There seems to be some speculation out there that Microsoft may be gearing up to go mano-a-mano with Google Docs. You may already know that it is possible to use Microsoft Office 2007 in an App-V environment. But, is Microsoft trying to position this technology to the general public (SaaS)? Possibly. According to some recent posts on virtualization.info, that may (or may not) be Microsoft’s goal. The evidence presented includes some new Office license agreements, and some interesting verbiage on a recent job posting. Plus, Microsoft and Google have been competitors for a while now. I’m not convinced yet that this is pointing to a straight up competition with Google Docs. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what comes of these developments.

Continue at source…

Technorati : App-V, Google, Office 2007, SaaS, Virtualization
Del.icio.us : App-V, Google, Office 2007, SaaS, Virtualization
Ice Rocket : App-V, Google, Office 2007, SaaS, Virtualization

Usually when people set up Microsoft SoftGrid App-V, one of the first applications they try to virtualize is Office. I must admit that I am guilty of this too. As it turns out, Office isn’t exactly the easiest of applications to sequence (or virtualize). This isn’t to say the Office won’t work in the App-V environment - quite the contrary. However, getting to that point can take some work. Luckily, J.C. Hornbeck has posted a blog entry on the App-V blog detailing how to sequence Office 2007 in 30 easy steps. Yep, that’s right - I said 30 steps. Whether virtualizing Office is a good idea or not is still up for debate (considering the number of applications that have dependencies on Office. Yes, I know there is dynamic suiting in App-V now - but that is a discussion for another day).

Continue at source…

Technorati : App-V, Application Virtualization, Office 2007, SoftGrid
Del.icio.us : App-V, Application Virtualization, Office 2007, SoftGrid
Ice Rocket : App-V, Application Virtualization, Office 2007, SoftGrid

Usually when someone mentions the word agnosticism, they are talking religion. It isn’t always a good idea to talk about politics or religion, so we are going to talk about hypervisor agnosticism. Hypervisor agnosticism is the idea that the customer does not care about which hypervisor they use in an environment since the hypervisor is becoming more of a commodity. There is even talk about hypervisors being built into the BIOS. Citrix is trying to re-focus on making virtual applications run more efficiently on the microkernel-based hypervisor as well as making “virtual workloads” portable. This is where Project Kensho comes in. Citrix states that “…Project Kensho will enable ISVs and enterprise IT staff to leverage a hypervisor-independent portable virtual machine format that packages a complete application workload as a secure, portable, pre-configured open standard virtual appliance. This will solve a multitude of interoperability issues between virtualization platforms while allowing automated provisioning and management of applications, rather than just virtual machines… These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments. ” Unfortunately there are no public betas out yet, but it will be cool to see as this project materializes.

Check out CIO’s write up on this technology to get some more information.

Technorati : Citrix, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, VMWare, Virtualization
Del.icio.us : Citrix, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, VMWare, Virtualization
Ice Rocket : Citrix, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, VMWare, Virtualization

Charles Torre from Microsoft Channel 9 recently sat down with Simon Crosby of Citrix to talk about machine virtualization. I must say that the short 30 minute interview is jam packed with some great information. Simon delivers a great deal of information about how hypervisors work (both bare metal and hosted). Simon also clues you in on some of the partner/competitor relationship works with Microsoft and Citrix (hint: it sounds an awful lot like one of Brian Madden’s predictions). There is some information about the similarities and differences between Xen, Hyper-V, and VMWare too. There is something for everyone in this video.

Continue at source…

Technorati : Citrix, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, VDI, VMWare, Virtualization, Xen
Del.icio.us : Citrix, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, VDI, VMWare, Virtualization, Xen
Ice Rocket : Citrix, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, VDI, VMWare, Virtualization, Xen

Microsoft recently released Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s bare metal hypervisor. It is important to note that if you want to use Hyper-V, there are some limitations. For instance, you must use 64 bit hardware with Hardware-assisted virtualization. Also, you must enable Data Execution Protection (DEP) - this is called the XD bit for Intel or the NX bit for AMD. Keep in mind that you can run 32 bit or 64 bit VMs (th 64 bit limitation is only for the host hardware). Besides hardware configurations, there are some maximum limits on memory, processors, networking, physical storage, virtual hard disks, virtual storage controllers, virtual storage, virtual CD/DVD drives, virtual Serial (COM) ports, virtual floppy drives, the number of concurrent running VMs, and the number of configured VMs.

Nick MacKechnie has put together a fantastic list detailing all of the maximum supported configuration for Hyper-V. Nick’s list can be found on his blog on MSDN…

Technorati : Hardware Virtualization, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, Server 2008
Del.icio.us : Hardware Virtualization, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, Server 2008
Ice Rocket : Hardware Virtualization, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, Server 2008

Microsoft TechNet has two “new” blogs surrounding “virtualization” technologies. You may have noticed some quotes in the previous sentence. No - those quotes are not extraneous - they are there for a reason.

First, there is a “new” App-V (formerly SoftGrid) blog. The reason this blog is “new” is because only the name has changed. It used to be called “The SoftGrid Team Blog.” Still, there is some crazy good information there.

Second, there is a new “virtualization” technology blog for the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). This is a new blog, but isn’t totally centered on vitalization. However, since SoftGrid App-V is part of the MDOP, it will have some virtualization posts. There should be posts about Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM), Asset Inventory Service (AIS), Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset (DaRT), Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM) and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) too. So, stay tuned…

Technorati : App-V, MDOP, Microsoft, SoftGrid, Virtualization
Del.icio.us : App-V, MDOP, Microsoft, SoftGrid, Virtualization
Ice Rocket : App-V, MDOP, Microsoft, SoftGrid, Virtualization

Marathon makes a bunch of cool software for physical and virtual servers. One of their product lines offers High Availability (HA) for virtual servers called everRun VM. everRun VM comes in 3 flavors and one of those flavors (basic failover) is now built in to Citrix XenServer 4.2 - for free. Here are the different levels of everRun VM:

Basic Failover/HA (will be included in XenServer 4.2)

• Heartbeat between hosts
• Restarts VMs on different host in the event of a failure
• Non-critical IT Infrastructure where some downtime is acceptable

Steve Huisman gives a good overview of the other levels of everRun VM at virtualfuture.info.

“Level 2: component-level fault tolerance (available now) Creates a virtual machine on top of 2 other virtual machines. The Marathon-VM runs on 1 virtual machine and synchronizes IO to the other virtual machine. If, for example, the disk fails in one virtual machine, the disk in the other virtual machine will take over.

Level 3: System-level tolerance (available Q4 2008) Protects VMs against any type of failure and maintains the applications and memory in their pre-failure state.”

One of the really cool things about this technology is that it enables fault tolerance between geographically disperse locations. So, VMs can fail over to DR centers “automagically”.

Technorati : Citrix, High Availability, Marathon, Virtual Server, Virtualization, XenServer
Del.icio.us : Citrix, High Availability, Marathon, Virtual Server, Virtualization, XenServer
Ice Rocket : Citrix, High Availability, Marathon, Virtual Server, Virtualization, XenServer

There are a ton of new features in Microsoft Windows Server 2008. Two of those features are cluster improvements and Hyper-V (Microsoft’s bare metal hypervisor). One of the big advantages to using virtual machines in an environment is high availability and fail over. Usually when you are talking about these topics, one of the requirements is some type of shared storage such as iSCSI of Fiber Channel. Guess what? It is possible to have Hyper-V fail-over using just clustering and a file share (no shared storage necessary). Sounds crazy I know, but Jose Barreto has posted a very detailed article (with lots of screen shots) on how to do just that. It actually only involves about 5 steps:

1. Validate the configuration
2. Create the cluster
3. Adjust the quorum configuration
4. Create the virtual machine in one of the nodes
5. Make the VM highly available

Continue at source…

Technorati : Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, Virtual Machine, Virtualizaton
Del.icio.us : Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, Virtual Machine, Virtualizaton
Ice Rocket : Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, Virtual Machine, Virtualizaton

One of the topics on Microsoft’s Channel 9 video website is called “Going Deep“. Recently John Sheehan, the primary architect of SoftGrid, sat down with Charles Torre (host of Going Deep) to discuss Microsoft Application Virtualization (or App-V). In this video, John explains basic concepts of SoftGrid, sequencing applications, OS Guard (or as John likes to call it - “lying to the application”), etc. This is a great video to watch to get the concept of SoftGrid as well as some of the “under the hood” workings of Application Virtualization.

Continue at source…

Technorati : Application Virtualization, Microsoft App-V, SoftGrid, Video
Del.icio.us : Application Virtualization, Microsoft App-V, SoftGrid, Video
Ice Rocket : Application Virtualization, Microsoft App-V, SoftGrid, Video

Virtualization.info is reporting that VMWare recently announced on an earnings call that VMWare ESX 3i will be released for free.

“During the Q2 2008 earnings call the company announced that before the end of July (the planned date is July 28) it will release the Update 2 for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and that will give away the lightweight edition of the product, ESX 3i, for free.”

So, what if you already bought ESX 3i from the online store? You get a rebate. “The customers that purchased the current version of ESX 3i directly from the VMware online store will be eligible for a rebate.”

It seems this move is to counteract pressures from Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer express, as well as slumping stock prices.

Continue at source…

Technorati : ESX, Hypervisor, VMWare, Virtualization
Del.icio.us : ESX, Hypervisor, VMWare, Virtualization
Ice Rocket : ESX, Hypervisor, VMWare, Virtualization