Last year, VMware released its light weight ESXi hypervisor for free. So, what are some of the differences between ESX and ESXi? David Sumsky compiled a few differences in his blog. Some of the differences noted include:

• ESXi is supported on a smaller set of certified hardware than ESX
• ESX can be managed via serial cable - ESXi cannot
• ESXi does not support Jumbo Frames
• ESXi does not support NetQueue (10G Ethernet)
• ESXi does support all VMware Infrastructure features (license required) such as vMotion, schedule resources, backup, etc.
• Annual support is not required (you can pay per incident if necessary)
• There is not service console in ESXi
• ESXi only requires 32MB free disk space (making it easy to install on solid state like USB)
• There is no Virtual Center agent in ESXi
• SSH access is not supported by default. Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI) is the default.

Continue at source…

Technorati : ESX, ESXi, Hypervisor, VMware, Virtual Center
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While reading the Realtime Community Windows Server website the other day, I discovered an article that led to a really cool feature comparison matrix of various virtualization vendors compiled by the IT 2.0 blog. This comparison chart has well over 100 categories and compares the features of VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, VirtualIron, Suse/Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, and Parallels. The chart is a little hard to read on the website due to the amount of horizontal scrolling (even spanning my monitors). But, the information is valuable.

Continue at source…

Technorati : Citrix, Compariason Chart, Microsoft, VMware, VirtualIron, Virtualization
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Virtualization.info conducted a survey last year about the use of virtualization technologies and the companies that use these technologies. Over 1000 responses make up the survey, and the results are published on the virtualization.info website. There is one surprising/controversial result concerning platform adoption. The specific question was worded as “what hardware virtualization platform do you implement?”. The results are graphed below:

Image source: virtualization.info

This makes it look like Hyper-V has more adoption than ESX. But, keep in mind that this was a multiple choice question. So, someone answering the survey could have many ESX servers and maybe 1 or 2 Hyper-V servers.

Continue at source…

More details on the survey can be found here…

Technorati : ESX, Hyper-V, VMware, Virtualization
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Curious about VMware View 3? Roland van der Kruk recently wrote a 3 part series about “…new features of VMware View 3, as well as best practices learned while doing a deployment for a customer.” This series can be found on BrianMadden.com.

Part 1 of this series is an overview of the VMware View 3 components and terminology including:

• View Connection Server
• View Replica Server
• View Security Server
• View Portal
• View Composer
• View Agent
• etc.

Part 2 of the series goes in to detail about Linked Clones.

Part 3 focuses on special considerations and best practices for deployment.

Be sure to check out the VMware View 3 resources on VirtualizationAdmin.com…

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Ruben Spruijt of PQR and Joren van de Kamp of Login Consultants have announce a joint venture called Project Virtual Reality Check.

“Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is a joint venture of Log•in Consultants and PQR, who have researched the optimal configuration for the different available hypervisors (hardware virtualization layers). The project arises from the growing demand for a founded advice on how to virtualise Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads. Through a number of researches, Log•in Consultants and PQR show you the scaling possibilities for Terminal Server environments as well as Virtual Desktops.”

Ruben states “…the goal of Project VRC is to investigate, validate, and find answers to the following questions:

• How do various Microsoft Windows Client OSes scale when used for virtual desktops?
• How does a VDI infrastructure scale in comparison to (virtualized) Terminal Server?
• Which performance optimization on the host and guest virtualization level can be configured, and what is the impact of these settings on user density?
• With the introduction of the latest hypervisor technologies, can we now recommend running large-scale Terminal Server or Citrix workloads on a virtualization platform?
• What is the performance impact of adding Citrix XenApp to Terminal Server?
• How do x86 (32-bit) and x64 TS platforms compare in scalability on bare metal and virtualized environments?
• What is the best way to partition (memory and vCPU) the Virtual Machines and the hypervisor host to achieve the highest possible user density?”

I must say, this is an incredible resource. Obviously, A LOT of time and effort has been put in to these whitepapers. Each whitepaper is very transparent - meaning they give you machine configurations, application configurations, test scripts, graphed results, etc.

Continue at www.virtualrealitycheck.net…

Technorati : ESX, Hyper-V, Terminal Services, VDI, VMware, Xen, XenServer
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It looks like Google has ambitions of being a major player in providing infrastructure for “the cloud” for desktops. This report vaguely details some of Google’s ambitions with GDrive. Google GDrive (rumored to come out later this year) is basically an online storage facility. So, online storage isn’t really “the cloud” - right? That’s right, but with Google releasing Android, there could be more to the story. Google already has Google Docs, and GMail. Is a cloud OS next? Google is being pretty vague about this too. Dave Armstrong, head of product and marketing for Google Enterprise, said: “There’s a clear direction … away from people thinking, ‘This is my PC, this is my hard drive,’ to ‘This is how I interact with information, this is how I interact with the web.’” I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

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Citrix and Intel announced that they will be partnering up to bring a client-side bare metal hypervisor to reality. “Under an agreement with Intel Corporation, Citrix plans to produce a new class of virtualization solutions that optimize the delivery of applications and desktops to millions of Intel Core2 and Centrino 2 processor-based devices, dramatically reducing the cost of desktop management. The first-of-its-kind hypervisor-based virtualization solution will bring both mobile and office users the benefits of centralized desktop virtualization with a rich, personalized PC environment”

This partnership is make Citrix’s “Project Independence” possible which focuses on local virtual desktops. Citrix is making 5 predictions with Project Independence:

1. Your company will no longer own your laptop (go ahead, buy that cool new computer)
2. Your company will spend more on coffee and office supplies than it does on desktop management
3. You will access your corporate desktop from whatever device is most convenient at the time (just like you do with email today)
4. You will switch back and forth between work and personal desktops on the same device, without thinking twice
5. You will never complain about your PC being too slow again

Be sure to read Brian Madden’s analysis on this announcement as well…

Technorati : Bare Metal Hypervisor, Citrix, Intel, Project Independence, VDI
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Joel Stocker created a cool web-based XenServer management tool called XenCenterWeb. Joel describes XenCenterWeb as “…a web interface for (partial) management of a Citrix XenServer environment. Users of XenCenterWeb will be able to see a list of Virtual Machines in the Resource Pool (optionally a restricted list based on the user logging in), perform life-cycle actions (start, shutdown, restart, etc.), get basic information about the hosts in the Resource Pools, information about the VMs and also connect to the console of the VMs.”

Two things I find really cool about this is 1) delegated administration, and 2) this thing is just a virtual appliance. Just download the VM, add it to your XenServer environment, and off you go…

Continue at source…

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Microsoft recently announced improvements that would be available in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2. Just last week, Microsoft released the first public beta of Windows Server 2008 R2 with all the “bells and whistles” promised for Hyper-V 2.0. Not only the promised features made it, but a few others made it as well (as pointed out by Virtualization.info):

• Live Migration
• Virtual disks hot plug
• Support for 32 logical processors
• Support for Second Level Address Translation or SLAT (usually known as Nested Page Tables or NPT)
• Support for TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) and Jumbo Frames
• Extended PowerShell support (with 240 new cmdlets for hard core scripting)
• CPU Core Parking

Along with these new Hyper-V improvements, Microsoft is stepping in to the VDI market as well with its own connection broker that is part of the R2 beta as well.

Continue at source…

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