Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

“With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, we are focused on the core pillars of developer experience, support for the latest platforms spanning client, server, services and devices, targeted experiences for specific application types, and core architecture improvements,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. “These pillars are designed specifically to meet the needs of developers, the teams that drive the application life cycle from idea to delivery, and the customers that demand the highest quality applications across multiple platforms. You can expect to hear a lot more about Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming months.” Democratizing Application Life-Cycle Management Today, much of application development remains siloed throughout the enterprise, leading to decreased productivity and lengthy product development cycles. With VSTS 2010, Microsoft is taking the next step forward in giving individuals an...

VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) is an open API / SDK to develop applications that create or access VMware virtual disk storage. VDDK supports virtual disk files (VMDKs) for both VI (Virtual Infrastructure Products) as well as Hosted products (Workstation, Server, Player). And lets take a look at what we have at hand: The Virtual Disk Development Kit is a collection of C libraries, code samples, utilities, and documentation to help you create or access VMware virtual disk storage. The kit includes: The Virtual Disk library, a set of C function calls to manipulate virtual disk (VMDK) files. C++ code samples that you can build with either Visual Studio or the GNU C compiler. Virtual Disk Manager utility to manipulate offline VMDK files on Windows or Linux (clone, create, relocate, rename, grow, shrink, or defragment). DiskMount utility to access files and file systems in virtual disks on Windows or Linux. Documentation about the Virtual Dis...

When an application that hasn't been certified to run on virtual servers encounters technical issues that prevent it from working properly, a user can be left in a bind if none of the involved parties -- the virtualization or operating system vendors, or the ISV -- is willing to step up and fix the problem. Such situations can result in "a lot of finger-pointing, which is what the user really wants to get around," said Christopher Voce, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. The support issue hasn't come to the fore yet because early virtualization adopters have mostly been large enterprises with sufficient clout to demand personalized help from reluctant software vendors, said IDC analyst Michelle Bailey. "The basic message is, 'Either support me or I'll find some other ISV that will -- or maybe I'll go open-source,'" Bailey said. But she added that as virtualization software trickles down to smaller and less cutting-edge companies, those use...

Geez, they've made a scientific study out of this. Excellent series! One of the interesting talks at Blue Hat was one about virtualization and security. There’s a lot of good stuff that was touched on (such as the fact that VMware still implements a hub, meaning that VMs on the same VMnet can still sniff eachother’s traffic). Anyways, watching the talk got me thinking again about how much kernel debugging VMs is a slow and painful experience today, especially if you’ve used 1394 debugging frequently. While kd-over-1394 is quite fast (as is local kd), you can’t do that in any virtualization software that I’m aware of today (none of them virtualize 1394, and furthermore, as far as I know none of them even support USB2 debugging either, even VMware Workstation 6). Check it out here: Part1 Part2 Part3 Part4 Part5 Part6

Creating a virtual OS from an install DVD went smoothly, just as we would have hoped for with no problems. VMware offered a minimum spec in processer but we’d advise a reasonable Core Duo, especially in the installation stage. As it can be a system hog at times. Importing an OS went well too, all though not every OS could be brought across - some of the old NetWare systems seemed to have trouble. It has been confirmed that VMware uses Workstation as its own test-bed for features to be seen in their grown-up products VMware Server and ESX. So look forward to seeing some of these abilities in future editions of their platforms. In Short Whatever your use for VMware Workstation 6, whether development, disaster recovery or IT literacy - version 6 is useful. Really, I will be demo'ing a complete datacenter workshop on my laptop with my workstation demo in Africa! Let me rephrase myself, and this time in capitals: COMPLETE VIRTUAL GREEN DATACENTER ON YOUR LAPTOP. Anybody would go n...

The Parallels Partner Program provides customized access, tools and resources to Technology, Services and Channel partners that enable them to drive customer acquisition and revenue. The ISV Initiative, of which NuSphere is a key member, is a component designed to allow Windows-only software vendors to quickly and easily extend their reach to the fast growing Mac and Linux markets. The Initiative offers software vendors streamlined application compatibility testing, technical support, sales support and co-marketing opportunities. Via the ISV Initiative, NuSphere will make its flagship product, PhpED, which is an award-winning PHP Integrated Development Environment (PHP IDE) favored for its power, speed, ease of use, exceptional PHP debugging capabilities, and fully configurable user interface, available to the Mac and Linux communities through use of Parallels desktop virtualization products, which include Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac and Parallels Workstation 2.2 for Windows and Linu...

Will it? And will it be really a well maintained product should people wrap a cool GUI around it? The ability to do library relocations of Windows guests, another new feature in the 3.05 update, is significant because it will allow the dynamic relocation of Windows workload, essential for ISVs to offer VMotion-like features, Pratt said. The Xen software has supported library locations for Linux for several years, he added. "The Xen API is how the ISV community will integrate with Xen systems and control virtual machines," Pratt said. "It will enable you to build clusters of Xen systems and control them. It's the underlying mechanism that enables others to wrap a GUI around it." Look here.

This proud VMware employee took on the challenge of making the lives of hundreds of developers easier. I began by talking to a few Workstation customers who also use Eclipse for Java development so I could get a feel for their workflow and pain points. Then I sketched out the proposed workflow model for virtualization-assisted remote debugging and ran it by them along with rough mockups of my UI ideas. Based upon their feedback, I designed the feature as an Eclipse plugin that adds a new type of Launch Configuration to the stock set. The UI for this new launch config reuses most of the tabs already familiar to Eclipse users from running Java apps locally and adds a new one with a few virtualization options, of which only one requires the user to make a choice: in which VM should the code be executed? Once a launch configuration has been created and a VM selected, as with any other launch config, it can be activated in future simply by clicking on the Debug button in the Eclipse toolbar...