Today’s the last day before a week long vacation over Thanksgiving and it’s been a continual mad dash for the finish line.  The rain is falling, the wind is howling, and I’m not looking forward to a vacation painting project…what better time than to catch up on a few key virtualization links that I have built up over the past…month! Wow, guess I’ve been busier than I remember.  😉  Some of these might be a bit old news (unless you have been living under a virtual rock lately…like me), but still valuable to raise to your awareness.

Have a safe and relaxing Thanksgiving holiday (at least here in the States).

VMware Specific Links

• New Releases over the past Month.5
  • The New VMware Website…in case you didn’t notice, it was entirely redesigned and rebranded.  More details about Where Did the Boxes Go? and the new holistic and consistent brand
  • VMware Fusion 3:  all the details on the Team Fusion blog post announcing availability.  (Sad to say that I still haven’t build a Win7 VM for my Fusion yet…)
  • VMware Workstation 7:  again all the details on the Workstation Zealot blog post announcing availability.
  • VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1
  • VMware View 4.0:  Software based PCoIP!
    • VMware View Point: Why PCoIP is Ideal for Remote Virtual Desktops
    • View 4 Production Info and a collection of View 4 Videos on YouTube
    • Video Demo of the power of View 4 PCoIP from down under (great video despite the jerkiness)
    • View 4 product download (as of this writing View 4 was being made available for download on the VMware website…)
  • VMware vCenter Capacity IQ 1.0:  release notes
  • VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.0.1:  release notes
  • VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat 5.5 U2
  • SpringSource Spring Framework 3.0
• VMware Opens Next Generation Green Datacenter:  VMware opened a new green IT datacenter in East Wenatchee, Washington.  Read about how VMware plans to save $5M per year due to it’s design.
• Operation Virtualization: VMware CTO, Steve Herrod, discusses how virtualization changes the way we should think about operating systems.
• Hyperic + SpringSource + VMware = Goodness: Hyperic’s view of the open-source systems management world
• Access your View virtual desktop on your iPhone with Wyse’s PocketCloud.  No word on View4 support…yet.
• HP Announced their Converged Infrastructure Architecture recently, a “a blueprint for chief information officers to create elasticity in their technology environments.”  Here’s a video from VMware’s VP of Product Marketing talking about VMware and this new architecture.
• Need a local copy of VMware’s product documentation?  Then check out xtravirt’s VMware Documentation Downloader.
• Are you still confused about ESX 4.0 compared to ESXi 4.0?  Better start getting straightened out as ESXi is the way of the future…
• xtravirt has a great white paper on Tape Backup Integration with VMware Data Recovery (VDR)

General Virtualization & Cloud Links

• Many have wondered, and now we know…What would 6 Million Virtual Machines Look Like?
• Cloud storage market sees continued growth as Hitatchi Looks to the Cloud for Storage.
• EMC Provides Validated Approach for Customers to Apply Virtualization Technology in Oracle Environments.  (First you validate, then you…)
• An interesting look from CIO Magazine Inside One Firm’s Private Cloud Journey
• Which 50% Will You Virtualize? Some interesting thoughts on statements made about Hyper-V R2
• As Microsoft heats up their battle with VMware, I think we’ll all be more Layers and Layers of FUD…
• IBM Acts to Enhance Security of Virtualized Environments.
• Liveblog of Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie talking about Azure and more.

I’m a bit delayed with this edition of the Virtualization Round Up due to some challenges with upgrading my MacBook Pro over the weekend (don’t you just love unforeseen production outages!  And over a weekend no less…there’s a couple of blog posts coming out of this…).  Slightly delayed, but just still within the best when consumed by date, here’s the latest super-sized Round Up:

VMware Specific Links

• New Releases
  • Workstation 7 RC was recently released.  No, this is not the official release, but an early version that you can test and play with…
  • Fusion 2.0.6 was recently released.  A maintenance upgrade that is free for all Fusion 1.x and 2.x users.
  • It was announced today that Fusion 3.0 will be available on October 27th, pre-orders are currently being taken.
  • SRM 4.0 was released today.  This version of SRM works with vSphere 4.0 and NFS support.  Make sure you check the SA compatibly matrix to make sure your storage has an adapter available.  Some of the EMC platforms are currently not on the list…
  • While not an official VMware product, View Open Client 4.0 Beta 1 was recently released. (now that my Mac is working again, maybe I should try installing it…)
• Ricky El-Qasem of VirtualizePlanet recently release his vSphere Plugin Wizard which makes it easy to embed a website or web portal into vCenter.
• Dell and VMware recently announced a broadened partnership on the Desktop front in which Dell will offer VMware View as an option for its Flexible Computing solutions.
• Dave Lawrence has a great post out discussing getting more advanced with View.  A few more advance items you can can configure with View.
• Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4 and ESX 4.0 is a new guide available on the communities site.
• As I’ve indicated before, I think Fault Tolerance is one of the key new features within vSphere. In some recent testing that Todd Muirhead did he showed how even with using a 1vCPU Exchange VM,  FT is a real value added feature that shouldn’t be overlooked.  You may also want to check out Eric Siebert’s Master’s Guide to VMware Fault Tolerance for all the FT details.
• Are you a VMware shop that would love to run Oracle virtualized but hesitate due to support statement confusions?  Then you’ll find Oracle on VMware posts at Virtual Geek (including part II) worth the read.  The longer you’re in the industry the more you have to laugh at the games…
• VMsafe is another key new aspect of vSphere which I have been disappointed to see hasn’t taken off faster.  Every View client of mine has been beating up their security vendors on VMsafe for the past few months.  So, What is happening with VMsafe?
• I updated the VMware Network Port list with a link to an interested graphical representation of this information that another colleague of mine here at VMware created.
• An interesting post by Maish Saidel-Keesing & discussion about using memory over commit made me chuckle a bit as I remember ever time I heard a client proud about how they are running their systems memory at the high rate of 50% utilized.
• And those who worry about over committing memory better buckle their seats when they see what the future holds, as Intel and VMware discussed some of the new memory and power management technologies they are working on.
• James Urquhart hits the nail on the head with his recent posts Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 1 and Part 2.  His thinking dovetails what Paul Maritz has been saying since before the launch of vSphere.  With virtualization creating a huge mainframe, do you need all the bloat of traditional OS?  A application specific hosting container running as the “VM” starts making a lot of sense…oh yeah, and VMware bought SpringSource…
• A client recently asked for help in identifying which physical NIC his VM was using for troubleshooting, and luck would have it the VMware Networking Blog just posted a tip for doing this with vSphere.  If anyone knows an equivalent method for VI3, please post in the comments!
• I found this recent post Comparing VMware’s Cloud to Amazon S3 comical in it’s mis-understandings.  VMware doesn’t host their own cloud (at least not commercially for others to use).  They make the software that allows others to create their own cloud.  vCloud is just a marketing term to indicate partners who are building upon the VMware vSphere platform.
• As I have a number of clients planning large P2V conversions, Eric Siebert’s article on Removing old hardware after a P2V conversion is very timely.

General Virtualization & Cloud Links

• I found it interesting that Adobe is offering a cloud service for Flash, while this is essentially a CDN for Flash applications, it is another example of how far the cloud front as spread.  As Matt Mullenweg recently tweeted, has Cloud jumped the shark?  Maybe in marketing aspects…
• Ron Oglesby from Dell shares some great research around the question of is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization? While ever IT shop can argue how the adoption curve methodology doesn’t work for their organization, this is an important topic that all users of virtualization have to be asking themselves as dragging of feet with virtualization in today’s economy has the hardest of business impacts.