VMTN Blog

For your long weekend's listening pleasure, we're very pleased to present the very first episode of the

Each week, we'll bring together experts and leaders from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs to discuss the interesting topics in virtualization. Think of this as if it were a group meeting up at VMworld over a pint to chat about the latest news.

We record the call and make it available for your podcast listening pleasure. Listen with the player over on the right, download directly, or use the podcast feed from TalkShoe.

Our first show ranged from an open source Virtual SAN appliance, how to think about and use snapshots, Service Console security, and Hyper-V comparisons. We had a great start to this new show -- thanks to everybody for calling in!

If you're a virtualization blogger and interested in participating, drop me a line. Also let us know if you liked the show and what topics you'd like to have us cover -- either comment here or over on the VMware Communities thread.

Here are some of the things we talked about:

1:28 Steve Beaver reports from the Orlando Virtualization Forums.

• VMware Virtualization Forum 2008
• Report from the Orlando Forum

6:00 Alex Mittell and Tom Howarth discuss the xtravirt Virtual SAN Appliance.

• xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS)
• Communities thread

15:00 Eric Siebert talks about what to do when your snapshot fills your disk and general confusion around ESX snapshots

• 70GB Snapshot, YIKES!
• How VMware snapshots work (Pt. 1)
• Deleting virtual machine snapshots without wasting disk space (Pt. 2)  
• Troubleshooting VMware snapshots (Pt. 3)
• xtravirt SnapHunter
• vmprofessional snapalert
• Eric's blog postings on the Server Virutalization Blog
• translating the snapshot UI button names to what they actually do from sanbarrow
• Comparison of VI3 backup tools from vmprofessional

25:00 Edward Haletky talks about security, network topology and the Service Console

• DMZ Virtualization with VMware Infrastructure from VMware
• VMware Virtual Networking Concepts from VMware
• Managing VMware VirtualCenter Roles and Permissions from VMware
• Security Design of the VMware Infrastructure 3 Architecture from VMware
• Edward's blog postings at CIO.com
• ESXi

39:00 Dave Mishchenko talks about apples-to-apples comparisons when looking at virtualization platforms

• ITcomparison on VMware Infrastructure vs Hyper-V
• From Virtual Reality Blog
  • Those Darn Details
  • Microsoft's Virtualization ROI/TCO Calculator: Our Take
  • Memory Overcommit in the Real World
• Virtual Infrastructure products: feature comparison from Massimo Re Ferre' at IT 2.0
• Sum-up of Quick Migration vs VMotion discussion from Rich Brambley at VM /ETC

Have a great weekend!