VMTN Blog

Stuck inside this weekend? Here are some links for your virtual reading pleasure:

Geert Baeke at baeke.info:

• Playing with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)
• Export a vmdk virtual disk to a SAN lun

Sun's Lou Springer at Inchoate Curmudgeon should be on your reading list :

• Could Virtual Appliances be the iTunes of Enterprise Services?
• iSCSI Whitebox Performance
• The Hurdles
• ESX on X4600 "The x4600 is an 8 processor, 16 core AMD Opteron machine. If you’ve ever wondered what 70 vm’s on a single box would look like, wonder no more."
• x4100 + SunRay + VMware: Virtual Lab

Mark Wilson asks:

Ever since Microsoft announced its new licensing policy for virtualisation, I've been trying to get an answer on whether the "4 free guests with every copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition (or unlimited guests with DataCenter Edition)" applies when non-Microsoft virtualisation products are in use.

And gets an answer from Microsoft's FAQ on virtualisation

"Licensing does not depend on which virtualization technology is used. With a license for Windows Server 2003 R2, Enterprise Edition, you can run one instance of the software in a physical operating system environment and up to four instances in virtual operating system environments. With VMWare GSX Server, this means you can run one physical instance plus four virtual instances. With VMWare ESX Server, it means you can run four virtual instances because there is no need for a physical instance."

(He also wonders why VMware hasn't clarified its licensing for 8-core processors. But man, the quad cores are just coming out, so announcing anything about 8 cores seem premature, doesn't it?)

A bunch of Security Matters: Virtual Machine detection

Nowadays, more than 50% of the malware that we analyze has some kind of virtual machine detection in its code (typically the SIDT method), and if they detect any virtual machine, they just do nothing. So, perhaps that's a good idea for our production servers, migrating them to virtual software and in any case they got compromised, the malware code won't run on them.

murphee's rant: Virtual Build Appliances

Let me be clear about this: this is the way that software will be distributed. Virtualization solutions like this (be it VMWare or Xen) will allow us to leave the current mess of software dependencies behind. No worrying about target Operating systems, their versions, their current state of configuration, or (for Windows machines) their current system rot status. Nope, just setup everything you need in a system, preconfigure it, and when you‘re ready to ship: freeze it. The user simply takes your images, points his VMWare or Xen at it and … well… that‘s it. Throw in solutions like Qemu, and you don‘t even have to care what CPU your user is running.

A Day in the Life: Singing the Same Old Song (go read the whole blog; warning: strong language and very funny: make sure your drink doesn't spurt out all over your keyboard)

But what about operating system base images? That's where it gets tricky. Only the admins have access to set VMWare to point the "CD drive" to an ISO image in order to install a new OS. Rusty knows not of Red Hat or SuSE and with gentle prodding can be convinced to accept a new, latest-and-greatest ISO from ftp.novell.com, but he does know Windows. He knows that Vista is beta and that we don't support beta.

Simon Wilson: What will happen to virtualization?

oraclesoon: Ask VMWare to generate unique id (UUID)

Vincent Vlieghe's Virtrix - Virtual Tricks looks like a good how-to blog to watch:

• VMware: HA cluster configuration and DNS
• VMware: memory reservations and swap files
• General: to Virtualize Applications or not (ok, you have to read Dutch for this one)
• VMware: how big can VM snapshots grow?
• VMware: physical switch load balancing

vmToolbox: VMDK to VHD Converter Available

If you're still looking for something to read, check out Planet V12n for the last week of goings-on in the virtualization world.