI 2.5 (the latest version) doesn't work on 64-bit OSes.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/16/20083 comments
Alessandro over at Virtualization.info brought a valuable link to my attention: A VMware
comparison
of ESX, its flagship hypervisor, and ESXi, its stripped-down, embeddable cousin.
A table at the bottom of the page reveals in stark detail the big differences between the two. For instance, ESXi lacks many key ESX features like Update Manager, VMotion, Storage VMotion, high availability, and a lot of other technologies. In reality, you can't do much with ESXi except create virtual machines. If that's all you need to do, ESXi will do the job; if your requirements go beyond that, you're looking at upgrading to some version of VMware Infrastructure, which includes ESX.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/14/20088 comments
Brian Madden has a fascinating
post
up about VMware's upcoming
bare-metal client hypervisor
. Few details have yet been released about
it, and Brian does a great job examining all the various angles.
Not
much was released about the client hypervisor at VMworld, and VMware has
been tight-lipped about development -- CTO Stephen Herrod made a quick
mention of it during his Wednesday keynote, but no shipping date has been
announced, and we don't know much more about it than the project
exists.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/13/20080 comments
Here's an interesting
story
about an Australian IT shop that wanted to get virtual. First the company looked at VMware, then Microsoft. It ultimately choose the Microsoft stack, and the key reason was price. The IT manager of the company, according to the article, said something revealing:
"You've got to question whether it's worth paying $50,000 for that. I know the VMware camp go on about features like VMotion, but for $50,000 I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/10/20086 comments
There's an interesting
article
on VMware CEO Paul Maritz on this website, giving some background on his South African roots. It's nothing earth-shattering, but does give some insight into who Maritz is. My favorite quote, talking about his travel back home after leaving Microsoft:
"I did this for a couple of years after leaving Microsoft but you realise after a while you are not the next great novelist or opera singer, or, even worse, you're a computer guy and you may as well get used to it."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/10/20082 comments
I feel like I've been doing this too much lately, but I need to apologize again for the scarcity of my blogging lately. For the last couple of weeks, it was print magazine deadlines. More recently, it was another college visitation roadtrip with my daughter April, who's deep in the midst of trying to pick a school. This last trip was to a college in Indiana, about an 11-hour trip from our home in north-central Maryland.
The best thing about the trip, other than spending serious quality time with my daughter? My iPhone and its GPS capabilities. I'm a pretty serious iPhone addict now, and this trip further cemented my standing as a Steve Jobs fanboy. I got a windshield mount for my car, plugged the phone into the cigarette lighter with an adapter, and let it guide me all the way there. Worked fantastic, except for a few minutes when I lost signal. It was truly a revelation (you listening, Tom?)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/09/20081 comments
If you're a vendor with a virtualization product, this blog's for you. We're putting together our inaugural Buyer's Guide, and would like to feature you and your company. But you have to help us. There's a form on this Web site to fill out. Do that ASAP, to ensure readers know who you are and what you offer.
Products are broken out by category. Find the best fit, and tell us about your offering. The Guide is coming out in November, so time's a-wastin'. I would like this to be as complete as possible, and a one-stop resource for readers. To make it that, we need your help.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/03/20081 comments