I recently
blogged
about the issue of "NIC teaming", also known as "NIC bonding", and the fact that it's allegedly missing from Hyper-V. Virtualization blogger Scott Lowe originally reported this, and we have confirmed that it is not a feature of Microsoft's new hypervisor. Here's the response, from Microsoft's Robb Mapp:
"NIC Teaming is a capability provided by our hardware partners such Intel and Broadcom. Microsoft supports our partners who provide this capability. This is true whether the customer is running Windows, Exchange, SQL Hyper-V, etc.
We'll have a detailed KB article about this coming out soon."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/18/20089 comments
A blog reader recently brought this
Microsoft policy
to our attention. It has to do with support for its products running in non-Microsoft virtualization software, e.g. Virtual Server 2005 and the upcoming Hyper-V. The key sentence is this:
"Microsoft does not test or support Microsoft software running together with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/17/20085 comments
There's no doubt that the word "virtualization" is a mouthful, so nicknames are invariably going to happen. In fact, the URL for this Website is horribly long; but in the age of URL hoarding, the choices for pithy URLs are shrinking. In the magazine, we call virtual machines "VMs", and internally, the magazine is usually designated "VRM" to save on hand cramps.
Microsoft has gone the same route, shortening, for example, "Virtual Machine Manager 2008" to "VMM 2008" in most instances. And, of course, there's Hyper-V, probably Microsoft's most cool product name ever. "Hyper-V" is just fun to say. Now, Microsoft has shortened another hideously long product name, and given it strong echoes of Hyper-V. Microsoft Application Virtualization will informally be known as "App-V", a name that's sure to stick; I know that's how I'll always refer to it on second reference henceforth.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/17/20080 comments
So your soon to be ex-junior administrator, who was watching
"Trapped in the Drive-Thru"
rather than paying attention to his job, accidentally reformatted an important RAID drive, containing lots of mission-critical data. And guess what -- the backups, which you check about every other year, are corrupt.
No problem, say you -- just send it out to your data recovery vendor. But your heart sinks when you check the disks in that RAID and find that they were VMFS disks; the VMware file system. Your vendor doesn't do recovery of VMFS volumes. You make some calls; no one else seems to, either.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/13/20082 comments
Blogger
Scott Lowe
is doing some fantastic work at Tech-Ed this week, covering the virtualization-related sessions. Very enlightening, informative stuff.
He's also uncovered what he sees as a big potential problem with Hyper-V: the lack of NIC bonding. NIC bonding, also known as "NIC teaming," "port teaming" and other names, means to link two NICs so they appear as one device, increasing their speed and redundancy.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/12/20085 comments
Microsoft has issued an update for the ungainly-named System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The last beta of VMM 2008 was
released
April 29, and this minor upgrade essentially adds one thing: support for Hyper-V RC1, which was previously
missing
. That meant you had to work with RC0 if you wanted to use both products together.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/11/20080 comments
Security company Tripwire has released a limited, but very useful,
utility
for checking the security of VMware's ESX hypervisor. Best of all, it's free.
The tool, ConfigCheck, looks for vulnerabilities in ESX, the kind that generally occur through misconfiguration of a server. The svelte, 11 MB download makes it easy to set up and try. After running the program, it compares data with VMware's published security guidelines and alerts admins if there's a problem.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/11/20082 comments
VMware has updated a number of important products in the last week; no major changes, but worth knowing about.
Most exciting from my point of view is the first VMware-guided release of the product formerly known as Thinstall, before the company was bought by VMware in January. ThinApp 4 plugs a hole in the VMware's product line, providing application virtualization. A virtualized application is encapsulated and isolated, making it unlikely to cause conflicts with other apps on a server or desktop.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/10/20085 comments
Hi gang,
Our second print issue is on the streets; those of you with subscriptions should have your copies by now. For others, I wanted to give you a rundown on some of my favorite stuff (we put all the print copy online).
If you're considering ESXi, VMware's embedded hypervisor, you'll definitely want to check out this myth-busting article by Andrew Kutz. He pops the hype bubble surrounding ESXi. He likes ESXi -- a lot, in fact -- but it's not exactly on a par with flight as a history-changing technology.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/09/20080 comments
A number of core VMware products have earned the highest security rating possible from the
Common Criteria
security evaluation. According to a VMware
press release
, VMI 3, ESX and VirtualCenter have earned Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4+).
EAL is a substantive certification, and EAL4+ is its highest rating. That's good news for VMware, since virtualization security is a growing concern for businesses as the technology moves into the mainstream.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/04/20080 comments
Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix and former head of XenSource, responded via e-mail to several recent
blog entries
of mine regarding the new trademark policy surrounding Xen. He thinks I'm off base and wants to give the Citrix take on the issue. As always, his comments are worth reading. Here they are, reproduced verbatim:
"1. The new TM policy is approved by the Xen Advisory board, not just Citrix. That's Intel, Red Hat, Novell, Sun, IBM and Citrix.
2. It was available for community comment for a substantial period, and all of that feedback was used in the final version.
3. We are in the unfortunate position that for our commercial product is named XenServer. So any other XenABC risks confusion. We therefore requested the community to respect that, and I've seen no negative response. Importantly all of the other Xen based products are named differently today, so there is no incumbent competitive issue.
So it's not "Hands off" but "hands on, go for it" with clarification as requested by the community. The AB has done a good job here"
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/04/20080 comments
Microsoft continues to embrace interoperability when it comes to virtualization technologies -- at least when it comes to Xen. The virtualization team, in a
blog posting
, announced that the the "Interop Vendor Alliance" took a trip to Redmond to try out a number of virt products and how well they play together.
The products -- Citrix XenServer, Novell XEN Virtual Server and Sun xVM -- were installed, along with Hyper-V RC1, on servers in the Microsoft Partner lab. Of course, the notable omission here is VMware. That makes sense for competitive purposes, since Microsoft and Citrix have ganged up against VMware. For users of VMware who would like to know if they can use pieces of Hyper-V or Xen in their environments, it won't have much value.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 06/04/20080 comments