VMTN Blog

virtualization.info:

• Installing and cloning SAP inside Sun Solaris Containers
• Choosing between VMware Server and ESX Server
• Four typical mistakes adopting virtualization (Processor.com)

VMblog:

• VMDK to VHD Converter Available
• Application Testing Goes Virtual (RedmondDeveloper)
• VMware's Greene: Utilities Pushing Virtualization (ZDNet)
• The merits of Grid and Virtualization (GridComputingNow)

Virtualization Daily dissects the spin on a this article: "They seem to be wanting to make this controversial which is a little odd."

Server consolidation: Marcus Wynwood says all the cool kids are doing it:

Think about it, why would you want to look after a rack full of servers, each with their own OS (that you need to maintain), each with their own spaghetti cable and one big KVM to switch between them when you really only need to look after one or two servers? Instead of having lots of little servers, get your hands on a fast machine with lots of RAM and a big hard drive, and start consolidating your servers with virtualisation.

Todd Biske via Joe McKendrick via Ipedo's Integration Insider:

With SOA and Web services, "it’s entirely possibly to have dramatic changes in load from when the Web Service is first deployed. As a new consumer comes on board, the load on the service can increase by tens of thousands of requests per day or more very easily. Furthermore, the usage patterns may be vary widely. One consumer may use the service every day, another consumer may use it once a month, but hammer it that day. All this poses a challenge for the operational staff to ensure the right amount of resources are available at the right time. The ease of virtualization can allow this to happen."

Transforming Hyperic - What Developers Gain from Virtualizaton

While its true that most virtualization packages these days come with management utilities, most of these are really bent around lifecycle management – which includes provisioning, appliance construction, backup, P2V conversion and monitoring of the hypervisor itself. What’s ignored is the systems management inside the little black boxes that get provisioned. These systems have unique applications and services that are consuming resources. While the hypervisor does a good job in general of providing CPU and disk resources based on your rules, it does not facilitate really understanding the performance of those applications and services operating in the made-up reality of a virtualized host. The management problem is compounded by the ease of which new virtualized systems can be rolled out along with the flexibility of virtual hardware. Not only does this management get harder, it changes more often.

On snapshots:

• Never touch the disks of a snapshot parent (from Gorillapond via OzVMs)
• Beware the long snapshot! (from vmwarez.com)

From OzVMs:

• Changing the IP address of service console in ESX 3.x
• Changing IP address of VirtualServer

Running FreeBSD on VMware Server?

• Enabling high resolution console screen
• Possible solution to calcru problem

From Vitrix:

• VCB, TSM, & VM groups
• ESX freeze on SAN Rescan
• Combining .lic license files
• Moving VMs between datacenters
• manual multipathing explained

More how-to's:

• Forever For Now is where to get empty VMware SCSI disks (via Roy speaks on technology)
• Fun things to do with virtualization #2: Snooping Windows data streams to hardware devices
• Shrinking Linux VMware images