Sun 30 Sep 2007
This is something that we’ve been discussing at the day job. Our current Citrix farm has 5 physical servers. Currently we have two in place for clients and a beefier one for corporate use. We’ve got two in place for testing and plan on moving those into production use eventually.
This article from Redmondmag.com highlights points that need to be addressed when thinking about moving to a citrix/virtual enviroment.
Sat 29 Sep 2007
Virtual Iron is a relative new player to the virtualization market. This past Friday at the day job we purchased a four socket license to start testing with at work.
VI has released a guide to getting started with Virtual Iron. The two main features in the guide are Getting Started with Virtual Iron and Creating and Booting a Virtual Server.
Fri 28 Sep 2007
Scott Lowe has a pretty interesting article outlining a number of possibilities concerning Apple and the virtual front. I have wondered for awhile how can Apple expect Microsoft to allow XP and Vista to run on Boot Camp but they won’t allow their own OS X to run virtual on MS hosts. To me it seems kind of like that person at work who always takes takes takes and never gives anything back. I know this is a corporate model of some, but in the grand scheme of things wouldn’t this allow more people to get used to using OS X and maybe just maybe take out the small loan needed for that new shiny Apple desktop?
In the past, I’ve ran OS X virtually and was disappointed in the performance. Yes it’s because it’s not designed for that or even supported. I like OS X, if i could see how it would integrate into my network at the day job or test migrating to it at home before making the plunge it might just get me motivated to buy an Apple desktop.
Flame all you want about how Apple is a hardware company and the os is just to compliment it. That’s becoming more and more irrelevant. Like Scott pointed out in his article, OS X on the iPhone, OS X rumored to be coming to the iPod. OS X on the Apple TV. It seems to me as they are using the os now to run all this hardware. The os is becoming more and more important to Apple and for it’s devices. Just as MS has their Windows CE and Windows Storage and such, Apple is branching out to provide more then just hardware, it’s designing the software to run on it. Selling OS X by itself for non Apple approved hardware and virtual instances would only help them attract more users into the Apple cult userbase.
Lastly, I know this has been talked about before but I just honestly can’t see how Apple is denying consumers this. But as always, it isn’t about what consumers want and will buy. It’s about what Apple thinks the consumers want. Newton anyone?
Wed 26 Sep 2007
VMware released an update to version 1.1 of their OS X based virtualization software called Fusion. The update includes new features and bug fixes.
For a complete list of features and bug fixes VMware has a list of everything on their website.
VMware Fusion Beta 1.1 Beta 1 Release Notes
Tue 25 Sep 2007
WSv (Windows Server virtualization) as you may know has been included in the RC0 release of Windows Server 2008. I came across a great detailed article about how to get it running, though i’m gonna have to wait on a test server with VT before I can begin testing.
John Howard - How to install WSv in W2k8
Tue 25 Sep 2007
Microsoft has reached a milestone with their new server release, Windows Server 2008 Release Candidate 0. This release includes the much anticipated WSV (Windows Server Virtualization). Other notables are IIS 7.0, Server Core, PowerShell, Network Access Protection and Server Manager.
Download Now via Microsoft
Mon 24 Sep 2007
You know you want one, you want your coworkers to be jealous of the life size poster of Cisco products hanging on your wall.
Just click the dang link….
Click here for your free poster
Also check out the site referenced above. Lots of awesome tutorials and videos on IT related stuff. Found it while looking for ESX 3i information.
Mon 24 Sep 2007
This happens when companies try to make things smaller and more effiecient by stripping away useful parts. Now VMware is forcing everyone to use the API or the use the CLI from your Virtual Infrastructure client. I understand the reasoning for this, but it’s hard to rely on something like a java based CLI when stuff gets nasty or you need to automate things with scripts.
Continue reading after the jump below
Mon 24 Sep 2007
So at the day job we’re looking at implementing a SAN along with moving server to something virtual (VMware, Virtual Iron or Xensource) . We like the offerings from LeftHand Networks for the SAN. It’s a software based SAN approach will allow us to grow as we need. We’ve got the quotes from them, but the execs are still leary about spending that much money. It’s a typical battle that everyone in IT fights, but we’re finally making progress.
Last weekend LeftHand released their SAN/iQ as a VMware appliance. This is very very awesome. This allows us to test the functionality of it on our network without getting the vendor in here with a SAN on loan that we end up buying because we’ve already started using it on our production network.
We’ve got an AIX server setup with our production data and have it connected via iSCSI to the appliances setup in a two node cluster. Testing so far has been really good over a 100mbit network. Speeds are similar to the SSA drives our production AIX server has. Will definitely update when we have tested it more.
Sun 23 Sep 2007
I probably don’t have to tell you that virtualization is one of the hottest technologies in the IT world right now. Between the demand for x86 server virtualization at the enterprise, mid, and small business levels as well as the demand for multi-OS and runtime desktop solutions in both the business and consumer markets, virtualization is all the rage.