VMware recently released VMware Go. VMware Go™ is a free web-based service that will enable SMB customers to fly through the ESXi setup process with just a few mouse clicks. The award-winning VMware ESXi is the industry’s most widely deployed hypervisor, with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. VMware ESXi, also available for free, allows companies to reduce overhead and simplify business operations by running multiple operating systems and applications on a single server, spending less money on hardware, power and cooling, and server administration. VMware ESXi together with VMware Go is an on-ramp for companies new to virtualization, especially small businesses who may not think they have the time or budget to get started.
VMworld 2009 is going on this week and there will be lots of advanced technology announcements. But, what if you are just getting your feet wet with this whole virtualization thing? Tom Finnis wrote a nice introduction to VMware vShpere 4 that highlights the core technologies. Tom covers:
Virtualization Terminology
Datacenters
Clusters
Hosts
Hypervisor
Resource Pool
Virtualization fundamental concepts
Advanced Virtualization functionality
VM Migration
High Availability
Fault Tolerance
and more…
This article does a good job of hitting the highlights and is a good starting point to understand VMware vShpere 4.
Traditionally, presenting 3D graphics over a display protocol such as ICA or RDP has been a challenge. There are some protocols (ICE, PC-over-IP, ICA) that do quite a good job of this over the LAN where bandwidth is plentiful, but WAN is still an issue… until now. Citrix just announced HDX 3D for XenDesktop. HDX (High Definition Extensions) 3D uses the power of a graphics card on the host to render 3D processing and optimize/deliver the results to the client. There are some “gotchas” to this architecture like the host machine has to physical hardware (no VMs), and the host machine also needs CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPU. However, this technology is included free in XenDesktop (Advanced and above).
Check out the HDX 3D website here for more information and demonstrations…
Amazon has extended their EC2 cloud computing with Virtual Private Clouds (VPC). VPC allows you to create logical instances of isolated (private) EC2 instances and connect them to your existing network using an IPSec VPN tunnel. This bridges the gap between internal infrastructure and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - or cloud infrastructure.
On the Microsoft Showcase site, a new video is posted explaining the architecture of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. This is a short video and explains how Hyper-V works, the separation of User Mode and Kernel Mode, and what happens to the OS when you enable the Hyper-V role.
VMware recently bought SpringSource. We all know who VMware is, but you may not know who SpringSource is. SpringSource coins themselves as “The Enterprise Java Cloud”. Looking closer, SpringSource is a Java development platform. Actually, about half of new software development using the Java language is done using SrpingSource’s tools.
So, how does SpringSource fit in to the VMware ecosystem? That’s a good question. It will be interesting to see how VMware positions this. Oh yeah - VMware paid $420 million ($362 in cash and %58 million in stock and options) for SpringSource! That is almost on the same scale of the $500 million Citrix paid for XenSource.
Not all hypervisors work the same. For instance, some hypervisors require a certain chip set - others do not. Even more differences are being seen in the upcoming client hypervisor market. Brian Madden put together a nice article explaining some of these different technologies present in client hypervisors. He groups the technologies into 3 groups:
Emulation
Paravirtualization
Hardware pass-through
The article goes on to explain what each technology is as well as advantages/disadvantages of each. This is a great read to get up to speed on what is coming down the pipeline with client hypervisors.
The people over at Techhead put together a nice list of VMware tools. Most of the tools are completely free (all of them may be free - I didn’t have a chance to check out the entire list, but the tools I did check out were 100% free!). This is an ever growing list broken down in to categories including:
Hot off the ePress is a new eBook all about Microsoft’s virtualization solutions. This book will teach you about the benefits of the latest virtualization technologies and how to plan, implement, and manage virtual infrastructure solutions. The technologies covered include: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5, Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, and Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
