VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘news’

VMTN moderator and Roundtable podcast regular Jason Boche and virtualization bloggers Rick Schere and Scott Lowe are reporting that VMware will be changing the name of their flagship enterprise Virtual Infrastructure products from VI 3.5 to vSphere. Following mostly the same individuals’ tweets on Twitter I learned that the new name was decided via a vote by VMware employees. It’s unclear to me at this time when the name change will officially take place, but I imagine it will coincide with the availability of the next software release.

First some quotes from the other guys, and then my first impression.  Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine what the Internet would be like without search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Live Search from MSN. Now imagine what managing your virtual infrastructure would be like with browser based searching abilities similar to the service these search engines provide. A couple of new virtualization management products that are currently in beta, Hyper9 and SearchMyVM, promise to do just that.

It’s exciting to think about the reporting and monitoring possibilities of a virtual infrastructure that is constantly indexed and quickly queried for information. Judging only by my speed reading, it sounds to me like many of the daily administrative tasks that are currently scripted or made possible via VirtualCenter plugins can be consolidated to a browser-like management solution and accomplished more efficiently.

The following is a link summary of various posts about the 2 products. As always, read the entire posts for more information. Read the rest of this entry »

The much anticipated announcement of a change in Microsoft licensing policy for virtual environments was delivered today as promised but with an unexpected let down. Microsoft has waived the 90 day mobility restrictions for applications like Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, Systems Center Operations Manager, and many others but still limits the Windows Server operating system. Microsoft, apparently only concerned with silo-ed hypervisor deployments like Hyper-V, continues to only allow the migration of a virtual machine operating system once every 90 days. Microsoft considers a VMotion or live migration of an entire virtual machine as a transfer of license between hardware platforms.

The following paragraph was taken from the Overview section of the new Application Licensing Mobility Brief: Read the rest of this entry »

Simon Crosby, Citrix CTO, just posted some details about the Project Kensho Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools on his blog. The post titled Kensho – Portability, Ubiquity… Now with Extra Freedom! is apparently a follow up from his Keynote speech at LinuxWorld this morning. Crosby confirms Citrix is on target for a technical preview release in September as well as offering some specifics on what virtual formats the tools can convert.

“This morning in my keynote at LinuxWorld I announced that the tools will not only be easy to use… but the core Kensho components will also be free, not only distributed at no cost (“free beer”) but licensed under an open source license (“free speech”) as well, to encourage open development and wider adoption.

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For maximum flexibility and portability, Kensho will support Read the rest of this entry »

VMware, following through on Paul Maritz’ promise from last week, officially announced today that ESXi is now available for free. The icing on this “virtual cake” turns out to be that the latest version, Update 2 released Friday 07.25, offers new features and functions than previously available.

Read the press release – VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free.

Get the download at www.vmware.com/products/esxi/.

Click the image to the right to go to VMware’s ESXi 3.5 web page to learn more.

Concentrating on the technical reaction and excitement from the news, here are some links from various posts I found interesting in the virtualization blogisphere. Read the rest of this entry »

There is no official announcement from VMware yet, but according to various sources from the virtualization community new VMware CEO Paul Maritz announced during the July 22 Q2 Earnings Call ESX3i will be available for free as early as July 28, 2008 (next week). Although predicted to potentially be released as a free hypervisor, ESX3i, now named ESXi, has been available from VMware since September 2007 for $495. A cheaper option for purchasing ESXi as of today is available by ordering select new server hardware models to ship with the hypervisor embedded. However, offering the bare metal ESXi for free in the future to VMware customers will certainly increase the number of installations in data centers of both small and medium businesses and enterprise organizations world wide.

In my opinion, this is a timely and needed move to counter Microsoft’s Hyper-V release and marketing hype touting Hyper-V as free add-on to Windows Server 2008.

According to virtualization.info’s article, VMware will not restrict any Read the rest of this entry »

In a shocking move today, VMware announced the replacement of CEO and co-founder Diane Greene with Paul Maritz. Maritz, formerly with Microsoft where he was responsible for the development and marketing of successful products such as Windows 95 and Windows NT until he retired in 2000, was also named to the VMware Board of Directors. Most recently, Maritz’s startup Pi Corporation was aquired by EMC in February 2008. Maritz joined EMC’s executive management team as President and General Manager of the Cloud Infrastructure Services Division at the time of the acquisition and has been in that role until now.

Here are some quotes from a few of  the many reports and posts published today that summarize both positive and negative reactions to this news. Read the rest of this entry »