VM-Aware

One of the great new bits of functionality in ESX 3.5 Update is the ability to hot extend non-boot virtual disks without shutting down the VM.

I decided to give it a go with a Windows 2003 Standard VM and thought I’d provide a How To for anyone that might need/want it.

You can download the pdf here.  It is the first version of the document so please feel free to comment and let me know how to improve it.

I’m working on a Linux equivalent, but to be honest, I have never tried this before in Linux so it might be a while until the Tech Note appears

VMware have recently announced an update to 3.5 & ESXi. Normally VMware slip a few cool features into interim releases, but nothing as major as the inclusions in Update 2. Here’s an overview of some of the major functionality additions.

• VSS quiescing support - Windows 2003 VMs now have application & file system level VSS support via VMware tools.
• Hot Virtual Extend Support - This will allow virtual disks that are running out of disk space to be increased on the fly while the VM is running
• iSCSI & NFS over 10GB Ethernet
• Live Cloning of Virtual Machines - This means that instead of having to power off a machine to clone it, this can now be done while the machine is turned on. Possibly a fore-runner to continuous availability?

All of these features have a massive impact on the way VMs are used and administered and take another leap away from Microsoft in terms of functionality.

I can’t wait to see what will be included in ESX4.

VMware recently published an article on the Virtual Reality blog that raises some interesting points as to why VMware is better than Xen & Hyper-V.

Some of the areas that get particular analysis are:

• Uptime
• Direct driver model
• Memory management

More interesting still are some of the comments to post, have clearly been made by Citrix & Microsoft employees or people with a vested interest.

I find some of the points amusing, but my 2 penneth worth is thus:

• No VMotion or equivalent = not production ready

I think that this in itself is a good enough reason to use VMware over anything else.  There are a multitude of other reasons, that hundreds of posts discuss, but this is the one for me.  Even after all these years, the ability to transfer one running VM from one host to another amazes me.

It’d be interesting to see what people think, so please do comment and see if we can get a debate going.

Virtualization.info reported today that VMware will give ESXi away completely free.

I have no idea how much revenue was brought in by ESXi, but I’d imagine compared to ESX proper it was a small proportion.  Nonetheless it is going to be a big shot in the arm for virtualisation proliferation.

A great move I think, as it will cause Microsoft a little concern that companies will use this as a shoe in to a far superior product.

It’s not free yet, but should be at the end of the month, according to virtualization.info.

A number of customers have mentioned over the years that surely IBM & HP must be worried about virtualisation impinging on overall hardware sales. I always said that the kinds of servers that people buy for virtualisation are usually significantly more expensive than the customers would previously have purchased. This means that the volume might be lower, but the overall spend has a tendency to be as high if not higher.

This seems to have been the case for IBM at least as they have managed to get back to the top of the server hardware sales tree in the second quarter. With revenues topping $3.9B according to Gartner which means they overtake HP with total sales at $3.8B. The interesting bit to me is how IBM can sell less than half (302,000) that of HP (680,000) and still make more money.

I read about this story over at the Avastu Blog of Tarry Singh. I particularly like this blog for its informative and insightful post.

Xenocode have released a new version of their Virtual Application Studio and it has some really great features now to rival VMware’s ThinApp including:

• Deploy complex apps in a single executable
• Stream with no infrastructure changes
• Execute .NET and Java with no runtime
• Run legacy applications on Vista
• Execute on locked-down desktops
• Completely user mode implementation
• Leverage existing management tools (more…)