Virtualization

Get an early look at Windows Server 2008 virtualization by downloading this product overview. This document provides an overview of Windows Server Virtualization and explores Microsoft's Virtualization Strategy, how it addresses key business needs including server consolidation, business continuity, testing and development, moving toward a dynamic data center and branch office.

You can request evaluation keys here and download the Enterprise Edition ISO image from here.

Windows Server 2008 RC0 system requirements and installation documentation is available here.

Release notes for Windows Server Virtualization (WSv aka Viridian aka Hypervisor) are available here.

Other RC0 editions available:
Datacenter
Standard
Web Server

Windows 2008 technical overview guides are available here. These documents are downloadable versions of guides found in the Windows Server 2008 Technical Library.

If you need Windows Media Services for RC0, you can download those here.

VMWare Workstation 6.0.1 is out.

You can download it from here.

You can view the release notes here.

Noteworthy items:

Workstation 6.0.1 adds experimental support for the following operating systems:
32-bit and 64-bit Windows Server 2008 (code name Longhorn) as host and guest operating systems
32-bit and 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 as host and guest operating systems
32-bit and 64-bit openSUSE Linux 10.3 as host and guest operating systems
32-bit and 64-bit Turbolinux 10 Server as a guest operating system


Workstation 6.0.1 adds full support for the following operating systems:
32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu Linux 7.04 as host and guest operating systems
32-bit and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 (formerly called 4.0 Update 5) as host and guest operating systems
32-bit and 64-bit FreeBSD 6.2 as a guest operating system


User Interface for Collecting Support Data — You can now click a button in the Workstation Help > About dialog box to gather troubleshooting data for VMware Technical Support. Previously, you had to run the script from the command line.

It also addresses 7 security issues.

A pre-made VHD for use with Virtual PC or Virtual Server has been updated to the RTM code of SCVMM. You can grab the VHD here.

It is a great way to get a feel for the product before installing it on 'real iron' for use.

Not much more to add to this than the subject line, but I found this blog posting interesting as a sign of things to come. The landscape in virtualization has really changed in the past few months, with Citrix buying Xen, and Microsoft diving into the hypervisor realm.

I'll be curious to see how everything pans out in the next year or so. It is going to be a wild ride.

Fun fact of the day: Virtualization isn't a new concept - it has been around since the DEC PDP-8/E!

Despite what some LiveJournal people might think, the PDP-8/S was the original "Serial Adder".

It is good to see more community driven/created content on the web for Softgrid. I posted a great forum the other day for Softgrid help and now Microsoft has a new forum on their website here.

Why is Softgrid cool? You can run different versions of programs on the same computer, among other things.
A great tool for running applications that would otherwise never "play nice" with each other on the same host.
A good example: Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007

For Softgrid for Terminal Servers and Softgrid for Windows Desktops only - Fixes a rare package corruption bug.
You can read more about it here and download the update here.

One piece of the upcoming/new Windows Virtualization part of System Center is out the door.

To quote some marketing speak:
“Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, part of the Microsoft System Center family of system management products, provides a simple and cost-effective solution for unified management of physical and virtual machines, consolidation of underutilized physical servers, and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by leveraging the expertise and investments in Microsoft server technology”

Why I like it:
More like VMWare, less like Virtual PC.

The best part:
You can use it today.
You don't have to wait for Viridian / Hypervisor / Windows Server 2008.

You can read the announcement here.

One unexpected aspect: Planned support for Xen and VMWare! I think that is great!

Found this very handy post on the VMWare forums which helped me out quite a bit with my experimental Fedora Rawhide/"FC 8 Test" virtual machines.

Steps involved:
1. Download the latest kernel sources from kernel.org
2. Download and apply the VMWare any any 113+ patch.
3. Extract the kernel sources.
4. (64-bit only) Apply the patch from the message post to revert a commit that broke 64-bit systems.