VirtInfo: Short Takes
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008Here’s a weekly round up on interesting issues concerning virtualization…
EMC has no intention of Selling VMware:
In an interview with Joe Tucci the CEO of EMC. It was made clear that EMC has no intention of selling or spining-off VMware. This should NOT come as a shock, after all while sell off a company who is growing and who’s share price probably doesn’t reflect its value – but reflects more the volitile econmic climate. I guess this will only fuel speculation about Dianne Greene’s departure. The full interview is here on silconrepublic.com
Virtual Infrastructure Toolkit for Windows 1.0 (AKA PowerShell for VMware) is released:
I’ve been playing about with the beta of VMware PowerShell Toolkit (how’s that for conflating off terms) for sometime, together with the Community Technical Preview of Microsoft version 2.0 of PowerShell. I’m no scripter myself, and all those squerly brackets and pipe symbols | can send you a bit dizzy. But so far I’ve been impressed, enough to blog about and include it in my SRM book. What I like about it is how you can do certain “bulk admin” tasks that currently are not available in VirtualCenter…
http://www.vmware.com/sdk/vitk_win/index.html
Veeam’s New Backup Tool hits the streets:
Well, if you a fan of Reporter and FastSCP then this might be worth checking out too. It’s not exactly “new” as such – this is Veeam’s second release. Veeam’s backup is bit unique in that includes both backup and replication in a single bundle. There’s a demo, an eval and even a live demo with engineer if your really interested
http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html
Virtualizatio Congress – London – 14th-16th October
Over on virtualization.info, Alessandro Perilli has rather impressively put together a conferrence to rival VMworld! I’m hoping to attend this first ever Virtualization Congress – not least because its on my patch (not that I live in London!). I hope my schedule allows me to do so.
http://www.virtualization.info/virtualizationcongress2008/index.htm
Chris Woolf Review HyperV for Redmond Magazine:
Chris Woolf has written a review of HyperV. A couple of months ago I predicted a perfect storm of FUD would hit the internet on the release of HyperV – I wasn’t wrong. With claim and counter claim made by all parts (VMware Vs Microsoft) sometimes it feels like an acrominious divorce of a couple who were never actually married. Personally, I’m already tired of the whole VMware Vs Microsoft, and I think I will reserve my limited resources to doing what I’m good – rather than trying to counter-act a wall of FUD. Anyway, I don’t agree at all times with Chris assessment, but I respect the guy – and I think its about as fair/balanced assessement as you will get outside of vmware.com or microsoft.com
http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?editorialsid=2528
So ESX3i is free – Yippee – What’s ESX3i:
Well, with all the news about the hypervisor being a commodity – now the dust has settled you might be asking yourself – this is great news, but I know very little about ESX3i. You do no harm to your braincells by visiting the VMTM blog which has a podcast and round up of ESX 3i resources.
http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/07/esxi-is-where-i.html
- see also http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/07/still-wondering.html
Just to remind you – I was one of the first to release a guide on ESX3i (LAST YEAR!!!) just after the gagging order which is NDA and Beta Programmes was lifted.
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=7
I’ve not reviewed the guide for sometime. But now it’s free, I think when I get time I will update it and chuck in some proper coverage of the RCLI and how to manage ESX3i with PowerShell via VirtualCenter. I’m thinking once I’ve got this batch of development out of the way, I’m going to stop install ESX 3.5, and force myself to use ESX3i instead. This week I had my first students/customers who going down the ESX3i only route. It’s the shape of things to come my COS friends 
A bunch of hosting companies come out in favour of HyperV on the Microsoft Website:
I don’t about you – but I honestly find this kind of info-merical stuff a bit nausea inducing. I’m afraid not one day goes by with vmware.com or microsoft.com have some yawn inducing customer-testimonial appearing on their websites. Personally, I find them a bit tedious and suspect. I’m always wondering what kind of quid-pro quo was arranged in exchanged for some call independent glowing referrence. That’s what makes these stuff really smell. I don’t people saying something is good – but when there absolute no problems at all – you learn nothing. Worst of all it sounds like the worst kind brown-nose fawning. All together dancing monkey style “I LOVE THIS COMPANY” (I even spraned my ankle to show it!)
This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about
VMware Infrastructure Has Eliminated Unplanned Application Downtime, Strengthens Resiliency for United Bancorp
Guest Post: Going Live with Hyper-V for myhosting.com
Guest Post: Why Microsoft and Hyper-V for HostBasket
This last blog post is a total hoot to read. I has comments like
“We have been investigating virtualization technologies such as Xen, VMWare and Virtuozzo, but always found problems (such as security-issues, complex and expensive licensing, stability or scalability) that kept us from creating a virtual machine-offer.”
and
“We opted not to use the term “Virtual servers” for our offer, because a “virtual server” implies less value for money than a dedicated server. Also, “Virtual servers” are often associated with cheap solutions based on Parallels Virtuozzo.”
and
“Our solutions based on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V provide more functionality (like snapshotting, easy installation, flexible upgrading), are more secure and stable and have a features that guarantee a higher uptime than dedicated servers.”
Well, you know what the hosting company that act my colocation for all my dev hardware. They do virtualization. They don’t use VMware, they find it too expensive. But they don’t use HyperV either. They use VirtualIron which as a hypervisor totally fits there needs. It’s hard to wonder what “security” needs HyperV addresses that either ESX or some hypervisor cannot offer. Unless you like rebooting your hypervisor whenever there’s patch Tuesday, and “Obama” needs adding to the MS Dictionary!
VOOOM! – Release DRS Whitepaper
There’s a suprising small amount of really techical information about DRS. The clever little folks at VMware do want to keep the competition in the dark after all. Nonetheless, the people at VOOOM! (VMware’s performance blog) have written a white paper about DRS which is well worry looking at.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/drs_performance_best_practices_wp.pdf
I recently bought a new car – a black roadster coupe it’s a Mazda MX5 2.1 Litre (I see it as my first consession to my on-coming mid-life crisis), I think if they could get away with the could call the blog – Zoom Zoom Zoom. Of course, all me mates say I have “hairdressers car”, but its just because they are jealous. All the girls think its cute and sexy. I ain’t saying nuthin’. 
More VirtInfo: Short Takes next week – have a good weekend – Mike
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