Virtualization news and reviews
Many of visitors to this blog and my Unix Tutorial website have really liked the What Hardware Virtualization Really Means article.
HW Virtualization is a follow-up article with further details on the topic.
Have a look at HW virtualization and let me know what you think!
Most Linux operating systems recognise being run inside a virtual machine and install Open VM Tools package if it's available.
There are advantaged and disadvantages to using Open VM tools instead of the VMware Tools that are supplied with your ESX/ESXi or VMware Workstation productions.
If you want my thoughts on this, please have a look at the VMware Tools vs Open VM Tools on Unix Tutorial blog.
I am shifting my focus from multiple technical blogs to the single location where all technology posts and articles will be shared going forward: www.UnixTutorial.org
Desktop Virtualization blog in unlikely to get noticeable updates in the future but I will be providing links to my articles on other websites like Unix Tutorial.
In case you have not seen in, check out the Desktop Virtualization: Year in Review 2016 post on BrianMadden.com, it's a great summary of the major announcements and changes in the industry.
It's exciting to see so many new DaaS offerings, but even more cool is to see pretty much every big player like VMware, Citrix and AWS to lead VDI innovation with a portfolio of products catered to different customers.
I've been using Parallels for quite some time now but just realised that I never gave VirtualBox 5.0 a proper test run.
From the official release notes it seems there's lots of useful stuff:
And from the most recent VirtualBox 5.0 release (5.0.14), there seems ot be a few OSX related improvements:
So the questions are:
Thanks for taking the time to comment, feel free to let me know on Twitter as well (@glebreys)
It seems the 3D acceleration is constantly getting improvements at different levels of virtualization.
As of VMware vSphere 6.0, there's now a concept of Virtual GPU (vGPU). This is a technology that provides special direct access from a VM to the GPU hardware. Each ESX host is getting a NVIDIA's vGPU Manager installed which manages resource allocation for all the participating VMs.
NVIDIA developed a special class of GPUs for this, called NVIDIA GRID cards. Some of the cards can be shared among 16 VMs which is an impressive density. I believe you need to have a server hardware certified by NVIDIA as well, but it seems that all the major vendors are there (Dell, HP, Lenovo and even Supermicro).
Read more:
If you're on the market for a proper VDI benchmarking tool, there's some really good news: Login VSI just got a major new release!
Login VSI 4.0 brings improvement to the following areas:
Desktop Virtualization has become an industry of its own in the past year, and as demand for desktop virtualization technologies grows, so does the flexibility of available solutions.
ThinPoint by NetLeverage is one of the leading desktop virtualization solutions, actively gaining momentum in the past few years. I've spent a few days testing ThinPoint and truly believe it deserves your attention if you're looking for a Windows-oriented desktop virtualization solution.
There are typically two challenges for any desktop virtualization solution: how to effectively virtualize desktops while achieving the highest virtual-to-physical ratio and how to provide the best remote access experience possible. Ideally, your users shouldn't even notice the virtual nature of their desktop environments. When it comes to ThinPoint desktop virtualization, it gains advantage by providing a number of innovative solutions in the remote access space.
ThinPoint offers a Windows-oriented desktop virtualization – it needs a Windows host and it supports only Windows-based virtual desktops at this stage. The really nice thing about ThinPoint approach is that you don’t need an enterprise infrastructure to start using it: neither server-grade hardware nor server editions of Windows OS are required. In addition to this, you can access your virtual desktops from Linux clients, so if you are a Linux-based software development company, ThinPoint can help you by providing easy and fast access to centralized Windows virtual desktops.
tuCloud
Hosted Virtual Desktop is one of the latest directions in desktop virtualization. Instead of more traditional approaches when you create virtual environments on your physical desktop or within virtual infrastructure deployed in your datacentre, Hosted Virtual Desktop offers you a refreshing alternative: host your virtual desktops in a secure cloud of a trusted provider. Today I'm going to review one of hosted virtual desktop solutions, the one provided by tuCloud.com.
PALO ALTO, Calif., December 21, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced independent research convincingly proves that VMware customers are drastically lowering operational expenditures (OpEx) with VMware solutions. VMware vSphere™ and the VMware vCenter™ Product Family lower the day-to-day costs of running IT, enabling IT resources and budgets to be shifted from tactical maintenance to strategic projects that can better create value for the business. “Reducing OpEx with Virtualization and Virtual Systems Management,” a whitepaper prepared by ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) for VMware, quantifies how customers have been able to reduce service failures, improve staff efficiency, speed up service deployment and reduce facility operation costs using VMware solutions.
The whitepaper (available from this page), which includes EMA research and VMware customer case studies, documents how VMware virtualization enables:
- Reduction of Service Failures – fixing problems up to 24 times faster, eliminating up to 43 hours of downtime a year, improving uptime to as high as 99.999 percent, to reduce the impact, frequency, duration, and cost of service issues, troubleshooting, out-of-hours support, and productivity loss
- Improved Staff Efficiency – increasing administrator efficiency by an average of 10 percent, and as much as 270 percent, by allowing a single administrator to manage up to 1,800 servers, reducing annual management costs by up to $1,000 per server
- Faster Service Deployment – allowing new systems to be deployed up to 240 times faster, and new applications up to 96 times faster, saving almost $2,000 in wage costs alone per deployment, while reducing downtime, and improving time-to-market for new products and services
- Reduced Facility Operation Costs – allowing approximately half of all organizations studied to reduce both floor space/rent costs, and power consumption, the latter by an average of 16 percent, or around $700,000 per year for a 5 megawatt datacenter
Full press release: VMware Lowers Operational Costs