VM-Aware

Now this is not really anything to with virtualisation, but the application blew me away so much that I had to at least give it a mention.

You know how sometimes you wish that Windows had integrated virtual desktops, like Linux does? Well I do all the time and have tried quite a few apps over the years. They were all either dog slow or buggy as hell, not Shock 4Way 3D. This bad boy is completely seamless, is super fast and so far, extremely stable indeed.

You can download it here and see a screen shot of it in action here.

If you find that using the limited space of a laptop screen too restrictive then using this will alleviate all your woes.

Here’s an interesting press release that goes to show how working closely with one of the most important IT hardware companies in the world can pay dividends.

Virtual Iron have worked closely with Intel on their new Intel® VT FlexPriority enhancement to the newest Quad Core processors. This has seen 35% increases in performance on 32bit virtualised operating systems and 40% boot time reductions.

Lot more information can be found by clicking here.

I don’t like to show favouritism, but IBM do make some incredible kit. I know it isn’t cool to get excited about servers, but I had the privilege of seeing a new M2 version of the excellent x3850.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me, but some of the design enhancements were incredible.

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Sun have just announced a potentially market conquering piece of kit called the Sun Fire X4450 server.

This puppy is a 2U server that support 4 x Quad Core Intel Xeon CPUs with a colossal 128GB of RAM via its 32 Dimm Slots. (more…)

VMware have just released an updated SAN HCL and it now offers full support for the N3000 series of IBM iSCSI based storage subsystems.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_guide.pdf

This is definitely becoming a viable alternative to IBM’s FC range of storage subsystems.

I heard a lot of talk about using NFS at VMworld, but dismissed it out of hand. This was until I saw a demonstration on the NetApp stand, for which I found a blog entry, going over the theory:

http://storagefoo.blogspot.com/2007/09/vmware-over-nfs.html (more…)