Nothing new here, but in case you weren’t aware there are some updates coming!
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1510-A-glimpse-of-VMwares-upcoming-product-roadmap.html
Nothing new here, but in case you weren’t aware there are some updates coming!
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1510-A-glimpse-of-VMwares-upcoming-product-roadmap.html
Ever need to change the size of your Virtual Machines? Well, changing the size is fairly easy, but what about the data and partitions inside your Virtual Harddisks? Paragon has made their “partion manager 10 for Virtual Machines” available for free! (well at least the first 5000 copies). Besides changing partitions, it can also do other handy tricks like backups and merging partitions. The product supports the ‘new’ GPT partitions that operating systems like Windows 7 and OSX uses.
Get your free copy here ![]()
Partition Manager 10 for Virtual Machines product page
Thanks to Run-Virtual.com for the info!
Thanks to VMguy.com for the write up. Workstation 7.1 has been released and can be downloaded here. VMware ACE and Player have been updated as well. Here’s the what’s new section from the release notes:
This release of VMware Workstation adds the following new features and support:
New Support for 32-Bit and 64-Bit Operating Systems
New Features in VMware Workstation
New Support for 32-Bit and 64-Bit Operating Systems
This release provides support for the following host and guest operating systems:
Operating System
Host and Guest Support
Ubuntu 8.04.4 Host and guest
Ubuntu 10.04 Host and guest
OpenSUSE 11.2 Host and guest
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Host and guest
Fedora 12 Guest
Debian 5.0.4 Guest
Mandriva 2009.1 Guest
New Features in VMware Workstation
OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Windows Vista guests — Improves the ability to run graphics-based applications in virtual machines.
Improved Graphics Performance — Enhanced performance with better benchmarks, frame rates, and improved rendering on Windows 7 and Windows Vista guests allows you to run various graphics-based applications. In addition, major improvements in video playback enable you to play high-resolution videos in virtual machines.
Automatic Software Updates — Download and install VMware Tools and receive maintenance updates when available.
Direct Launch — Drag guest applications from the Unity start menu directly onto the host desktop. Double-click the shortcut to open the guest application. The shortcut remains on the desktop after you exit Unity and close VMware Workstation.
Autologon — Save your login credentials and bypass the login dialog box when you power on a Windows guest. Use this feature if you restart the guest frequently and want to avoid entering your login credentials. You can enable Autologon and use direct launch to open guest applications from the host.
OVF 1.1 Support — Import or export virtual machines and vApps to upload them to VMware vSphere or VMware vCloud. The VMware OVF Tool is a command-line utility bundled in the VMware Workstation installer. Use this tool along with VMware Workstation to convert VMware .vmx files to .ovf format or vice versa. VMware recommends that you use the OVF command-line utility. For more information, see the OVF Web site and OVF Tool User Guide.
Eight-Way SMP Support — Create and run virtual machines with a total of up to eight-processor cores.
2TB Virtual Disk Support — Maximum virtual disks and raw disks size increased from 950GB to 2TB.
Encryption Enhancements — VMware Workstation includes support for Intel’s Advanced Encryption Standard instruction set (AES-NI) to improve performance while encrypting and decrypting virtual machines and faster run-time access to encrypted virtual machines on new processors.
Memory Management — User interface enhancements have simplified the handling of increased virtual memory capacity.
User Experience Improvement Program — Help VMware improve future versions of the product by participating in the User Experience Improvement Program. Participation in the program is voluntary and you can opt out at any time. When you participate in the User Experience Improvement Program, your computer sends anonymous information to VMware, which may include product configuration; usage and performance data, virtual machine configuration; usage and performance data, and information about your host system specifications and configuration.
The User Experience Improvement Program does not collect any personal data, such as your name, address, telephone number, or email address that can be used to identify or contact you. No user identifiable data such as the product license key or MAC address are sent to VMware. VMware does not store your IP address with the data that is collected.
For more information about the User Experience Improvement Program, click the Learn More link during installation or from the VMware Workstation Preferences menu.
Thanks to VMguy.com for the great write up. Fusion 3.1 has been released. You can download it here. There’s tons of great information in the what’s new section of the release notes.
Here’s also the post on the Fusion Team blog, which has a little more detail and screenshots:
http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2010/05/vmware-fusion-31-better-stronger-faster-than-ever.html
VMware Fusion 3.1 has a large number of new and improved features, including:
New Features
8-way SMP
2 TB Virtual Disks
OpenGL 2.1 for Vista
OpenGL 2.1 for Windows 7
Support for overlapping Unity windows in Exposé and Dock Exposé
USB “EasyConnect” to easily assign USB devices to virtual machine or Mac when connected
OVF Tool for Mac OS X now included as optional install with full download or CD install
OVF Tool 2: Import and export OVF packaged virtual machines and upload to vSphere with bundled OVF Tool
Drag a disk image or virtual disk to the installation media pane of the assistant
Add shortcut for opening a virtual machines configuration file in default text editor for VMware Fusion (Hold down option and right-click in Virtual Machine Library)
User Experience Improvement Program
Graphics Improvements
Aero is much faster on Windows Vista and Windows 7
Greatly improved scrolling speeds in Windows Vista and Windows 7 with latest Mac OS X release
Some games up to 10x faster than VMware Fusion 3.0 with VMware Fusion 3.1 and latest Mac OS X release
Improved performance and better compatibility for both DirectX 9 and OpenGL 3D applications
Boot Camp Improvements
Up to 5x disk performance in Boot Camp virtual machines
New option to minimize prompting for password (authentication dialogs) when using Boot Camp virtual machines
Handle Mac OS X disk changes better to avoid multiple references to Boot Camp partition in the Virtual Machine Library
PC Migration Improvements
Improvements to Migrate Your PC assistant, including better validation of names and better location prompt
Prompt user if Mac OS X guest account prevents guest access to shared folders instead of failing
Open new virtual machine on successful migration
Enhanced user interface on PC being migrated including:
New progress dialog on the PC being migrated as well as in VMware Fusion
Option to show converter logs and troubleshooting steps on PC if PC migration fails
Avoids port conflicts with Web server software installed on PC such as IIS, Tomcat, and Apache
New Guest Operating Systems Supported
Ubuntu 8.0.4.4: 32- and 64-bit
Ubuntu 10.04: 32- and 64-bit (currently in Beta)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 Service Pack 1: 32- and 64-bit
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1: 32- and 64-bit
RHEL 5.4: 32- and 64-bit
You can download it using the link above or running the updater inside of Fusion itself. Enjoy.
Short article showing the impact of adding memory to the virtual machine running Exchange 2010 on top of vSphere. As you will see there is quite an impact adding memory can have on the amount of disk I/O generated. With the I/O numbers generated you certainly don’t need expensive EMC disk either!
http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2010/05/exchange-2010-disk-io-on-vsphere.html
The next link is to the first part of the series where they tested the impact of adding virtual cpu’s to the Exchange 2010 server(s).
http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2010/05/exchange-2010-scaleup-performance-on-vsphere.html
What is interesting in both cases is the amount of cpu and disk for 8000 users in both of these test is EASILY within the capabilities of VMware vSphere….so virtualize already!
Oh yeah… we all have testbeds and we all love to waste the extra memory we have in them…uhm…wait, no I don’t!
I’m going to be applying this tonight to my own vCenter lab environment…that poor PC just dies with all the memory/disk swapping it is doing.
http://deinoscloud.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/tomcat-for-vcenter-memory-tuning/
A blog article from Brian Madden, I enjoy his posts and this one is right up my alley, I love analogies too.
Also has a nice list of the optimizations to make to a Windows XP image that you are going to deploy on VMware View.
Back before vSphere, some very creative people/companies created utilities to backup all of the host configuration on your ESX servers. Things like Networking configuration, vSwitch configuration, Port groups, etc. Now with vSphere, how do you protect this information in case of a host failure/reinstall? Answer: Host Profiles.
It’s not really a “backup” per se, yet Host Profiles greatly simplify host configuration management in scale-out deployments through user-defined configuration policies. You can use profile policies to eliminate per-host manual host configuration and efficiently maintain configuration consistency and correctness across the entire datacenter.
An excellent recent post with additional links and such about Host Profiles can be found here:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1376450;jsessionid=4944184E8F195FF105DF0BCF31114226
A great “how-to” type of blog post with Host Profiles can be found here:
http://malaysiavm.com/blog/esx-host-profiles-with-vsphere/
Hope it helps!
vSphere 4 requires your processor to be 64 bit. This lesson will show you how to check your existing ESX server to see if it supports 64 bit and the required CPU features in order to run vSphere.
On your existing VMware ESX server, you can use a simple command to see if the CPU supports 64 bit and the required "flags" (or features) that vSphere needs.
Open up a SSH session to your ESX server and log in as root.
Then type in:
egrep ‘(vmx|svm)’ /proc/cpuinfo
The flags on the CPU will show if it supports Virtualization Technology (VT) or not. If your system supports VT, then you’ll see vmx or svm in the list of flags.
The vmx flag is for Intel based processors. The svm flag is for AMD based processors.
You’ll see that in the screenshot above, our processor (Intel) does support VT as we have the vmx flag in the results, circled in the red box.
VT technology can still be disabled in your computer’s BIOS, however, so you’ll want to check there to make sure that it hasn’t been disabled. The flags in cpuinfo simply mean that your processor supports it.
Another method of checking your CPU’s to see if they support 64 bit and the necessary features for vSphere is to use a utility from VMware. More information about this can be found at this site, which has an excellent write up on it:
http://www.vladan.fr/you-have-to-have-64-bit-hardware-for-vsphere/