Innovative Technology Weblog

A few months ago my beloved colleague Walter gave me the Beta version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to play with it until now. While most people enjoy their well earned vacation, I’m playing around with SCVMM.

There are definitely things to be excited about:

• Ability to manage both Hyper-V and VMware farms
• Migrate virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts (maybe not a live migration, but a migration none the less! )
• But the main thing to be excited about is the future integration within the System Center family.

And their are also some irritating things:

• Hyper-V has just RTM’ed and SCVMM is still in beta. This means you got to install update after update to make everything work.
• When I try to install the integration services on Windows Vista it comes with the message: “Unsupported Guest OS - An error has occurred: The specified program requires a newer version of Windows.” Unfortunately I’m not yet in the possession of Windows 7… 
• I created a new library share. But when I try to mount an ISO file to my virtual machine it fails and the only thing you can do with your virtual machine from that point is remove it and repair it. Through the repair option you can save him by the way.

I properly can go on and on with these things but I can rather posts these on connect.microsoft.com. It is still a beta and I believe eventually these ‘minor’ issues will be solved.

There is one very interesting feature I found in SCVMM and I’m still not sure if it’s a brilliant or stupid thing. When you create a new virtual machine you got to choose your processor type. Not just the number of virtual processors or the clock rate, no actually the processor type. Like the 1.2 Ghz Athlon, the 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 (HT Technology) or the 2.8 Ghz Xeon MP.

It states that it uses this info to determine the processor requirements of the virtual machine. That’s being used when calculating host ratings and when setting CPU resource allocations.
You can view the host rating when you create a new virtual machine. The host rating helps you to choose the best host for your virtual machine. Based on free resources.
CPU resource allocation is something we know from VMware ESX. VMware uses shares to do this. A plain number like 1000 or 2000. The virtual machine with 2000 shares gets twice the amount of CPU cycles (when needed) in comparison with the machine that has 1000 shares.

I understand that SCVMM should use his own system that can be plotted on all the different virtualization platforms it’s going to manage (Hyper-V, XEN, ESX). But I don’t understand how a 2.4 Ghz Opteron relates to a 2.4 Ghz Xeon.
So if I just want my production server to have a 50% preference over my test server which should I choose? And what’s worse, if I’m in doubt with this option, how about a self service user that’s got the option to create a new virtual machine? I can imagine it would properly mean that this user got the advise to skip it.

But there is one more thing confusing about this. When you use the Virtual Machine Manager snap in, there is another way to set the processor weight and you can use a simple number!

So if I change the processor type in SCVMM of a virtual machine, you would suspect something to change within this screen. But it doesn’t… Neither does it the other way around.

I’m going to investigate some more but if you got some tips or hints, please post them!

Hi,

I’m at Vmworld 2008 Europe (Cannes) right now. Virtualisation is hot and you can tell by the enormous amount of people that came to Cannes. A lot of interesting new product and enhancements have been release here today but there is one thing I want to mention here.

The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). At this point it is still in beta (0.9) but a 1.0 version is coming out very shortly. It’s a new way you on how to offer your virtual appliances and supported by Vmware, Citrix (Xenserver) and Microsoft Hyper-V. You can create your virtual appliance in any of these environments and package it as an OVF package. The virtual appliance can even exist out of multiple virtual machine.

This OVF package can be imported on to any of these hypervisors (that’s the open part of it) and it automatically build the right virtual machine(s) with the correct virtual components (Nic’s, CPU, memory etc). It also builds the correct virtual disk format, VMDK, VHD or even RDM or NTFS.

Read more about this new portable virtual machine format here: http://www.vmware.com/go/ovf

===========================

“You are kidding arent you ?

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?That sounds preposterous to me.

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12355-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31199&messageID=579806&start=-9530

A few days ago Microsoft announced a very cool, promising and high tech table! It’s called “Microsoft Surface”.

If you haven’t heard of it already check out a quick demo of it’s capabilities:

When you search YouTube for a while you will find more great previews of Microsoft Surface like this one, or this on with Bill Gates or this quick review from popularmechanics.com.

But when you search on you will find some other (older) video’s of a similar product from a Mr Han and his company Perceptive Pixel (he also comes back in the review from popularmachines.com).

Ok, so Microsoft isn’t the first one to announce a product like this, they are working on it for a really long time (from 2001) and the product looks great. So their is no reason to become less enthousiastic.

The next questions is: where can I buy this and for how much? Unfortunately you’ll have to wait till at least the winter of 2007 to have your own Minority Report experience. And by then it will cost around the $5000-$10.000.

But thank god for the Internet because their is a cheap way you can build your own Surface. For as little as $10 you can buy an article about how to make your own Low-cost multi-touch sensing through frustrated total internal reflection. Written by the same Mr Han again!

If even those ten dollars sounds to expensive for you, I’ve found an other short description on Tinker.it on how to build your own. This is all you need:

1 panel of plexiglass 8mm thickness
2 strips of IR LEDs (18 LED per strip)
2 sheets of tracing paper
1 projector
1 mirror
1 analog camera sensitive to IR light
1 IR filter for the camera
1 computer

Read the whole article here.

There has been a lot of fuss about Microsoft’s virtualization licensing and distribution policies. The biggest player in this market (and properbly the most affected), VMware, is pissed and posted a whitepaper with their 7 complaints.

 VMware seven objections are:
1) Microsoft offers top virtualization support for only premier-level support customers, inherently limiting the ability for many customers to get technical support for competitive virtualization platforms;2) Microsoft’s “restrictive terms” on the use of published virtual machines, or appliances, is unfair to users. Microsoft, VMware claims, restricts use of VHD formatted virtual machines to Microsoft Virtual Server and Virtual PC only;

Does this mean we can put virtualization in the same category as the browser and the mediaplayer?…..

The VMware DiskMount Utility allows you to mount an unused virtual disk in a
Windows host file system as a separate drive without needing to connect to the
virtual disk from within a virtual machine. You can mount specific volumes of a virtual
disk if the virtual disk is partitioned.
DiskMount is a command line program called vmware-mount that works similarly
to how you use the subst command on Windows. Once the disk is mounted, you
can read from and write to the disk as if it were a separate file system with its own
drive letter on your network. However, you cannot power on any virtual machine that
uses this disk until the disk is unmounted.
You can perform activities such as scanning a virtual disk for viruses and transferring
files between the host system and a powered off virtual machine.
When you are finished using the mounted virtual disk, delete the mapping so the
virtual disk can be used by virtual machines again.

This tool isn’t exactly new (it get’s installed with VMWare server automatically) but I do find it underappreciated. And so does VMWare. In their new VMWare Workstation 6 (beta now available) they are building it in the GUI. No more remembering difficult command lines! With three simple clicks on your mouse you will have a virtual disk mapping…Virtualization: everybody can do it!