VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘virtualizationreview.com’

Almost as if to segue from my recent Virtumania Podcast episode about type 2 hypervisors, VMware has announced the release of the public betas for the latest versions of their popular Workstation and Player desktop products. Touting several new features and performance improvements, VMware Workstation 7.1 and Player 3.1 betas can now be downloaded from their VMware Beta Community pages.

I am downloading my copy as I write this post, but several new features have caught my attention.

• Open GL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests
• Improved graphics support enabling high resolution videos in VMs
• Autologin for Windows Guests
• Inclusion of the OVF 1.0 command line tool to convert VMs to .OVF files for exporting to other hypervisors
• 8 way vCPU support in VMs
• up to 2TB virtual disks
• Direct Launch – drag icon to host desktop and seamlessly start an application inside a VM – even after closing VMware Workstation or Player.
• Support for Fedora 12 as a guest OS
• VMware Ace upgraded to version 3.7

Also, I can’t help but notice Known Issues from the Release Notes such as the following:

“Display

• Exiting FIFA 08 game on Windows 7 guests and hosts with Aero enabled, might cause the desktop wallpaper to turn black.
• There are known issues with the ATI Linux driver 10.2. VMware recommends that you use ATI Linux driver 9.11 for the best 3D user experience.”

Looks like I’ve got some new testing to do! (and maybe a new 3D games video to make!)

Copying more information from the Release Notes:

Read the rest of this entry »

Hypervisor Test Explained is a Virtualization Review post by Rick Vanover written in response to the fallout over “The Benchmark”. Real quick for those few that do not know, Rick, along with Editor in Chief Keith Ward, recently published (in Rick’s words) “a comparative performance test” for VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer. The results of that test have been hotly debated since. Mostly between VMware and Citrix, but other skirmishes in the form of comments, tweets, and blog posts have also popped up scattered around the virtualization blogisphere. Until recently I’ve sat on the fence about the test results and the reactions. Partly because I found the test’s outcome startling, but also because I found myself disagreeing with the position and opinions of both sides as I watched the battle.

Now, before I continue let me establish that I immediately questioned why this was even being debated as a hypervisor “benchmark” at all. In my mind it was always what Rick describes now: a comparitive test. The goal wasn’t to say hypervisor A, B, and C can do X amount of Y and Z. Rick’s comment on Jason Boche’s early post on this topic makes it crystal clear what his objective really was:

“… everyone is assuming I’m offering this as information for the enterprise. Not so. I really am targeting this to the customer who is going to select the free hypervisors for small, unmanaged installations.”

To satisfy me for “small unmanaged installations” Read the rest of this entry »