I've lost count of how many time I've heard people say "I installed Vista, but I'm back to XP now". People who know enough to be comfortable with rebuilding their own systems of course, one wonders how many of the general population would do the same if they knew how.
I'm going one step further now... today I received a free VMware Workstation 6 key (being a VCP and all), and I redeemed it for the Linux version of Workstation. I'll keep a disk around with XP on it for when Team Fortress 2 comes out, but otherwise I'm sure any other app I'd care to use (that doesn't have a Linux equivalent) will run fine within a VM... Visual Studio 2005 is about the only one I can think of in that category to be honest!
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
VMware Workstation 6.0 finally released....
Yes sir, the latest major revision of VMware Workstation has finally gone gold. The revision number is not far above the RC, so I'm guessing there haven't been many changes between the RC and the final product. I found the RC to be rock solid, and was running the various betas for quite some time (and submitted my share of bugs, which were fixed over the course of the beta). Go grab it now!
Monday, April 16, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Microsoft Virtualisation MBSM getting into gear...
That's right, the Microsoft MBSM (Marketing Bull Shit Machine) is really cranking into gear, this time via Mike Neil posting on the otherwise respectable Windows Server Division blog (Ward, none of this is directed at you, you do a fine job. It's when those marketing types somehow take over your blog that things go down the toilet).
Seriously Mike, do you think the ppl reading Ward's blog are managerial types who don't see straight through marketing BS like "We’re designing Windows Server virtualization to scale up to 64 processors, which I’m proud to say is something no other vendor’s product supports."
You're proud to say you're DESIGNING something that no other vendor's product (currently) supports!?!?! Come back when you have a shipping product that comes somewhere near what your competitors are (currently) doing in terms of performance, scalability, management and stability, then you can boast about what features you have that they don't.
I'd also be interested to know where the requirements came from to develop such a feature... applications requiring 64 processors are generally not the kind of thing you would virtualise... how would you go about allowing for hardware failure with such a VM? Have another 64way piece of hardware sitting there doing nothing, that you can fire up in the event of a hardware failure on the first one? Gee, we're back with the physical world problem again!
Seriously, stuff like this just makes me think Microsoft aren't on the right wavelength. Another blog somewhere once stated that while everyone currently in the virtualisation market has solved the physical problem, only VMware has actually solved the VIRTUAL problem, by way of their management software and Vmotion. It's pointless to tout things like hot add NICs and CPU's, how many physical servers will let you hot swap a failed CPU? When was the last time you were in a datacenter and tried to do that? How about trying to do that on a blade? What would happen to the instructions the VM was executing at the time the CPU failed - are they gona seamlessly failover to a different CPU? How many applications that require going from 2 to 4 CPUs and then back again are really suitable for virtualisation? That kind of issue is generally solved by scaling out the number of machines running the application rather than increasing the CPU available to a single machine. What happens to the HAL and the kernel when you try to go from 1 CPU to 2 CPU's and then back again? I can only assume the enlightenments in Longhorn will solve that issue...
I hope when the product launches it has something like Vmotion, otherwise there's no way it can hope to compete. Microsoft is already on the back foot in terms of the platforms that will be supported on top of Windows Virtualization, and one of Microsoft's most successful arguments against Linux is "cost of acquisition is a negligible part of TOC". Do they hope to fly in the face of that by expecting if they give Windows Virtualization away, it will be a convincing enough argument to switch?
Time to buy some shares in VMware. I can see the virtualisation market playing out much the same way as search currently is.
Seriously Mike, do you think the ppl reading Ward's blog are managerial types who don't see straight through marketing BS like "We’re designing Windows Server virtualization to scale up to 64 processors, which I’m proud to say is something no other vendor’s product supports."
You're proud to say you're DESIGNING something that no other vendor's product (currently) supports!?!?! Come back when you have a shipping product that comes somewhere near what your competitors are (currently) doing in terms of performance, scalability, management and stability, then you can boast about what features you have that they don't.
I'd also be interested to know where the requirements came from to develop such a feature... applications requiring 64 processors are generally not the kind of thing you would virtualise... how would you go about allowing for hardware failure with such a VM? Have another 64way piece of hardware sitting there doing nothing, that you can fire up in the event of a hardware failure on the first one? Gee, we're back with the physical world problem again!
Seriously, stuff like this just makes me think Microsoft aren't on the right wavelength. Another blog somewhere once stated that while everyone currently in the virtualisation market has solved the physical problem, only VMware has actually solved the VIRTUAL problem, by way of their management software and Vmotion. It's pointless to tout things like hot add NICs and CPU's, how many physical servers will let you hot swap a failed CPU? When was the last time you were in a datacenter and tried to do that? How about trying to do that on a blade? What would happen to the instructions the VM was executing at the time the CPU failed - are they gona seamlessly failover to a different CPU? How many applications that require going from 2 to 4 CPUs and then back again are really suitable for virtualisation? That kind of issue is generally solved by scaling out the number of machines running the application rather than increasing the CPU available to a single machine. What happens to the HAL and the kernel when you try to go from 1 CPU to 2 CPU's and then back again? I can only assume the enlightenments in Longhorn will solve that issue...
I hope when the product launches it has something like Vmotion, otherwise there's no way it can hope to compete. Microsoft is already on the back foot in terms of the platforms that will be supported on top of Windows Virtualization, and one of Microsoft's most successful arguments against Linux is "cost of acquisition is a negligible part of TOC". Do they hope to fly in the face of that by expecting if they give Windows Virtualization away, it will be a convincing enough argument to switch?
Time to buy some shares in VMware. I can see the virtualisation market playing out much the same way as search currently is.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
VMware Workstation 6.0 hits RC...
Yes that's right, build 42757 was released on the 23rd and is the first public RC of Workstation 6.0. Aside from the usual slew of bugfixes, the biggest deal for anyone using it is that debugging is finally configurable! In the betas, debugging was set to Full and there was nothing you could do about it, which is reasonable enough for a beta I guess. Now it's set to 'none' by default :-)
It's also a whopping 280MB download... the current version of Workstation 5.x is only ~90MB!
It's also a whopping 280MB download... the current version of Workstation 5.x is only ~90MB!
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