More on SCVMM: Stefan Stranger linked to Tony Soper’s Weblog who explains more about the Windows Powershell Cmdlets used in Service Center Virtual Machine Manager.
After a short delay today the presentations delivered at TSX 2007 EMEA in Nice are ready for download from the vmware-tsx site.
The partner presentations will follow shortly.
Have fun!
Technorati Tags: tsx-emea, VMware
Wednesday Microsoft released Beta 2 of Service Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
This latest version of Virtual Machine Manager – Beta 2 – represents a major step forward in providing IT administrators with a fully featured,
easy-to-use and integrated suite of management tools to tackle even the most distributed and complex virtualization migrations. While the
improvements in Beta 2 are too long to list, here is a preview of the major upgrades in this release:
- Completely new, easy-to-use and intuitive UI based on the System Center look-and-feel (same as System Center Operations Manager 2007, Service Desk and System Center Essentials)
- Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) Conversions (Windows Server® 2000 or WindowsServer 2003 are supported)
Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) Conversions – Using the Windows PowerShell® interface, converts a VMWare disk or a whole VM to the analogous VS
vhd\vm representation
- 64-bit VMM server support
- Every VMM component is now remotely installable, including the VMM server, library server, delegated provisioning portal, administrative
console and data store
- Full Windows PowerShell support with documentation – automate away!
- Better overall performance and scalability
- Every feature from Beta 1 with more functionality and enhancements
Click here to view the FAQ which also contains a part about requirements
Technorati tags: Microsoft, Virtual Server, Virtualization, SCVMM, Service Center Virtual Machine Manager
A collegue pointed me to this
forum thread in the VMTN-forum. It looks like Eric (aka esiebert) had some spare time.
Eric collected a huge amount of links covering diverse subjects related to VMware.
Lots of useful links. If you have time click on the link and see for yourself.
In the months May to July 2007 VMware origanizes several one-day-events in cities throughout Europe.
The events are meant to "stimulate the exchange of viewpoints and strategies among industry experts and leaders who are harnessing the power of virtualization"
Read more and register
here.
With this tool you can roughly estimate what the return on investment (ROI) when you implement VMware Infrastructure.
It delivers a detailed report containing possible cost-savings (less low-end servers, less cooling, less powerconsumption).
It is a user friendly tool to help users to get an overview on cost-savings when using VI-3.
The data within the tool is based on customersurveys, experience and recent implementations of VMware Infrastructure.
The Release Candidate build of Virtual Server R2 SP1 is now available Before anyone posts a comment, yes I’m aware that we said we planned to have SP1 out in the first quarter and it is April now, so we’ve missed that. You’re welcome to speculate on the final release date.
The download site also has a ReadMe file which details how to make Virtual Server work on Windows Vista (something which has caused a few headaches, although is now documented in other places) and gives a history of "What came in with R2" and "What is new with R2 SP1" – the list is as follows
- Support for hardware-assisted virtualization
- Support for greater than 64 virtual machines on x64-based hosts
- VHD Mount command-line tool and APIs
- Tested for interoperability with SCVMM Beta 2 RC
- Interoperability with Volume Shadow Copy Service.
- Support for additional Guest and Host Operating Systems
- Service Publication using Active Directory Service Connection Points
- Host clustering whitepaper
- Virtual SCSI fix for Linux guests
- Larger default size for dynamically expanding virtual hard disks
- VMRC ActiveX control and Internet Explorer Security Zones
- IVMGuestOS::Get_OSName property returns more operating system information
Each of these is explained in the Readme.
I suspect there will be quite a lot of interest around VHDMount as we move to release. When beta 2 was out Dave Northey blogged how to install
VHD Mount without virtual server (the instructions seem to have gone from the current release notes and I haven’t tested them) and Ben Armstrong posted a guide to making VHDs mount when you double click them.
Download it
here, if you’re not preregistered with the beta program you have to register
here first.
According to
Ben Armstrong there are no significant new features in this release compared to the beta 2, mostly bugfixes.
Yesterday I was informed that the 2.5 beta version of VMware Lab Manager has been released.
Just to remember what it is again:
Lab Manager is a virtual lab automation system for development and test organizations that allows for rapid setup, storage, capture, and sharing of multi-machine software configurations.
Lab Manager 2.5 Beta is now available. New features include iSCSI and NFS storage support, 64-bit guests, Solaris 10 guests, automatic server pool cleanup, storage server maintenance, and managed server maintenance (release notes). For questions and comments, see the VMTN Lab Manager Discussion Forum.
Whats new:
- Support for ESX Server 3.0.2. Lab Manager also continues to support ESX Server 3.0.1.
- Support for 64-bit guest operating systems. For details, see the guest OS matrix in the VMware Lab Manager Installation Guide at http://www.vmware.com/beta/labmanager/Lab_Manager_Installation_Guide.pdf.
- Broader platform support for guest operating systems. For details, see the guest OS matrix in the VMware Lab Manager Installation Guide at http://www.vmware.com/beta/labmanager/Lab_Manager_Installation_Guide.pdf.
- SMP support. Lab Manager supports virtual machines with multiple CPUs.
- Support for NFS storage as both virtual machine and media storage. Previously, NFS storage could only serve as media storage.
- Automated server pool cleanup. You can automate undeploy and delete operations.
- Managed Server maintenance mode. You can redeploy all virtual machines on a Managed Server system to other Managed Server systems.
- Storage maintenance tools. Lab Manager provides a graphic and tabular view of disk space usage to support maintenance of datastore content. From one location, you can perform various operations at the virtual machine level and assess disk space that would become available if you delete a virtual machine and its "hidden" internal nodes.
- Support for Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and ASP.NET version 2.0.5.727.
It’s funny to see that esx 3.0.2 is mentioned here, because if you search on the vmware site or with google you do not find much information about it. At TSX 2007 EMEA I was told that (and thats confirmed now with these release notes) 3.0.2 would come out. Also version 3.1 is somewhere in pre-birth state.
Funny detail in the known error list (it also existed in previous versions of LM) is that Microsoft Vista’s UAC (User Account Control) is having some problems accessing the Lab Manager Web Console (or should I write it the other way round…).
Tags: Virtualization Lab Manager VMware
VMmark is the first benchmark for quantifying the performance of virtualized environments. It features a novel tile-based scheme for measuring the scalability of consolidated workloads and provides a consistent methodology that captures both scalability and individual application performance. VMmark is meant to measure the performance of hardware platforms running virtualized environments.
VMmark is intended to measure performance in an enterprise consolidation scenario. More importantly, it is a benchmark for the entire virtualization platform. Appropriately configured CPU, memory, network, and storage are recommended. In its current form, it still requires some degree of effort to set up and run effectively. Users should have an MSDN subscription (or equivalent) in order to set up and run the Windows workloads. Licensed copies of SPECweb and SPECjbb are also required.
VMware anticipates that the primary users of VMmark will be both vendors and power users like system integrators, consulting agencies, and some customers.
The dare devils among us can download the VMmark-kit containing the VMmark User’s Guide, the configuration files, and much of the software needed to run VMmark. With help from Novell they shipped three pre-configured vm’s for the linux workload.
Users running windows have to create their own workloads based on the instructions provided in the manual. This (not shipping windows workload vm’s) probably has something to do with licensing. Speaking of licenses in order to legally use this software you have to have licenses for some parts used as stated above. Not a very big problem because the companies where VMware is aiming at with this software probably already have those licenses in place. VMware has plans to automate more parts of the installation in the 1.0 version.
Looking at the download page, it really looks like vmware focusses mainly at the linux area, because the downloadable version of the vmware kit is in a tar.gz-format.
Today on the
Windows Server Division Weblog, Mike Neil General Manager of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft officially announced the delay in both the final version of virtual server R2 SP1 and the public beta of windows server virtualization (aka Viridian). Viridian was scheduled for the first half of 2007 but now is moved to the second half, virtual server was scheduled to ship Q1 but now has moved to Q2. The timeline for windows server virtualization (final release) is not affected as stated by Mike Neil, it is still planned to ship 180 days after the Longhorn release.
Reading this news, I’m suddenly very interested if there are any consequences for the (beta) release dates of Service Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Is it still scheduled to be released at WinHEC 2007?
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