VMware’s Richard Garsthagen: VMware introduces ESX 3i
The real cool thing I like about ESX 3i is that it has support for SATA disks!! meaning it runs on your notebook
Jippie!!!! I have successfully tested ESX 3i on my older Dell laptop
and it works awesome on my IBM x60. The IBM has a really good SATA
controller, that by default is not even supported by Windows XP, but
ESX 3i has no problem what so ever with itAlso the notebook NICs seem no problem for ESX 3i.
Gordon Haff: Embedding Hypervisors
Expect all this activity to kick off another round of “Where does the hypervisor live?”
Microsoft, in particular, is still determined to own the entire
software stack from the VMM to the application. As a result, they’re
still promoting Viridian—however delayed.
It’s a misdirected quest. Although a VMM intermediates between the
hardware and the operating system—and usurps some low-level
functions—it hardly replaces the OS. The APIs and libraries of the OS
are still the “application contract” that underpins the software that
users actually care about. And Microsoft sells a lot of that
higher-level software as well. In other words, it’s hard to see why
Microsoft really needs to own the VMM any more than it needs to own a
server’s BIOS firmware or hardware. In fact, software that abstracts
messy hardware details from Windows would simplify Microsoft
development in a number of ways by reducing myriad complexifying
hardware dependencies. And, in any case, playing King Canute seems an
increasingly pointless exercise as the tide of embedded hypervisors
starts to wash in.
Drue Reeves: ROM-based Hypervisors: The New Data Center Operating System
Write down September 11, 2007 on your calendar as a landmark day for
virtualization. …By shipping the hypervisor on bootable flash
within the server, it fundamentally changes the way we buy applications,
operating systems and hardware platforms. In this scenario, the hypervisor
becomes the operating system, while traditional operating systems become
application run-time environments. Thus, in the future, we won’t buy servers
with traditional OSes pre-installed on the hardware platform. Customers will
buy servers that are virtualization-ready, customizing their purchase with wide
variety of pre-configured VHDs that bundle the application and the operating
system as a solution. You may hear these bundles called "application
blades", "software blades" or "virtual appliances".
Whatever you call them, they represent a new way IHVs will deliver OSV and ISV
solutions.
Joe Hernick: Honey, I Shrunk the Hypervisor
So be on the lookout for
the new thin hypervisor from your favorite hardware vendor. Saying that
this will change the landscape in an already quickly shifting market is
an understatement. If you haven’t started a virtualization project in
your enterprise, an embedded hypervisor that requires no installation
and yields a short order infrastructure deployment should making it
that much harder to stay away.
The Inquirer quoting VMware’s Steve Jackson: VMware’s ESX Server 3i does support AMD’s nested paging tables
To clarify the situation with regards to VMware’s support for AMD’s
Barcelona chipset, I would like to say that I made an error in
describing the level of support that is present for Nested Paging
Tables, or Rapid Virtualisation Indexing as AMD is now calling this
feature, within VMware’s product line-up and particularly within VMware
ESX Server 3i. ESX Server 3i does support the new feature, and
customers will automatically benefit from support for RVI when they buy
any server with the Barcelona chipset and ESX Server 3i installed. ESX
Server 3i is shipping later in the year as part of servers from the
likes of Dell, IBM, HP and Fujitsu Siemens as well as other hardware
vendors.
