VM-Aware

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing some of the guys from the VMware ESXi team.  It was more a Q&A than anything formal, but it was useful for me to try and get a handle on how VMware see how the product has matured.  It was a fairly short discussion, but some of it may be interesting to some people so I thought I would publish it. (more…)

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 great article on how to enable SSH for ESXi, which if you didn’t already know does not have a Service Console to speak of, but is built on the BusyBox distribution. However, it is still possible to remote manage it using SSH with a tweak here and there.

Here’s the great video that shows you how to do it step by step, but check out the rest of the article for more detail:

This is the first post since VMworld and I have a lot to tell you all about, but it’s going to have a wait for a few days until I have time to assimilate everything.

Until then you’re going to have to make do with this great pdf outlining the beauty of ESX Server 3i.

You can find it here:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/ESX_Server_3i_presentation.pdf (more…)

This is not a big post, but more of a check it out post.

Here’s a picture of the main configuration screen of the now in beta ESX Server 3i:

Click the image for a full size version.

I know that strictly speaking XenSource came up with the first embedded hypervisor, but don’t mention that to VMware.

However, VMware have officially announced, the not so well kept secret, I first heard about this in conjunction with Dell servers. It is a great idea and all the major server vendors have been involved, including IBM, HP & Dell. (more…)