This weeks theme on Planet V12n most definitely was VMworld and all the drama surrounding it. It's been discussed over and over so I will not go in to the details, everyone has his own opinion and let's just leave it at that. Technically speaking it was also an exciting week, VMware View 3.1 has been released and a large number of excellent blogs have been published of which the following 5 where my personal favorites:
- Arnim van Lieshout – ESX Memory Management – Part 3
The ESX kernel scans VM memory pages regularly and generates a hash
value for every scanned page. This hash value is then compared to a
global hash table which contains entries for all scanned pages. If a
match is found, a full comparison of both pages is made to verify that
the pages are identical. If the pages are identical, both physical
pages (guest) are mapped to the same machine page (host) and the
physical pages are marked “Read-Only”. Whenever a VM wants to write to
this physical page, a private copy of the machine page is made and the
PPN-to-MPN mapping is changed accordingly. - Tom Howarth – VMware Release View 3.1
As you are aware I work in the VDI marketspace and utilize a significant about of VMware View in my solutions. These solutions are currently based on VMware View 3.0.1, but can now be based on wait for it (drum roll please mister musician man) VMware View 3.1. So what is the hype , what is new in VMware View 3.1? - Dave Mishchenko – The official unofficial vSphere Whitebox HCL
The Whitebox HCL is a list of servers, PCs, motherboards and storage controllers that are not officially supported for use with VMware ESX and ESXi, but have been found to function properly. If you have a system that you'd like to try that isn't on VMware HCL or the Whitebox HCL, you can check here to see if ESXi 4.0 will recognize your storage and network controller. -
Rawlison Riverra – vSphere Lab on VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation
I know that running ESX in a virtual machine is not new… that kind of thing has been talked about and done all over the web. But lately several people have asked me how to set that up. I guess now that the new vSphere products are on the market, everyone wants to get the most out of their new features. So, here it is… I’m going to share with everyone how I configure my virtualized test environment of vSphere with VMware Fusion. - Daniel Eason – Siloed DRS Clusters – Would you, do you or will you have to?
Getting push back when wanting to Virtualise applications which are still under licensing policies that go back to the dark ages is definitely a kick in the teeth to anyone waxing lyrical about Virtualisation, also its very hard for someone who believes in the excellent benefits of cutting edge technology such as VMware that an ISV could be so backwards and cruel. The most common barrier with the licensing model you experience is you can't virtualise something due to the fact you have to license all Physical CPUs and sometimes even the Cores on 32 hosts in your DRS Cluster just to run it on a single VM instance, the cost just makes it impractical and I think any VM Lover would see sense (after punching a wall) in this.
