Mike Laverick again shares another screenshot-filled pdf guide, this time with his upgrade notes. Overall it went OK, but he had a few issues with the VC upgrade. As always, you should backup, snapshot, and try it on non-production machines first.

Link: RTFM Education » Blog Archive » Upgrading to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 Experiences.

The ESX upgrade part is relatively easy – given that the upgrade process can modify your configuration (as in my SSH example) and that moving a VM off an ESX host is simple. I think I would still prefer to wipe my ESX hosts and do a clean install – adding them back into VirtualCenter. This is not without consequences. It means losing some of that precious performance data collected over a number of weeks or months.

The VMware Fusion Team is happy to announce that VMware Fusion 1.1.1 is now available, addressing 15 issues reported by our customers.

 VMware Fusion 1.1.1, a free update for current VMware Fusion customers and available in all the languages Fusion currently ships in, also adds a nifty new feature to transparently remap keyboard shortcuts when going back and forth between applications in the virtual machine and the Mac, regardless of what view the virtual machine is in.

 For example, VMware Fusion now remaps Command –X from the keyboard to Ctrl-X in the virtual machine whether in Full Screen, Single Window or Unity. The same remapping happens for Command-Z/-C/-V/-P/-A/-F.  Previously, VMware Fusion only did this remapping in Unity mode.

What this means to users, is that when copying something from the Mac side to paste into the virtual machine, and vice versa, you no longer have to remember “Is it Ctrl-V, or Command-V to paste here? Which machine am I interacting with?”

The effect is a more integrated blending of the two operating systems, so your Mac and Windows work together seamlessly, where the user only has to remember one set of keyboard shortcuts! 

Keyboard remapping can be turned on and off in the VMware Fusion > Preferences dialog.

To download VMware Fusion 1.1.1, go to: 

http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/ 

For a complete list of changes, go to: 

http://www.vmware.com/support/fusion/doc/releasenotes_fusion.html#new111

~The VMware Fusion Team

Christofer Hoff talks about how NAC (Network Access Control) appliance vendors are coping in a world where all compute nodes are virtualized, all nodes are flying around with VMotion, all traffic is going through virtual switches, and you're trying to protect access to the cloud -- is that like nailing Jello to the wall?

Link: Rational Survivability: UPDATED: How the Hypervisor is Death By a Thousand Cuts to the Network IPS/NAC Appliance Vendors.

Virtualization is causing IPS and NAC appliance vendors some real pain in the strategic planning department.  I've spoken to several product managers of IPS and NAC companies that are having to make some really tough bets regarding just what to do about the impact virtualization is having on their business. ...

It's especially hard for vendors whose IPS/NAC software is tied to specialty hardware, unless of course all you care about is enforcing at the "edge" -- wherever that is, and that's the point.  The demarcation of those security domain diameters has now shrunk.  Significantly, and not just for servers, either.  With the resurgence of thin clients and new VDI initiatives, where exactly is the client/server boundary? ...

...and it's going to get even more hairy as the battle for the architecture of the DatacenterOS also rages.  The uptake of 10Gb/s Ethernet is also contributing to the mix as we see customers:

• Upgrading from servers to blades
• Moving from hosts and switches to clusters and fabrics
• Evolving from hardware/software affinity to gird/utility computing
• Transitioning from infrastructure to service layers in “the cloud”

He also points to Chris Silva @ Forrester with much the same concerns:

Server virtualization blurs segmentation models. ... Client virtualization proliferates MAC addresses and blurs endpoints.  ... Application virtualization hides setting and blurs endpoint status.

From Massimo Re Ferre':  Why Desktop Virtualization is not as easy as Server Virtualization. He brings up a number of barriers to thin client computing that have remained true over the years. I do think that this is the psychological one is the most important -- ever since Apple II's and IBM PC's began sneaking into corporations, they've been my personal computer. Even if the end user experience with thin client computing is fine, it still feels like the IT department is taking power away from me, the end user. All that being said, however, everything I hear says full steam ahead for VDI deployments.

- End-user Experience. There is a big difference between virtualizing a server and virtualizing a desktop from an end-user perspective. You, as a CIO / Sys Admin, can virtualize a server or even the whole server farm and no one at your company would even notice it. It's just your own decision to do that or not to. In a desktop virtualization scenario, as soon as you start deploying the first thin client you are opening it up to the whole company. Immediately you have exposed your decision to dozens / hundreds / thousands of  other individuals that, for good reasons or political reasons, will start to challenge you. Good reasons might be technical limitations that you have to compromise with as of today, limitations for which a thin client can sometimes hardly cope, in terms of local device attachment support / multimedia video performance / flexibility / off-line capabilities etc etc, with a standard desktop deployment. I can assure you that no single "average end-user" would ever realize that their mail system in the back is now running on a vm whereas yesterday it was physical; however even the more "IT-candid end-user" would understand that he / she is using Outlook from a "little box where I cannot even attach my iPOD anymore" as opposed to the PC he / she was used to! And there is when political problems start.

The good folks from Hyperic and Mosso have put together a nice recorded presentation on managing the operations of your virtual infrastructure -- keeping track of your virtual appliances as they are VMotioned around your pool, maintaining performance history across migrations, comparing guest and host metrics, things like that. Stacey Schneider shares the story on the Hyperic blog. Mosso (a hosting provider of over 35K web sites) also shares some war stories about firing up multiple copies of their web servers when one of their customers publishes his annual Macworld coverage on his blog.

One of the Mosso guys -- not sure if it's Jason or Jonathan -- also repeats some outdated conventional wisdom about what kinds of workloads are appropriate to virtualize. From a hosting provider's perspective, I can see keeping it simple, but be aware that you might be surprised at what is virtualizable these days. As always, the answer is 'it depends' on the characteristic of your particular workload, but many of our customers are virtualizing all workloads by default and are running their RDBMS applications happily in their virtual infrastructure.

From VMware's Gerod Carfantan, a new blog vmMBA, "Exploring the Business Side of Virtualization." Here's an excerpt from his latest article: vmMBA.com: The Virtualization Adoption Lifecycle.

Level 5 - "Business Transformation [2008]

 

This is the year of Business Transformation through virtualization. 

Some organizations got a head start on Business Transformation in 2006-2007 through the uses of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Virtual Software Lifecycle Automation (VSLA) tools like Lab Manager. These tools allowed them to change the way development infrastructure or desktop services were built and managed, without transforming their production server infrastructure.  We're seeing an increased adoption of those solutions, but my focus here is on the transformation of the way production servers are architected, built, managed, and commercialized.

Another key development is the concept of "Transient VMs".  Traditional (physical) server architecture means static servers, built for a purpose, and those servers typically "stick around" for a long, long time.  A server that is powered on and placed on the network is a server that must be patched and managed.  Transient VMs are those that are created for a purpose, but then may be archived or destroyed as required. 

Examples may include test VMs (clones of production, perhaps), development environments in Lab Manager, or legacy applications in VMs that can be powered off and archived for compliance reasons.  Plus, the great thing about powered-off VMs these days is that they can be patched with VMware Update Manager (in other words, the best of both worlds: a patchable VM that doesn't need to be managed on a day-to-day basis).

A third development is the use of advanced automation with virtualization.  VMs, because of their portability and flexibility, are a much better object for automation than physical machines.  This has given rise to solutions such as Dunes VS-O (now part of VMware), which automates hundreds of workflows that normally would be performed manually.

A fourth development is the fact that organizations (both outsourcers and internal IT shops) are offering new services that use virtualization at their core.  These includes Disaster Recovery (using internal assets instead of third parties), on-demand computing, or hosted virtual desktop.  For outsourcers in particular, it means that they can get new revenue streams, without increasing their customer's overall IT spend (usually, the customer gets more revenue, and the customer reduces costs).

A combination of organizational experience, experience in the systems integrator community, and product capability has given us the "perfect storm" in 2008 for business transformation.

Kenon Owens over at the new VMware: Virtual Reality blog takes on check box marketing. If you call something a "resource pool" if it's really just a bulk configuration option? Is an initial placement of a VM the same as DRS? Or for that matter, is quick migration really the same as VMotion?

Link: Can I have the Check, Please? | VMware: Virtual Reality.

So as you can see, they are trying to marginalize our advances by saying their minimal features are equivalent to our feature rich and fully baked products. Take a look at the table below and see if their capabilities warrant a check.

	Citrix XenServer Enterprise	Microsoft Hyper-V	VMware Infrastructure 3
Continuous Optimization - Across Physical Host Machines	-	-	√
Optimized Initial Placement of Virtual Environments on Power On	√	√	√
Distributed Power Management	-	-	√
Aggregate Collections of Hardware Resources for	-	-	√
Create Child Pools for dynamic resource distribution	-	-	√
Multi-VM Resource Guarantees	-	-	√
Live Migration of Virtual Environments	√	-	√

To be honest, though, check marks aren't enough. If we were simply selling "Speeds and Feeds" you would see that we blow the competition away, but at VMware, we aren't creating features, we are providing solutions. We are helping customers  solve their real world problems that go way beyond server consolidation.

A clarification about VECD licensing from Warren Ponder at the Virtual Desktop Blog. Warren is referring to Rich Brambley's posting over at VM /ETC about The hidden cost of VDI - VECD. Note that in all of yesterday's sound-and-fury from Microsoft, they did reduce the VECD license cost from $78 to $23 dollars.

Link: VMware Communities: Virtual Desktop Blog: VMware VDI - Understanding VECD Licensing.

The initial white paper released explaining VECD created more confusion than clarity. I know I read it many times and each time, I came away with a new interpretation. Fortunately I have some close contacts at Microsoft I was able to sync up with, back in September, at VMworld. VECD was top of the list to get clarified. Who better to hear it from the horses mouth. At VMworld Microsoft was handing out a recently completed license brief that had yet to be published on the Microsoft web site.

This license brief as well as my conversation with the owner at Microsoft, went a long way in clarify things for me. Unfortunately, I failed to share it had posted when it did. I recommend, Anyone interested in better understanding VECD should read this license brief. It covers VECD for SA and VECD. The document is titled Licensing Vista for Use with Virtual Machine Technologies and can be found on the Volume Licensing Briefs site.

VMware: Virtual Reality is a new group blog from VMware that covers virtualization technology and the virtualization landscape. Its motto: "Setting the Record Straight One Post at a Time." Mike DiPetrillo checks in after a hectic day at Macworld and gives us four reasons to switch over to VMware Fusion. (I was there and can vouch for the hectic crowded VMware Fusion booth! -jmt)

Link: The Chaos (aka Macworld) Begins | VMware: Virtual Reality.

Today was my first day in the VMware booth at MacWorld 2008. Man was it crowded! What a show so far with Jobs announcing 4 great new technologies (my Apple TV thanks you). What really peaked my interest was all of the people coming by and asking what made VMware Fusion so much better than Parallels for Mac. Ed Baig from USA Today even got me on film talking about this very subject. So here's my personal (non corporate marketing) rundown on why I think we're better than Parallels. For what it's worth I used Parallels for a long time since VMware didn't have anything on the Mac. I loaded up Fusion since I work for VMware and decided to give it a try. The points below are what got me to switch. Yeah, I know, you say I would have switched anyways since I work for the company. Not true. I'm a technologist and use what works better. Anyhow, here's the list. For what it's worth I used Parallels for a long time since VMware didn't have anything on the Mac. I loaded up Fusion since I work for VMware and decided to give it a try. The points below are what got me to switch. Yeah, I know, you say I would have switched anyways since I work for the company. Not true. I'm a technologist and use what works better. Anyhow, here's the list.

Today we're pleased to announce the acquisition of Thinstall and its agentless application virtualization technology. Here is VMware's Warren Ponder on the significance on his Virtual Desktop Blog:

Where VMware VDI enables organizations to break the bind between the Desktop OS and physical desktops systems. Thinstall allows organizations to break the bind of the Desktop OS and the Applications. Combined organizations will be able to start delivering dynamic desktop environments and better manage desktop computing across the enterprise. With the ThinStall VOS - Virtual Operating System, organizations can easily package and deploy the most complex applicaitons without worrying about application conflicts or costly and challenging application sequencing operations.

For a deep dive, there is an hour-long video, podcasts, white papers, and some downloadable trials on the VMware site: VMware to Acquire Thinstall.

Brian Madden, noted desktop computing expert, calls it "a brilliant move": VMware buys Thinstall! What does it mean?

The key differentiator between Thinstall and the other products is that Thinstall is "agentless." It doesn't require any software agent to be pre-installed on a workstation before Thinstall-packaged applications can run.  ...

The most obvious place for Thinstall in VMware's solution stack is for use with their Windows XP and Windows Vista desktop delivery products, including their VDI solutions for server-based computing scenarios and VMware ACE for local computing scenarios. Thinstall is great here because the more apps you package with Thinstall, the less you have to build into your base Windows disk image that your desktop users will use.

Last September I wrote an article about the importance of a "stateless" desktop disk (which is important regardless of whether your users are running the desktop locally or remotely). Owning an application virtualization capability allows VMware to offer a more complete desktop delivery solution. ...

The bottom line is that it's no secret I think this is a brilliant move on VMware's part. (In fact I wrote "they might as well buy someone like ThinStall" in an article last October about whether VMware should focus more on applications.) What a great day in our industry!

Alessandro Perilli at virtualization.info: VMware Acquires Thinstall

Given the strong focus of Thinstall on Microsoft platforms, the acquisition seems to validate an important point, often emerging in surveys: large majority of virtual machines contain Windows guest OSes.

At the same time this acquition validates once and forever the fact that application virtualization is considered one the next mainstream technology for most major players ...