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VMware View 5.1 announce

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VMware, Inc.  today unveiled VMware View™ 5.1 and an updated portfolio of end-user computing solutions designed to empower a more agile, productive and connected enterprise (the product is expected to be available in Q2 2012 ).

There are several interesting news in this new release, and actually seems that not all are yet listed (maybe some feature in the beta will be not released yet).

But more interesting is the new set of products designed to be used with View:

  • VMware vCenter™ Operations for VMware View: Cloud Infrastructure Insight – To be offered as a new add-on to VMware View, VMware vCenter Operations for VMware View will enable administrators to have broad insight into desktop performance, quickly pinpoint and troubleshoot issues, optimize resource utilization, and proactively address potential issues in real time.
  • VMware Horizon Application Manager™: Your Personal Cloud Broker –To be offered as an on-premise virtual appliance, VMware Horizon Application Manager™ 1.5 is a centralized policy and entitlement engine that will broker user access to applications, virtual desktops and data resources. Integrating the application virtualization capabilities of VMware ThinApp®, the VMware Horizon Application Catalog will benefit both IT and end users by consolidating diverse application types into a single, unified catalog. In addition, the VMware Horizon Workspace delivers a simple, seamless end-user experience when accessing work resources across private and public clouds on whatever device a user chooses. Additional information can be found in the VMware Horizon Application Manager media backgrounder.
  • VMware Project Octopus: Your Personal Data Cloud –Available later this quarter as a beta for qualified customer trials, VMware Project Octopus will enable IT organizations to provide employees with an easy and secure way to share data and collaborate with anyone from any device. Deployed on-premise or accessed via a VMware service provider, VMware Project Octopus will provide the ability for IT administrators to govern usage and set policies for data access and sharing within their organization or with external contributors. Additional information can be found in the VMware Project Octopus media backgrounder.
  • VMware Personal Cloud Applications: Share More, Send Less – Composed of VMware Zimbra® and VMware Socialcast®, VMware cloud applications connect employees to the knowledge, ideas, and resources they need to work smarter. As part of today’s announcement, VMware Zimbra 7.2 will support Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) for government deployments requiring encryption. Additional information can be found on the VMware Zimbra 7.2 data sheet.

For more information see:

VMware ,

Windows 8 installation options

30 April 2012
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If you want to “play” with Windows 8 Consumer Preview or “Windows Server 8” Beta, then there are several installation options.

Destinations

Hard disk

This the common solution, but mean the needs of a blank partition, or space to build a new partition, or the possibility to erase your disk. If you choose a dual boot configuration, of course, the bootloader must be modified to add the new entry. Physical installation permit to test most of the features and can give better performance (for example you cannot realize how fast is the boot procedure in an installation on a virtual machine).

Virtual Machine

Common solution, but that may limit some functions. As already written, for ESXi you need the 5.0 U1 version or a 5.0 version with some patches. For Workstation the 8 version could be fine. It’s a “clean” solution for your system and for test more systems, but is not the best solution for performance.

USB (aka Windows To Go)

This is a new option in Windows 8 (but to be honest is really similar at the procedure to install Hyper-V Server on a USB or flash support). It’s a “clean” solution and also quite portable (but system in-dependency is not guarantee after the first boot). You can use a USB stick (or flash card) or an hard disk. But at least 16 GB (or 20 GB in the 64 bit editio) are needed… so an USB hard disk could be better (also for performance aspects). The procedure is not so simple (and actually is not integrated with the installation procedure).

For more infomation see:

VHD

This option it’s quite strange (and was introduced with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2). It’s an installation on a virtual disk but it runs in the physical environment (so with native performance and native hardware). It’s quite interesting because you do not need new partitions or un-allocated space, just a free space (40 GB could be fine) to build your system disk in a VHD file (you can create it before, for Windows 7) or during the installation. Again this option is not available during the standard installation process, but it’s quite simple (and you do not need other tools). The bootloader will be modified for the new entry, because you will have a dual boot environment.

For more infomation see:

Source

ISO

The simplest option, but you need to burn it to a DVD, unless you are using boot from LAN o or virtual environment or some hardware management tools).

VHD

For Windows Server 8 (Windows Server 2012) you can download a VHD file to run it on a Hyper-V enviroment without the need to install.

USB

You your system does not have a DVD reader, you can start the installation from a USB device (hard disk or USB stick or flash).

For more infomation see:

GUI or Core?

For more infomation see:

Microsoft ,

ESXi – How does the dual bank work?

23 April 2012
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As written in the previous posts, in the ESXi installation there are two copy of the system image located in two different partitions (see Partitions layout of system disk and More on partitions posts).

The actual system image is located on the first 250 MB partition, formatted with plain old FAT16 filesystem, but using a special pseudo-filesystem on it (see VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient Handling of System Images). The image itself, s.v00, is a 124 MB compressed file, which is decompressed on boot and contains the hypervisor operating system. Note that the compressed image is larger in 5.0 than in 4.1, (where the image was 70 MB), but still a very small disk foot print with about 124 MB in 5.0.

continue reading…

Highlights, VMware

ESXi – More on partitions

20 April 2012
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In a previous post I’ve described the partitions used by a ESXi installation (see ESXi – Partitions layout of system disk).

Partitions are formatted with a FAT16 filesystem, but the ESXi files are stored into the banks partitions with a specific system that consist in some compressed archives containing the required files or more archives (as also described in the yesterday’s post about the reset of the root password). More details on the filesystem used is on the first number of the VMware Technical Journal, in the paper: VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient Handling of System Images.

But for a installation on small disks or on a USB keys/flash card more considerations are needed about ESXi partitions, expecially for the missing scratch partition.

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VMware

ESXi – How to reset the root password

19 April 2012
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Reset the root password with ESX 3.x was quite simple, just because the service console was a partition writable a live CD… With ESX 4.x it was a little more complicated (the service console was basically a vmdk).

But with ESXi things are more complicated, due to the partition layout, that ESXi works in RAM and that all configurations files are stored in the banks it special archive files. The file containing the password hashes is called “shadow” and it is is contained in  a nested structure of archives inside the state.tgz file.

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Highlights, VMware

Greater number is always better? For Intel maybe no

17 April 2012
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As most people know, Intel adopt a Tick Tock model for processors development: a tick advances manufacturing technology, a tock delivers new microarchitecture. Usually this mean that a tick means processors with more frequency speed (sometimes also more cores and/or more cache) and a tock means usually new features (but not necessary more frequency speed and/or more cache/cores).

But when a new generation (tick or tock) as been introduced, after some months, this usually means cheaper processors (or at similar price) compared to previous generation.

Now a possible confusion could be generated by the Westmere family (the tick evolution of the Nehalem) that was probably much articulated with at least two big Xeon branch: the Westmere-EP (really simple to understand a just an evolution in speed of the previous models) and the Westmere-EX (the Xeon E7 series) that was much similar as a tock evolution.

To make things more complicated the tock evolution as been called Xeon E5, making diffult a comparison with the E7 (the old model) series, for several reasons: numbers does not help (E5 seems a system with lower feature compared to E7), cache is bigger on E7 (24 MB compared to 20MB), memory speed is limited on E7 (also compared with old Westmere-EP).

But price comparison is much interesting: if we compared a E5-2670 (Recommended Customer Price: $1552 – $1556) with a E7-4830 (Recommended Customer Price: $2059) price make the E5 solution much valuable (considering that also are mounted on new servers generations). With the only (little) disadvantage of the cache size. For a complate feature comparison see the datasheets at Intel web site:

Product Name Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2670 (20M Cache, 2.60 GHz, 8.00 GT/s Intel® QPI) Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4830 (24M Cache, 2.13 GHz, 6.40 GT/s Intel® QPI)
Code Name Sandy Bridge-EP Westmere EX
Essentials
Status Launched Launched
Launch Date Q1’12 Q2’11
Processor Number E5-2670 E7-4830
# of Cores 8 8
# of Threads 16 16
Clock Speed 2.6 GHz 2.13 GHz
Max Turbo Frequency 3.3 GHz 2.4 GHz
Cache 20 MB 24 MB Intel® Smart Cache
Bus/Core Ratio 33 16
Bus Type QPI QPI
System Bus 8 GT/s 6.4 GT/s
# of QPI Links 2
Instruction Set 64-bit 64-bit
Instruction Set Extensions AVX SSE4.1/4.2
Embedded Options Available No No
Lithography 32 nm 32 nm
Scalability 2S Only S4S
Max TDP 115 W 105 W
VID Voltage Range 0.60V-1.35V
Recommended Customer Price 2059.00
Memory Specifications
Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type) 750 GB 2048 GB
Memory Types DDR3-800/1066/1333/1600 DDR-3 800/978/1066/1333 (Max Speed 1066 MHz)
# of Memory Channels 4 4
Max Memory Bandwidth 51.2 GB/s
ECC Memory Supported Yes Yes
Expansion Options
PCI Express Revision 3.0
Package Specifications
Max CPU Configuration 2 4
TCASE 81.8°C 64°C
Package Size 52.5mm x 45.0mm 49.17mm x 56.47mm
Sockets Supported FCLGA2011 LGA1567
Low Halogen Options Available See MDDS See MDDS
Advanced Technologies
Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 Yes
Intel® vPro Technology Yes
Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology Yes Yes
Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) Yes Yes
Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) Yes
Intel® Trusted Execution Technology Yes Yes
AES New Instructions Yes Yes
Intel® 64 Yes Yes
Idle States Yes
Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology Yes Yes
Intel® Demand Based Switching Yes
Thermal Monitoring Technologies Yes Yes
Intel® Flex Memory Access Yes
Execute Disable Bit Yes Yes

For new processors (actually only for the desktop market) see also: Unofficial Intel Ivy Bridge CPU Datasheet.

General, vDesign

New certifications from Microsoft

16 April 2012
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Microsoft has recently made some changed in certifications and also has introduced new paths, like the new MCSE: Private Cloud certification. The path has the following requirements:

  • become a MCSA: Windows Server 2008
  • pass the Exam 247: Configuring and Deploying a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 (Until January 31, 2013, Exam 70-659 may be taken in place of 70-247)
  • pass the Exam 246: Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012

Note The Private Cloud certification requires candidates to show continued ability to perform in this technology area by completing a recertification exam every three years.

As you can notice Microsoft has reintroduce some old certification names, now new meaning, but still with similar skill as in the past: MCSA and MCSE. For more information see the certification page on Microsoft site.

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Microsoft, vCertification none
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