I just finished up the VMware authorized training course, VMware Infrastructure 3: Deploy, Secure, Analyze. I did it remotely; we used WebEx for the course slides and to communicate, and Citrix to log into our lab. The instructor was very good and had a lot of experience.
Continue reading “VMware Training - Part 1″
Everyone is talking virtualization. Most enterprises have adopted VMware in some form, for testing or production server consolidation. The new buzzword is VDI, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. (Read all about it at http://www.vmware.com/products/vdi/.)
Continue reading “Three Things You Should Know About VDI (Part 1)”
In a previous post I discussed an advanced feature that is included in only one of the leading virtualization platforms and involves the ability to over commit memory. I am, of course, talking about VMware’s unique ability to overcommit memory through a technique known as transparent memory page sharing. In this posting, which I will so cleverly call “Part 2”, I will discuss another technique used in overcommitting memory, the balloon driver.
Continue reading “Memory sharing – VMware has it and the others don’t! (Part 2)”
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of comparative documentation on three of the main players in the virtualization space which include VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. I have setup and used each of these virtualization platforms and each one has their own features and drawbacks. I think if you look long enough, you will eventually see through the marketing smoke and come to the conclusion that ESX, XenServer and Hyper-V are all great products that accomplish pretty much the same things. They all offer a solution for maintaining high availability. They all support virtual machines with enormous specifications and they all have the ability to migrate VMs between hosts.
Continue reading “Memory sharing – VMware has it and the others don’t! (Part 1)”
This past week, Jason Sharp and I put on a presentation for C/D/H’s Annual Technology Briefing Series on the topic of virtualization. At a high level, we addressed numerous technologies and trends in this growing area. The one discussion we had with the attendees that still has me thinking was power consumption and resource requirements. I think this area really expands on the numerous benefits of virtualization and server consolidation.
Continue reading “Virtualization with Distributed Power Management”