Jun
10
2009
Jun
10
2009
New host: Dell PowerEdge R710
So, it was time to make the virtualization a bit more serious and the same time solve my hosting problem. After a quick survey of the hardware available, I bought a Dell PowerEdge R710:
Jun
10
2009
May
23
2009
Dell R200 and vSphere
Yes, the Dell PowerEdge R200 runs vSphere/VMware ESXi 4.0. More details to come as I revive this blog :-)
Nov
18
2008
Updates
Well, it’s been a quiet month. I’m still writing on my project, and I’m searching for a job. In addition, the planning for The Gathering 2009, where I’m the chief information officier, has begun.
Nov
18
2008
VMware ESX(i) 3.5 U3 and random stuff
Well, looks like VMware is updating their products again. VMware ESX(i) U3 is available from their site. I have installed it, but did not notice any differences. But hey, I have test lab, let’s be bleeding edge.
VMware: ESX4 beta? :-)))
On the other side, a few experiences the last couple of days: VM’s might get stuck – and there’s no way of killing them on ESXi that I know about, besides rebooting that is. There should be a kill option in the remote CLI!
Another one: suspending one guest, rebooting the host and powering on the guest again does not mean that all the network connections are dropped. My IRC connection stayed up during the reboot and I continued it when the guest was back on-line. Nice!
Oct
14
2008
Documentation…
As I’m currently in the process of writing an academic report on virtualization solutions currently on the market, I have been surfing the web for documentation of quite a few of the products on the market. I have noticed that a number of these solutions are poorly documented. As a general notice, a lot of the solutions lack basic information about limits. For example, I really want to know how many guests I can have on a single server before the hypervisor says “enough” and refuses to power on another guest.
Simply said, there are a number of solutions I wouldn’t have bought today on the basis of their online documentation. This applies to Sun xVM and Parallels. As both Xen and KVM are freely available software, the demand for documentation decreeses, but I think they too should get someone to document their code.
On the other side, VMware have documented their solutions extremely good – and, they have done one thing that I think is critical: all the documentation are available from a single page linked to from the product page. No more browsing of support pages, pages you have to create an user to access and so on. It’s there, available for everyone. And, it is maintained on a regular basis. Kudos!
Just as a side note; Microsoft: Please try to do something similar, your web pages with both microsoft.com, TechNet, MSDN and so are a big mess. Collect all the necessary documentation on one page, please.
Oct
14
2008
New academic site from VMware
I would like to point your attention towards http://www.govirtual.org where VMware is trying to create a community for virtualization research and development. They’ve made a number of papers and some software available for download at this site, and invite the site users to make their own contributions to the site.
Sep
24
2008
VMware Server 2.0 RTEFF (Released To Everyone For Free)
Well well, it’s been a long time since VMware Server 2.0 beta 1 was released; but finally, the new version is complete and released to the general public!
As said before, VMware Server is great for those of you who are running a Linux or Windows server and are eager to try virtualization. If you’re more serious about it, you might want to consider VMware ESX(i); especially since VMware are giving away ESXi for free now.
As a bonus, the 2.0 release also includes a new build of their VirtualCenter Client. I doubt that there will be any new functions in this release; but there’s nothing wrong in hoping for it? :-) Check out https://servername:8333/client/VMware-viclient.exe or /usr/lib/hostd/docroot/client/Vmware-viclient.exe :-)
Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to add the VMware Sever 2.0 hosts to the VirtualCenter yet… :(
And I guess we’re still stuck with the web interface since the ViC can’t handle version 7 hardware… :(
Well well, on the other hand, I just love free software; don’t you? :-) As long as it’s free, I’m quite capable of swallowing some camels :-)
Sep
17
2008
Cisco Nexus 1000v
Yet another exciting release: Cisco is supposed to deliver their NX-OS to the virtualized world.
Source: http://www.colinmcnamara.com/2008/09/16/cisco-releases-nexus-1000v-virtual-switch-for-vmware
Recent Comments