Stuck inside this weekend? Here are some links for your virtual reading pleasure:
Geert Baeke at baeke.info:
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.
