New VMware Training Options:

VMware has opened new Online training options to make learning more flexible.

VMware's innovative Flex Online program enables you to take our flagship VMware Infrastructure 3: Install and Configure course online in a way that fits your busy schedule.

If you only have time on the weekends or before or after your workday, Flex Online is right for you. Over a span of two weeks, Flex Online gives you multiple opportunities to hear each lecture and participate in discussion. You choose among several time blocks during those two weeks in which to perform the course's lab exercises. Some options are on weekends and others are on weekdays.

You can learn more here.

Enrollment has started also for Site Recovery Manager training here.

VMWORLD 2008 Schedule Builder is LIVE!!!

Get your reservations fast before they fill up (especially the instructor led labs)!

To go the Scheduler.

MAJOR BREAKING NEWS...VMware offers free ESX Version to battle Microsoft!!:

Exactly what I was hoping VMware would do, I just read this information at this site!
This is going to be really good for VMware and combating the competition. Now just need to work on that licensing model some.

" The next version of ESXi, which will come in about two weeks, will be available at no cost, said VMware CEO Paul Maritz. ESXi is a basic hypervisor, which is technology that separates the OS from server hardware so multiple OSes can run virtually on one physical server."

New Version of ESXManager tool (free):

New features are:

Virtual Center independent
Keeps track of Virtual Machine Host Registration, Migrations and Status
Manage Virtual Machine Configuration
Display and work in the Virtual Machine Console
Kill Virtual Machine Process (if the VM can't be powered off)
Rename Virtual Disks of registered Virtual Machines
Move Virtual Disks and keep the disk attached to the Virtual Machine
Virtual Machine Registration, Start , Restart , Reset, Power Off, Suspend
Extend Virtual Disks
View-Search-Filter Logfiles on the ESX Host.
Define and save custom SSH commands with Parameter handling
Publish and share custom SSH commands with other ESX Administrators

Dowload here.

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