VMware Infrastructure - Architecture Advantages:

Well with the final birth of Hyper-v, it might be good to do a little review on the Architectural Advantages of VMware Infrastructure. Check out this article at http://blogs.vmware.com.

Some interesting parts I thought:
“The architecture for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V puts standard device drivers in their management partitions. Those vendors claim this structure simplifies their designs compared to the VMware architecture, which locates device drivers in the hypervisor. However, because Xen and Hyper-V virtual machine operations rely on the management partition as well as the hypervisor, any crash or exploit of the management partition affects both the physical machine and all its virtual machines.”

“The Xen and Microsoft architectures rely on routing all virtual machine I/O to generic drivers installed in the Linux or Windows OS in the hypervisor’s management partition. These generic drivers can be overtaxed easily by the activity of multiple virtual machines – exactly the situation a true bare-metal hypervisor, such as ESXi, can avoid. Hyper-V and Xen both use generic drivers that are not optimized for multiple virtual machine workloads.”

“Products like Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V lack an integrated cluster file system. As a result, storage provisioning is much more complex. For example, to enable independent migration and failover of virtual machines with Microsoft Hyper-V, one storage LUN must be dedicated to each virtual machine. That quickly becomes a storage administration nightmare when new VMs are provisioned. VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMFS enable the storage of multiple virtual machines on a single LUN while preserving the ability to independently migrate or failover any VM.”

VMware Communities Roundtable Discussions:

You should try to give a listen each week to these nice roudtable discussions that happen each week with links to all the topics they discuss.

Main site is here.

VMware Infrastructure Architectural Advantages:

So with Hyper-V releasing tommorrow and the bound to happen Hyper-V is free comments (hopefully know one is falling for that one), you might need to ammunition for the less informed on why VMware is Architecturally better than those others.

Read all about it here.

Virtualization.Info's new REVIEW CENTER:

One of my heroes in the industry for sure, Alessandro Perilli is creating some very nice professional reviews of the major hypervisors. Worth a look for sure.

See more at the Review Center.

Pass-through authentification support in VC 2.5:

Just learned this great tip from the VM / ETC blog. Adjust the properties of your Virtual Center icon to pass-through your logon credentials by adding this:

-passthroughAuth -s vchostname

New VMware Workstation 6 support running ESX 3.5 now!

It appears VMware has listened to the customers and they are putting back in the ability to run VMware ESX 3.5 inside of VMware Workstation. Reports so far are detailed in the links below but it appears at present you can installed ESX 3.5 inside workstation but you can not run any virtual machines yet...with that support coming in the next beta release.

There is also some changes needed in your VMX file. See these links:

http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/workstation6.5b

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/146818?tstart=0

XtraVirt's new FREE SAN Appliance!

Wow...now this is really cool and just what you need to do some of the DR testing. This is a free tool that works similar to LeftHand Network's SAN appliance, using your free space on your ESX servers as replicated ISCSI storage.

The Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) appliance for VMware ESX3 Server, is a free solution to provide the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN – this allows the utilisation of otherwise unused local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA normally only available through the use of a shared storage device. All volume data is synchronously replicated between hosts, providing full fail-over capability with data integrity in the event of host, disk or appliance failure. The appliance is menu driven and has been designed to be as easy to configure as possible, and full documentation is provided. Its features include:

- XVS is a SAN and local Disaster Recovery all-in-one
- It provides enterprise level functionality such as vMotion, DRS, and HA, all using direct attached storage
- All volume data is synchronously replicated between hosts providing full failover capability with data integrity in the event of a host, disk or appliance failure

More Info and download.

Demand for Virtualization Jobs up 40%-mostly for VMware skills:

Virtualization.info has an article or see the full report from DICE.

"There are more than 1,500 jobs posted on Dice that require VMware experience, up 40 percent from only six months ago. Right now, only a handful of jobs call for Hyper-V knowledge..."

Virtualiation.info job board has over 7,500 jobs related to VMware, over 290 to Xen, and just 57 to Hyper-V.

Citrix Releases it's XenDesktop VDI product:

See this article for more info.
Interesting info:
"To deliver its out-of-the-box Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Citrix includes with DDC several other products: the back-end virtualization infrastructure (XenServer), the streaming server (Provisioning Server), the application virtualization & streaming server (XenApp), the SSL VPN gateway (Access Gateway), the monitoring suite (EdgeSight), the QoS engine (WANScaler), the remote control (GoToAssist) and the VoIP gateway (EasyCall)."

"It's worth to note that while Citrix offers its own hypervisor with XenDesktop, the product also supports VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V once available."