Innovative Technology Weblog

Today I learned about a product called “virtual desktop” from Scriptlogic. Well, I’m not convinced. At first I thought; “okay, this sounds promising”. But now I know it just delivers a management interface to of a lot of user settings. It does prevent spaghetti scripting, but this is exactly where Scriptlogic is coming from; a clever login script. Nothing virtual about it! The virtualization hype at it’s top. Concluding I must state that RES Powerfuse still delivers the strongest uniform desktop experience, but it isn’t cheap, and without any strong competitors I know of.

Today we have network virtualization (VLAN), hardware virtualization (Hypervisor/Veridian), application virtualization (streaming et all) and OS virtualization (like VDI/Virtual PC) – I don’t think we need much more at the moment, because all is virtual that needs to be virtual.

- Paul

Source: xtravirt

Paul Davey from xtravirt wrote a Guide to installing VMware ESX3 on workstation 6.

“This paper illustrates how to install and configure VMware ESX3 Server to run within VMware Workstation 6. From this, VirtualCenter, VMotion, HA and DRS features can be configured.

Although performance is significantly reduced from that of a physical server, this type of environment opens considerable possibilities for portable client demonstrations and is excellent for self training and small lab environments.

This paper assumes the reader has good technical knowledge of VMWare Virtual Infrastructure 3. The paper assumes that you know how to install the VirtualCenter2, License Server and Virtual Infrastructure Client.

The hardware used in this whitepaper was an IBM Thinkpad T60P laptop, Core Duo, 3GB memory, 120GB SATA Hard Disk.

Note: Intel CPU(s) on the hardware running Workstation 6 must have the VT technology or the performance of ESX will be very poor.  It is believed that the same applies with AMD chips with AMD-V compatible CPU’s being recommended, although it is currently untested by us on this platform.”

Regards,
Stefan Stranger
http://weblog.stranger.nl

I am enjoying Longhorn beta 3 at the Longhorn TAP event in Seattle.

I have got a little stampede going on. On my Vista box, a Dell 810 with 2 GB of ram, I’m able to run 4 Virtual Longhorn Beta instances.

Two core installs and two regular installs, one of the regulars is a Domain Controller.

I think I could another one or maybe two instances when I close a couple of other open programs, but because I’m running all from my local disk I have some limitations because of the amount of free diskspace

 

Rob

 

 

Application virtualization on the desktop is hot. Not only will it deliver a future proof set of application “scripts” but it also promisis a very fast way of deploying up-to-date, non-conflicting software. But of course! You’ve had a lot of work, I mean months and months of testing, in creating MSI packages. Throwing that away is not a very strong business case to move to app virtualization. For that issue I ran into a nice tool that is capable of automating the migration effort. Check out www.softgridguru.com too.

If you have chosen Softgrid as your app virtualization platform you need to create streams or sequences. To migrate an MSI into a stream automatically check out this tool (registration is required). Although it’s “just” a program around the command line sequencer, it makes life a lot easier.

If you have choosen Altiris SVS as your app virtualization platform you can use the Wise Package studio for easy migration. So lets hope you did not just buy Installshield…. Also the Altiris suite includes tooling to assist your migration and packaging efforts.

Finally, if you have a Citix farm you should towards Presentation Server 4.5. This version includes application streaming technology. But I haven’t heard from migration tooling here (yet). Suggestions are welcome.

For now this is all just theory. In the coming months I expect lessons learned to become more widely available as migration efforts get finalized. Pls post your comments if you’ve allready done it!

- Paul

Yesterday i came back from San Diego (MMS 2007) and was due to a jetlag unable to sleep, so i had to spend my time wiseley
So i decided to try the new Virtual Server R2 SP1 beta 2 and installed CentOS 4.4 in it as a guest system. I allways use CentOS cause it’s a free RedHad Enterprise alternative based on RedHad’s Distro, so i can use RPM and Yum for installation and updates.

This was my download list :

CentOS Server CD
Virtual Server R2 SP1 beta 2
Microsoft Virtual Machine Additions for Linux (You need to register on connect for this download)

Let’s have a beer and fire the Virtual Server installation up.

After installing Virtual Server on my machine i created a Virtual Machine with all the default options and mounted my CentOS ISO image in it. After starting the Virtual machine i selected the text setup, so the Virtual Machine was not so stressed during the installation.

I installed only the development and editor packages in CentOS + SSH and no other services, to ensure that my system is as clean as possible.

All the other settings are default.

After the installation of CentOS I took a beer and logged on to my machine and tried to install the VM additions.

First I’ve mounted the VM Additions CD into my Virtual Server using the webinterface.
In Linux i also have to mount the CD before I could use it, to mount the CD in Linux I used the following command:

mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Now I switched to the CD-rom using cd /media/cdrom
I try to install the VM Additions by typing rpm -ivh vmadd-full-0.0.1-1.i386.rpm --force but unfortunatly the logfile tells me that installation was unsuccesfull cause the Kernel Module was not found and a compiler was not installed.

Damn, time for an other beer and think things over, what could i have missed. I’m just a Linux novice but played a bit with an other server also and remeberd that if i had to make a package i allways had to something with GCC, so lets try to install that first.

yum -y install gcc

The cool thing about yum is that it checks for dependencies and also downloads them to. After installing GCC i tried installing the VM additions again, but stil the logs telling me that the Kernel Modules could not be found. Man, if this keeps going i would be out of beer in no time (no i’m not a problem drinker,’i drink to solve my problems )

Lets search the net to find a solution and after a few minutes i found how to install the Kernel Modules for my system.

By running the following command i got my Kernel Version :
uname -r
The result was : 2.6.9-42.0.10.EL

Ok now i could install the Kernel Modules :
yum install kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.EL (note how the kernel version is used in this command)

I rebooted my server and damn it is installed but still not working :

Time for more beer and think things over. Lets try to install the VM Additions again, now all modules are installed maybe it will work better. First i had to mount the CD again (it keeps losing the mount after a reboot) and installed the VM Additions again. I did’nt want to reboot again so i tried to start the VM additions manualy:
service vmadd start now i got a green Ok telling me the additions are working.

Ok lets take a beer to celebrate and wath the machine coming up again:

Because i dont use SCSI on my virtual machine a removed the symbolic link to S30vmadd-scsi from the folders : /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/ and /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/ so my machine don’t load the VM Addtions for the SCSI interface.

Now in my Virtual Server Web interface it sees my VM Addtions for Linux :

but a little bug (i think it is) is the Virtual Server Logfile, it tells me that the beta VM Additions are outdated, but i dont give a f***

This post was powerd by Grolsch.

Have fun out there,

Erik Luppes