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Tuesday, 16 September 2008 08:02 |
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XenServer 5 Has Arrived (130 new features). This is most significant launch of XenServer(130 additional features). Read about what's new: http://www.xenserver5.com/whatsnew.php |
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Thursday, 11 September 2008 08:03 |
Microsoft has released Application Virtualization (App-V) version 4.5 to manufacturing. Formerly known as SoftGrid, App-V 4.5, App-V 4.5 is the first Microsoft-branded release of the product.
More information on Microsoft web page or Microsoft blog…
APP-V (Softgrid) Official web page |
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Tuesday, 09 September 2008 17:50 |
Microsoft Finally details Standalone Hyper-V. Monday, at a Microsoft Virtualization event in Bellevue, Washington, Microsoft annonced a few interesting virtualization news. The company showed off some live migration features of Windows Server 2008 R2 (R2 should be released next year).
The most exciting news, is about Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. Microsoft said that it would sell this product for $28, but on Monday the company announced that it would be given for free and will be available as a Web download. Keep in mind that like VMware's ESX solution, Hyper-V Server 2008 is a "bare metal".
With Hyper-V Server 2008, Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor is installed in the parent partition, and it provides just the bare essentials required for booting the system, providing hypervisor services, and exposing the management interfaice necessary for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. It's NOT Server Core. It's much less than that: At boot time, you'll be prompted from a command line interface to configure some basic configuration options. But management occurs from the free Hyper-V management console (on Vista or Server 2008) or System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.
Microsoft says the performance characteristics of Server 2008 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008 are identical. But this version of the product has a few differences. It's limited to four physical processors and 32GB of RAM. There is no clustering support.
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Tuesday, 26 August 2008 15:39 |
On September 8th, 2008 Microsoft will launch its new virtualization products.
Attend this free summit on Microsoft® Virtualization Products and Practices and INCREASE your productivity!
Find out how Windows Server 2008® with Hyper-V™, Microsoft System Center - including Virtual Machine Manager 2008 - and Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization allow you to deploy, manage and get VIRTUAL now like never before. |
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Monday, 25 August 2008 00:00 |
If you want to work / test / learn many of the VMware ESX Server advanced features, like VMotion, VMware High Availability (VMHA), and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), you should have SAN (Storage Area Network).
For my Home Lab I'm using OpenFiler. You can find a very good Step-By-Step tutorial about OpenFiler at well know Petri.co.il web site. Article by David Davis - "Use OpenFiler as your Free VMware ESX SAN Server"
I just want to add one small part to this tutorial. I think it's not the best idea to use IP address from DHCP on Server, a specially on SAN :). So, I've configured my SAN to use static IP. Here is how to do that:
Logon to the OpenFiler console as a root.
Run "vi /etc/sysconfig/network" and make the following changes:
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=net-nas-01.admininfo.local
GATEWAY=192.168.1.1
Run "vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0" and make the following changes:
DEVICE=eth0
IPADDR=192.168.1.15
BOOTPROTO=static
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.1.0
GATEWAY=192.168.1.1
BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
ONBOOT=yes
Go and modify the hosts file. To modify the hosts file run this command "vi /etc/hosts" and make sure the FQDN names for 127.0.0.1 and the static IP address are set correct.
127.0.0.1 net-nas-01.admininfo.local
192.168.1.15 net-nas-01.admininfo.local
For more information go to Openfiler website |
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Sunday, 24 August 2008 10:24 |
As result of battle between Microsoft and VMWare (for place on Virtualization market), VMWare announced that a new VMWARE ESXi server became FREE.
This news generated a lot of interest and many people started to try install VMWARE ESXi on VMWARE Workstation, just to see it and learn.
By little Googling you will find a lot of sites, where explained how to run ESX 3.0 server on VMWARE Workstation 6.x, but you will see that this tricks is not working for ESX 3.5. Equally they are working, but you unable to start virtual machine inside ESX.
To make ESX 3.5 fully working on VMWare Workstation we need to do the following steps:
- Download and install Workstation 6.5 (Right now you can download RC version from official version from www.vmware.com)
- Inside Workstation 6.5 create a new VM, but keep in mind select Custom in "New Virtual Machine Wizard. As Hardware Compatibility select Workstation 6.5. You need to select an Redhat x64 Linux version. Set to use One CPU. At least 1024 MB ram. As a Virtual disk type select SCSI and as SCSI controller select LSI Logic (Recommended).
In my testfrom VM settings I removed USB Controller, Sound Card, Floppy drive. In Display settings I deselect the Accelerate 3D graphics checkbox. On network tab I've selected Bridged and Replicate physical network connection state. On Processors tab select Intel VT or AMD-V as preferred mode.
OK, now is very important part :). Close VMWare Workstation and got to .vmx file of your just created VM. Open .vmx file in Notepad and add (change) the following lines:
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
monitor.virtual_exec = “hardware”
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = “true”
Save .vmx file, start VMWARE Workstation and you are ready to start install a new Vmware ESX 3.5. |
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Saturday, 23 August 2008 10:15 |
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Running virtual machines is easy. It's managing and securing them that's the problem, according to both users and analysts. Check Point Software Technologies thinks it has an answer: the VPN-1 VE (Virtual Edition). The VPN-1 VE is a VMware-certified virtual application, which is designed to secure VMware virtual servers and applications by making them act as if they were on separate physical servers. While Check Point claims that it's the "first company to provide unified security management for both physical networks and virtual applications," the concept is used by other vendors in the still new field of virtualization security...
Full story at source: http://www.networkvirtualization.com/content/check-point-marries-virtual-physical-security-vmware-servers
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Friday, 15 August 2008 00:00 |
Justin Zarb, from http://blogs.technet.com/virtualworld published very nice step-by-step explanation how to build your App-V RC test lab (using 4.5.1305). Take a look here.
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Thursday, 14 August 2008 13:18 |
When you try to implement Application Virtualization 4.5 (aka Softgrid) in large scale environment you probably will be asking How:
- How Roaming Clients works with Application Virtualization?
- How to say to Roaming Client to pull application from local server resources?
- How to control all these applications from streaming across your WAN links?
- How to......
Yes, before Application Virtualization 4.5 , there were complications to setting up Softgrid in a large scale environment, but still possible. Let see what we have in Application Virtualization 4.5:
Pre- Softgrid 4.5:
Softgrid versions 4.x was great in centralized environments with high bandwidth availability. But in most large environments, we have to remember about branch :). So where does the client stream the SFT file from? There are different techniques to say Client from wich server to pull the application. One of the technics was using Netmask ordering settings from DNS. It allows clients on a local subnet to pull from a local resource by giving the client the nearest IP for that subnet. Other posible solution was DFS.
Softgrid 4.5:
Here's some of these new changes, with much more scalability choices:
ASR- Application Source Root is a big addition to the 4.5 version. ASR allows direct manipulation on where a client streams the SFT from. It's a registry key that can take care of the HREF path specified in the OSD. All this setting could be set in a GPO at the site level. So when a Roaming Client moves, it'll receive an ASR path through the GPO to the local content location.
OSR/ISR- Like the ASR, these can be set for the ICO/OSD files as well. During EACH DC refresh, the client pulls all the ICO/OSD files down which could very well be from across the WAN. So if a user clicks the reload/refresh button 10 times and he has 20 virtual apps assigned, it can add up against your traffic. So now we can control where those ICO/OSD files are brought down from.
ConfigMgr R2- With this new integration, Softgrid works off the backbone of ConfigMgr's enhanced scalability features.
- First, when a user clicks an icon file to stream a virtual application, the v-launcher or interceptor talks to the Advanced client which from it's management point, receive the location of the closest virtual enabled distribution point with that SFT and streams it from there.
- Second, since ConfigMgr now included 'Branch office' distribution points, a windows client can become a Softgrid storage point when now servers is available. Thus, clients at this serverless location can also pull the virtual application even at the lowest levels.
So as you can see, there are new options that help make this product more enterprise ready.
In this articl used material from http://blogcastrepository.com/blogs/troy_wilch
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