VMTN Blog

Join the Conversation on Virtualization

Tue, 31 Jan 2006

A tutorial on installing OpenSolaris on Workstation from Bill Rushmore.

So you want to try out OpenSolaris but you don't have a machine available. Then VMware is what you need. Even if you do, VMware is great tool to get help you get started with OpenSolaris and can be a great tool to help you on your kernal hacking efforts. VMware workstation 5.5 has "experimental" support for Solaris but I have found that OpenSolaris actually runs quite well with it. This article will take you through the steps to get OpenSolaris up and running on VMware and assumes you are new to VMware and OpenSolaris. This article will also be helpful if are just interested in Solaris on VMware.

Previously on VMTN Blog: Unsupported how-to: Solaris 10 on ESX 2.5.2, Solaris 10 as a guest OS in workstation

posted by jtroyer at: 16:46 | | | permanent link

In December on VMTN Blog I wrote about reducing the size of virtual machines for portability. A number of methods were mentioned, and in the text I quoted a possible 80% reduction in virtual machine size, but I edited out the name of the tool that caused this high level of compaction: Invirtus VM Optimizer.

Tom Edwards of Invirtus was nice enough to contact me afterwards and also blog about it. (Sounds like we also sent a prospect his way, so score one for the bloggers.) I've been unable to test it out myself, since it works with Windows, and I'm doing most of my work these days with our Community-built Virtual Machines, which are all open source and *nix-based. (Although many of them could use some aggresive shrinkage of their own as well.)

Today Virtual Strategy Magazine has an interview with Tom:

TE: Essentially, the use scenario for VM Optimizer is identical to the use scenario for VMware shrinking and for Virtual PC and Virtual Server compaction. If there is ever a need for giving a virtual machine from computer A to computer B, or user A to user B, or company A to company B, that will involve some type of media for distribution. It could be a CD, DVD, LAN, WAN or the Internet. Those are complicated scenarios because virtual machines are very large. So the best use scenario is if you're planning to share or backup or move or archive virtual machines, VM Optimizer is going to make it the least painful.

VSM: This seems like a good fit for disaster recovery and business continuity.

TE: I agree. At VMworld, I was talking to someone in IT with Wrigley Corporation about VM Optimizer and the VMware platform. He pigeonholed disaster recovery as well, and I believe that's a compelling scenario.

We've also had a good report or two from the forums. Any experience with Invirtus? Any other tools you use to shrink virtual machines? Any best practices to suggest to creators of downloadable virtual machines?

posted by jtroyer at: 16:13 | | | permanent link

Mon, 30 Jan 2006

Last week, I linked to Eric Cowperthwaite in the VMTN Blog entry Moving to Linux and jokingly wondered if he would "see the light" on virtualization as a viable alternative to a LiveCD or dual-booting for Windows users transitioning to Linux.

Eric is nothing if not a good sport, because he took me up on my suggestion and jumped in feet first with Russell Ost's Debian virtual machine. He is now swimming deep in the virtual machine ocean, with 5 versions of Linux on his laptop, a downloadable Puppy Linux virtual machine on his blog, and now a review and account of his experiences at Debian News.

The bottom line? I would definitely recommend a Linux virtual machine using the VMware Player for anyone who needs to have Windows and Linux co-exist on the same machine. ...

I now have five different VM's on my Windows laptop (Fedora Core, SlackWare, Debian, DSL and Puppy). The thing I'm beginning to realize is that this virtualization goes beyond just being able to have Linux and Windows co-exist. ...

The potential to set you free of the constraints of the x86 architecture, with its inability to virtualize (if you've worked with SPARC-IV and Sol10, or IBM Power and AIX5L, you know what I mean), to slice resources. The new functionality and flexibility is tremendous. And, I can have my Debian distro at my fingertips, even though I have to run Windows XP on my laptop. That's just hard to argue with.

Eric, thanks for the kind words and please keep us informed on your next projects! Virtualization is immediately useful and practical for most developers and IT professionals, and if you're doing it right, it can also change the fundamental ways you think about computing. Come on in; take the plunge -- the water's fine!

posted by jtroyer at: 18:11 | | | permanent link

Fri, 27 Jan 2006

Mike Healan in today's Spyware Weekly Newsletter says:

It is now my official position that using the Browser Appliance is the best and only way for Windows users to remain completely safe on the internet. I will no longer explain how to alter security settings, block massive lists of nasty web sites or how to install a half dozen different programs, all protecting different parts of the system. ...

You can lock your machine down with firewalls, script blockers, antispyware programs, antivirus programs, enormous web site block lists, block all ActiveX and then live in fear of the next 0-day exploit. Or you can install the Browser Appliance and be immune to all web-based malware installers. The choice is your's to make.

He also has written a four-part article on using the Browser Appliance.

The article covers everything I think that you will need to know, if you decide to use the Browser Appliance. Page One introduces newcomers to the idea of the Browser Appliance and explains why it offers 99.9% protection from all spyware. Page Two explains how to perform a few tweaks to the default set-up. Page Three explains how to share files between the virtual computer and the real computer. Page Four explains how to install some additional software you probably will want to have.

via Suzi Turner's Spyware Confidential at ZDNet.

posted by jtroyer at: 16:47 | | | permanent link

Thu, 26 Jan 2006

AstLinux combines a custom Linux distro with the open source Asterisk system. (It and other downloadable virtual machines are available at the VMTN Virtual Machine Center.) Its creator, Kristian Kielhofner, presented this week at a "cool hacks" session at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference. Here are a few blog mentions:

Christine Herron:

There's now an AstLinux virtual machine built with VMWare Workstation 5. This allows you to experiement with Linux and Asterisk without leaving your typical environment. This application has found a niche with people doing demos, training, or user groups.

Ikisai:

Allows you to explore using linux with telephony, emphasis on VMware, also allows high availability, talking about hertbeats etc, open source version of Serviceguard? ( I do miss those days - not !) Important point for Orange - for < $500 you can have a HA asterisk install, expect to see lots of these springing up this year.

Stuart Henshall at Skype Journal:

Allows you to experiment with Asterisk and Linux without leaving your current operating system. Looking on the site it appear this provides a very small footprint and could be run off a USB stick. Still he's talking another language for me. I've had a few pointers recently pointing me to Asterisk options. I'm certainly considering a little "learning by doing" project.

posted by jtroyer at: 17:20 | | | permanent link

Tue, 24 Jan 2006

Many people are interested in moving from Windows to Linux on the desktop, but realize some transition time and effort will be needed. Virtualization is a great way to gradually move files, applications, and habits from one platform to another.

Chimo lists his motivations and recommended steps:

Meanwhile, I had heard about Linux but didn't really paid close attention to it. I later made the connection between the open-source concept, Linux and FireFox. Sure Linux sounded great and promising but I wasn't ready to throw my Operating System in the trash can just yet. This wasn't a personal issue, it was just that it is so universally used everywhere - starting with my University - that I just couldn't take the risk of handing in homeworks in files that were not fully compatible with the standard applications.

Of course the concept of dual-booting came to me not long after that. And I gave it a try. And found it annoying to restart the machine to use an application that ran on the other OS.

During the summer, one of my colleagues at work introduced me to Virtual Machines...

Eric of Eric's Grumbles Before the Grave actually recommends dual-booting or a LiveCD over VMware. I'm not sure he realizes that the free VMware Player is available, or that performance these days is "virtually" the same on a modern box. Perhaps he'll eventually see the light, but in the meantime he lists some great pre-move steps that will make your Windows to Linux transition smooth. Here's an excerpt:

Try the apps you plan to use on Windows first and find out if they meet your needs. I run GIMP, FireFox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice on my Windows laptop and they perform quite nicely and meet my needs.

Backup all of your user files that you will need to bring to Linux with you. Remember to use a format that is portable across applications. A classic example, if you are an Outlook user, is your .pst mail files. You will want to move them into a mail file that non-proprietary mail applications can recognize. The mail app you want to use should have a FAQ on this. Same thing for browser favorites. OpenOffice can read Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, so you should be able to bring those files across with you. ...

Document exactly what hardware is in your PC, including video and sound card, harddrives, amount of memory, network cards, printers, and other peripherals (PDA, MP3 player, digital camera). Check your preferred distribution's FAQ's to make sure the hardware is supported, or that there is an alternative. You may need to install add-on drivers for some hardware, download it first.

Of course, living permanently in one virtual and one physical machine has some of its own challenges, and Linux on the desktop is not for everyone.

posted by jtroyer at: 16:30 | | | permanent link

Fri, 20 Jan 2006

Adrian Crenshaw at Irongeek demonstrates running a LiveCD inside VMware Player in a screencast video. A LiveCD, like Knoppix, Auditor or Bart's PE Builder, is a bootable ISO image. (Warning; embedded flash video with narration)

Update: If you'd like some written instructions, Alessandro Perilli at virtualization.info published How to launch ISO and use LiveCDs inside VMware Player for you three months ago.

posted by jtroyer at: 17:44 | | | permanent link

Tarry Singh discusses the preparation and planning for the installation of a 2-node RHEL 4.2 Linux VMware for Oracle 10gR2 RAC. Also covered in the article are groundbreaking technologies like OCFS2 and ASMlib, and an overview the ESX Server in general.

To top it all, it has been a RAC year for Oracle. Oracle had just about a flat year in revenues and it was RAC that was the hero. So, you see RAC is getting more and more attention and is being adopted more rapidly than ever. I see RAC deployment, with help of Virtualization technologies such as ESX Server, only to soar higher in 2006.

In this article, we will go through the preparation and planning. We will take time to study the groundbreaking technologies like OCFS2 and ASMlib and breeze through the ESX Server in general.

posted by jtroyer at: 16:01 | | | permanent link

Thu, 19 Jan 2006

In the first of our new series of "cool but unsupported things from the VMTN Forums," Juergen Winkelmann gives us detailed instructions how to get Solaris 10 running inside ESX 2.5.2. Since this involves recent Solaris patches, please know what you are doing and pay attention to ongoing patches from Sun and threads in the Forums: you are juggling on top of a moving train.

That being said, here's the thread on the Forums and Juergen's Solaris 10 Installation on VMware ESX Server 2.5.x. The VMware Tools are only partly functional on Solaris at this time, but he reports that mouse focus, copy and paste, and removable devices all work.

Again, have fun with this if you are an experienced train-juggler, but I sense that our tech support team would like me to reiterate that this is unsupported and to be used only at your own risk.

Previously on VMTN Blog: Solaris 10 as a Guest OS in Workstation, which has experimental support.

posted by jtroyer at: 16:56 | | | permanent link

HarryC shares with us a moment of clarity and prophesy: Computers as 'appliances' reaching critical mass. Basically, you're always in a meeting with your laptop anyway. Why not replace your desktop with a virtual desktop on an ESX Server?

Case in point: Here at LXK, we go to meetings. Alot. However, in each of those over-attended, useless meetings, 80% of the people have some form of laptop open multitasking--IM to their team or answering email. This 'laptop' culture has gone through several distinct phases:

1. Nobody has a laptop. Ah, the days of the short, focused meeting.
2. People replace their desktops with laptops. Yeah, carry-around your office. Thing is, the laptops have slow, small hard disks and weak processors, and really powerful ones are heavy, so what's the point
3. Today: People go back to the super-fast desktop machine, and use Windows XP's Remote Desktop to be back "at" that machine via their laptops + wireless internet.

Critical mass occurred when we combined site-wide WiFi and Windows XP installations with Remote Desktop. Thinking about this, I figure the next logical step is replace the honking desktop machine again, but this time replace it with time-sliced "virtual" desktops on some grid machine with a bazillion CPU cycles/second and unlimited storage.

Read the whole thing. Thanks for that moment of clarity, Harry!

posted by jtroyer at: 16:23 | | | permanent link

Wed, 18 Jan 2006

All software will eventually be distributed as virtual machine images, says Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror. He goes into more detail, but his main points are:

• It's the ultimate security sandbox.
• It makes software installation a no-brainer.
• The operating system doesn't matter.
• New CPUs will accelerate VMs.
• What else are we going to do with all this power?

All we really lack, I suppose, is VM built into the operating system as a first-class citizen rather than a standalone application. But the solipsist operating system is surely coming:

so-lip-sism (n): a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.

Eventually, all applications will believe they're the only applications in the world. And they'll be right.

But Chris Bilson at Iimplement has had enough of virtual machines:

Anyway, VMs have some really nice properties, but a world of VMs sounds like a really slow and expensive version of the Matrix to me. Even though I could do wicked kung-fu moves and jump from tall buildings, I'd rather be unplugged, thanks.

I sympathize, especially about the Rabbits (just go read the rant; it's funny), but his statement that his virtual machine runs an order of magnitude slower than his physical machine -- not my experience -- makes me think that there are configuration issues going on here. Chris, you need a virtual tune up!

posted by jtroyer at: 18:12 | | | permanent link

Getting away from hardware heterogeneity is one driver for virtualization. Anil Gupta wonders which industry segment most likely to use virtualization?:

Last week, I visited a large data center that houses hardware for various customers. I came across a very interesting cage while walking along a row of cages. This cage contains over thirty racks full of servers, networking and storage hardware. ... Looking at multiplicity of vendors in this environment got me thinking about which industry segments are most likely to use virtualization.

1. Organizations that have gone through several M&A in last few years, especially merger of equals.
2. Geographically dispersed organizations with de-centralized management.
3. Organizations whose management seem to be always in structural flux.
4. Technology industry segment.
5. Organizations that grow too quickly too fast, startups like Six Apart.

posted by jtroyer at: 17:42 | | | permanent link

Fri, 13 Jan 2006

The VMware Player continues to garner accolades.

NewsForge gives a First look: VMware Player:

I found that the Ubuntu image ran better if I remembered to close all Windows applications and terminate as many processes as I could before firing up the virtual machine. The Web browser ran smoothly and quickly, loading pages with no hesitation, almost as though they were locally cached. My Windows version of Firefox isn't as good, and that's on the host. XChat worked flawlessly, as did Evolution, AbiWord, and all the other programs I installed. I was even able to save files on the virtual drive and retrieve them after rebooting the virtual machine. The whole environment had the authentic look and feel and the quick response of GNOME on Linux.

The Long Dark Tech-Time of the Soul blog thinks Player is Linux for the timid:

I was interested in virtualization technologies so I gave it a whirl and loaded up their browser appliance virtual machine image. Well stone the crows if it wasn't an Ubuntu Linux preloaded with Mozilla Firefox and a few other goodies. I could even browse my Windows network, and fire up an RDP client to log into remote Windows machines. Sweet. Believe me, this is a serious alternative to dual boot and for development very convenient. I didn't run benchmarks but even on my lowly 1.6Mhz laptop it seemed to run likety split.

Vlandham at his V is for Verbose blog calls Player VMware: my new coworker:

The really cool thing about this software is that it creates virtual network cards for your virtual machines, so it should be possible to create a little virtual network of "computers" that could all communicate with each other and could be used for learning and testing how a network is set up. I set up an Apache web server on my virtual machine and was able to access it from the real computer it was running on. Pretty fun.

Christian Mohn aka h0bbel gives us his take on Linux on the Desktop:

BTW: I think VMWare has struck gold with the newly released VMWare Player. It really opens up an alley of virtualization for everyone that I'm sure will find loads of good uses in the time to come.

Ace Portuguese blogger Rui Carmo at Tao of Mac gave his initial thoughts on Player. His blog/wiki also holds some notes and tips for Player.

But the best news (and my main reason for doing this) is that I can now run Google Earth a bit faster - I was using QEMU via Remote Desktop, and VMware is noticeably snappier, even using the OpenGL software renderer and RDP.

Travails of an ungeeker says Ubuntu on VMware Player is pretty cool too:

I've been playing a while with Ubuntu. I'm running it it under VMware Player and am very impressed. Having converted to Microsoft VirtualPC 2 years ago through MSDN and not trying it since - it is now clear the VMware are still ahead.

And finally, David Hamilton at Dave's Place thinks that VMware offers a gift to the world and most fail to notice.

Whether you're doing software/web development stuff, want to test out linux, or just want to play some old DOS games, or for any of a hundred other reasons, this is a fantastic tool that's worth checking out. ...

Next purchasing cycle at work, this is going to become part of my professional toolkit as well (the workstation product) and help me get rid of the ridiculous array of screens strewn across my desk. I'm at 5 and occasionally 6 at this point. I also hope they consider developing an OSX port of their product once OSX is running on intel hardware.

Don't worry Dave, we're very happy with the notice we've gotten, including the good reviews, the support from the community, the twenty downloadable virtual machines that volunteers have made available, the peer recommendations, the inquiries to redistribute the Player, hundreds of thousands of downloads, and thousands of blog mentions.

That's enough patting ourselves on the back. We promise to stay busy here -- lots more good stuff on the way -- and you keep busy virtualizing your enterprise. Deal?

posted by jtroyer at: 17:42 | | | permanent link

Tue, 10 Jan 2006

Lindsay Donaghe gives detailed step-by-step instructions how she took her laptop and did a physical-to-virtual conversation using NTBackup.

I recently got a new replacement laptop for work. I had a lot of stuff on the old laptop after 2+ years of use and so I didn.t want to have to rush myself in remembering everything in one or two passes before formatting it to send back to the office. There are always things I forget when I.m mostly focused on moving data files over: files in .hidden. places like IM logs and non-file based data such as product keys, configuration info, settings for programs and other non-file based data. So I decided the best thing to do was make it into a VM and take my time about reinstalling and configuring the new laptop to match.

Update: Russell at Streams of Consciousness talks about why why one might need to do a P2V conversion from backup:

The hard drive in my old laptop had been failing over several days randomly causing the OS to crash. One day I heard the drive sound like a pinball machine, then system locked up and blue screened. On reboot it said Primary Hard Drive Not Found, ouch. I shut it down for a while then started it back up and the OS booted. I immediately ran a full backup of the system (I had only data backups from the night before). It was running, but I had an idea. What if I could migrate my full backup into a VM. Well, after learning a few things I successfully performed a manual P2V for my laptop. This was a good exercise with valuable experience.

posted by jtroyer at: 17:56 | | | permanent link

Bill Lovett takes a look at the IBM SoulPad project and wants have a portable virtual machine and track it via Subversion, a software version control system. OK, I'm a bit mystified why, but let's run with it.

The other day I was reading the paper Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads, which describes the use of a virtual machine disk image run from a portable USB drive in order to give the user "the ability to walk up to any computer, personalize it, and use it as one's own." ...

A bit of reading around (here and here especially) got me thinking about bringing a version control system like Subversion into the picture. You'd take a VMWare image, restrict it to the size of a CD, install an operating system on it, then bring the image into Subversion in order to tracks its changes over time. In other words, achieving portability through version control.

First, I'm not sure why you need version control for synchronization of your virtual machine if you are carrying it around with you on your CD or USB key. After all, the whole point is that it is with you all the time.

Even if you do want to track changes while you are working, remember that a virtual machine is still an independent computer, and any software you use on your physical box you can use on your virtual one. So please keep using your existing backup software, file version control systems, system restore points, or any of your normal tools to backup, track, snapshot, and version your working files.

If you do make a lot of changes to your system configuration or do a lot of software installations, then versioning your entire virtual machine makes sense. The right way to do this is to use the snapshot feature of Workstation. You will need to have Workstation installed on each machine you want to use, but since Bill just wants to move between home and the office, this seems tractable.

And finally, using the linked clone feature of Workstation, you should be able to make a base OS virtual machine, keep a copy both at home and at work, and carry around the much-smaller linked clone "working" virtual machine on your portable media. And make sure you read the documentation on moving virtual machines, as there are some gotchas if you aren't paying attention.

posted by jtroyer at: 16:42 | | | permanent link

Mon, 09 Jan 2006

Network World has a new good set of virtualization articles.

Jennifer Mears has a good article on desktop virtualization, where users talk about both security and management.

"Our professional-services folks have client data in their possession that typically is of a financial nature and private," Beasley says. "We were concerned that if Baker Hill were to have a laptop stolen that we would be held liable, because our laptops are unencrypted." ...

With VMware Ace, Beasley can create isolated virtual machines - software files that contain an operating system, applications and related data - on single physical systems and then encrypt specific virtual machines, rather than encrypting hardware. ...

"We can create rules saying that when a virtual machine is connected to our network, it can only speak to certain IP addresses or certain file servers," he says. ...

"For troubleshooting, it is invaluable to be able to have all of your operating systems start up at a moment's notice" on a single machine, he says. "The second place virtualization is ideal is prototyping. I can build, for example, an XP Pro system with software I know is going to cause problems in the real world. That way, I can, at worst, have to rebuild the virtual machine as opposed to sitting and rebuilding a real machine."

In another article, she names virtualization one of six hot technologies for 2006. (The other five are service oriented architectures, intrusion-prevention systems, Linux, MPLS-based IP, and Microsoft's Group Policy.)

Network World also has a list of post-holiday IT security wishes: Security inside. Standards. Cool servers. Faster, better disaster recovery. Virtualize virtually everything.

posted by jtroyer at: 17:26 | | | permanent link

Fri, 06 Jan 2006

Mike Laverick has taken his RTFM Education website and now "exploded" it into a blog. It makes the content a lot more accessible. His weekly email list and PDF "Beyond the Manuals" continue. Recent content includes:

• HP Customer Advisory
• VMware KB Articles of the Week
• Automatically Mount Windows Shares
• Online Backup to Windows Share using vmsnap_all and vmsnap.pl
• Shrinking the VirtualCenter Database
• Display WW port names and VMHBA information for fibre channel adapters

Just go, start scrolling, then sign up for his mailing list.

Lee James also has a new blog with a very imperative title: Virtualize Now. He's just getting started, but has already talked about e-books, terminal services, blades, gmail, buying storage, and 2006 punditry.

And finally, About Virtualization contributor Bjorn Anders Jorgensen is now a VMware employee.

Look for an updated blogroll very soon. All these folks are active on the VMTN Discussion Forums, which I'll plug again as the fastest, best place to ask questions or find out more about VMware products.

posted by jtroyer at: 18:25 | | | permanent link

Phil Windley, now an Associate Professor at BYU and formerly CIO of the state of Utah, is a very smart guy and writes a very interesting blog on IT strategy. This week he asks the following question:

Suppose you had a couple of quad processor boxes with 16Gb of RAM each attached to a 1Tb SAN and enough VMWare ESX licenses to do whatever you wanted on the platform. What would you do? We.re wrapping up some initial VMWare performance studies on the boxes and I.m looking for ideas about what research projects to do with them next. I have a few ideas, but I.m curious if you have any.

Current suggestions in his comments include testing concurrent I/O, clustered databases, storage architecture, SMP, and hot backup.

posted by jtroyer at: 18:00 | | | permanent link

Alessandro Perilli has posted some interesting graphs on the growth of virtualization.info over the last year.

He says 2007 will finally be the Year of Virtualization. I say anyone working with virtualization in 2006 is going to be so busy they aren't going to have time to notice.

posted by jtroyer at: 16:32 | | | permanent link

Wed, 04 Jan 2006

Dell published a white paper last month entitled VMware VMotion Performance on the Dell PowerEdge 1855 Blade Server. Since blades are often limited to two or three network connections, people have questions about how to best utilize them in ESX Server. Traffic from each virtual machine, traffic from the service console, and possible VMotion traffic all needs to use those limited number of NICs. The good news is that the VMotion throughput overhead, at least in this case, was only 2%, even while sharing a NIC.

The VMotion feature of VMware's ESX Server, which enables live migration of running VMs from one ESX Server to another, can be used to implement high availability or load balancing, or to facilitate routine maintenance. When the server farm consists of Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers the VMotion capability may still be used effectively even though the same Ethernet controller on each blade has to support the network traffic to the VMs residing on that blade as well as the VMotion traffic. As shown by the test documented in this paper, even a high rate of VMotions (each of 20 VMs moved within a 10 minute period) did not substantially reduce application performance on the VMs.

More discussion can be found by searching the VMTN Discussion Forums, and you can find a good discussion of the vmxnet_console driver on vmguru.

posted by jtroyer at: 16:52 | | | permanent link

Tue, 03 Jan 2006

Tom Yager of Inforworld gives us his hardware-centric prognostications for the new year:

What are you going to do with all that capacity? The short answer is "real time" -- but it will take me a year to lay out the long version of that answer. Anyway, take my word, you'll want to embrace dense computing clusters, and you'll have two choices of how to manage that capacity: waste it or virtualize it. If you do the latter, every CPU and gigabyte of storage in your enterprise, along with CPUs and gigabytes that you rent or share with partners, becomes part of a pool into which you dip as needs change, not on the quarter year, but the quarter hour.

VMware Vmotion is a piece of this puzzle. At VMworld, we talked about two more pieces coming in VirtualCenter: Distributed Resource Scheduler and Distributed Availability Service. It's going to be an interesting year.

Update: More from Yager on virtualization:

When someone calls you to request a new server, you sit down at your desk and build a server or cluster that matches his or her requirements before you hang up the phone. If a demanding application bogs down others sharing the same server, you pick up its virtual machine instance, while it's still running, and drop it onto another physical server with more available resources. Users have no idea that SAP (Profile, Products, Articles) has just teleported down two floors. All they see is that it's running smoothly again, without missing a beat.

posted by jtroyer at: 13:02 | | | permanent link