Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

I call VMware a flirtation because it will run on an otherwise ordinary system (provided that I have enough kernel source around to compile its modules). Installing and using VMware is thus a reasonably casual thing, something I can do without particularly perturbing the system. I can even normally boot my system with VMware's kernel modules loaded, and only contaminate things if I actually need it this time around. Xen's hypervisor approach requires a much bigger change in my system; I can't add Xen to a running system, I have to boot the Xen environment from the start. Which requires a special Xen-enabled kernel, which requires special patches that you have to integrate into your kernel, which gives me nervous flashbacks. Being able to run stock kernels is valuable for me, and with Xen I give that up, so setting things up for Xen means a fairly significant commitment. I can understand from a developer's point of view. We flirt with everything that is there. But somewh...

If this post about a hacker finding the free VMware Server is free in 2007 doesn't move you, then you are not living on this planet ;-) Today I found out that VMWare server is now free for download. Their major upsell is service contracts and add-ons, but if you don’t tend to use that or need it for testing and you run Windows but want to run other operating systems or perform potentially dangerous tests, this is the software for you. Moral of the story: It's never too late. But hey, doesn't this say something about the VMware Server's marketing? or the lack thereof? Check it out...

China, Africa, S. America and East Europe will follow suit (If they haven't already started it, that is!) India continues to soar. South Asia’s largest economy will continue to lead the pack as the next IT market opportunity. A major wave of IT investments has started to take place across banks, financial services institutions (FSI), telecom, manufacturing, government, resource, education, and other industries. This is probably why India is the fastest-growing country by IT spending in 2006 (22.4 per cent) and is forecast to remain so in 2007 (21.5 per cent) when it reaches Rs 75,891 crore Dynamic IT to enter Phase 2 in 2007: From Consolidation to Virtualization and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The growth is there (That is 758.91 Billion dollars! ). Sometimes I think it might be a pretty good idea to spend sometime there as an expat and help the industry expand there. Maybe I'll just do that! Read here...

Before consolidation, the company had about 200 servers across the region. They now have 70 physical servers in Singapore, having consolidated about 150 servers already, mainly from Japan and Australia. Of the 70 servers, 25 are running VMware’s ESX, a virtulisation solution from VMware. On average, each physical system hosts about four virtual machines. Community experimentation is one thing, community enthusiasm is another. Adoption by the business community is a totally different ball game! VMware just shows that it quietly does the latter. While virtualisation may not be appropriate for all companies, it is particularly useful for companies that have many servers with low utlisation rates. By consolidating virtual servers on one physical server, utilisation rates naturally shoot up. And each and every shop has these underutilized boxes. You'd be lying to yourself or to your directors and CIOs by stating that all your machines are really sweating it out. Imagine if your director...

Well that's what Charles Jade @ArsTechnica did deliberately. He decided to play the resilient user and pose serious questions at both booths during MACWorld. Rather than asking each of the two major players in emulation for the Mac about the strengths of their respective offerings, I thought it best to be a jerk. To that end, I asked VMWare a simple question: as a Parallels user, why should I switch to VMWare Fusion? Read the rest.

While ILM is dead, virtualization is at the verge of exploding in 2007. This would also mean that you as the customer really need to watch out! You don't want to get tied up with a promise only! The two big areas of growth around virtualization in 2006 were software and management. One assumes that hardware is part of the picture, but although companies like Intel and AMD continue to make their products more accessible to various virtualization schemes, the real news was what vendors were doing with software and management capabilities. All the usual suspects made announcements this year, including HP, IBM, HDS, and EMC, with EMC doing an awful lot of interesting things with Rainfinity and file virtualization as well as with Documentum, not to mention the popularity of VMware as a way to create virtual servers, and also providing other products such as ACE which is similar to Rainfinity. Microsoft created news by making its virtualization format technology available under its Open ...

This is true story , by the way: We had a couple of old servers responsible for login details for over 50,000 users!!! And it all runs on a NT4 sp5 OS. The hardware is also pretty old. REALLY OLD!!! My Network Admin had been complaining about it for a long time. They have saved the day in the past by rebooting the machines (with fingers crossed , hoping that the hardware wouldn't die out on them!). Anyways I approached them and...Hang on lets catoonify all that happened. No special kernel tales here, sorry. Plain execution!!! So we: Converted the Machines Ported them to the ESX Lab and we plan to keep it running on our "new & shiny" hardware as redundant copy of production Motto Moral of the story is: All mission critical systems are not prominent and maybe hidden in your organization. Don't get that impression that a system you need to virtualize is large and huge. So start virtualization with a mission to get a grip on your processes!