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:
Sun xVM VirtualBox
Another update for VirtualBox was released yesterday: VirtualBox 2.2.
If you remember, 3D acceleration was introduced for Windows XP guests in VirtualBox 2.1, and now similar functionality had been ported for Linux and Solaris VMs. A quick experiment shows almost 4x performance improvement for 3D between VirtualBox 2.1.2 and VirtualBox 2.2 – I've simply booted Ubuntu live cd and used glxgears to get some idea about the efficiency of new 3D acceleration support. [Read more…]
I'm not sure if it's part of the official documentation to VMware Server, but seeing as a few people failed to connect to their VMware Server 2.x using Infrastructure Client, I thought I'd explain how exactly this can be done.
There are three reasons I can think of:
Windows 7 in xVM VirtualBox
January 21st saw the release of 2.1.2 update of a popular desktop virtualization solution – xVM VirtualBox.
As usual, there had been numerous bugfixes and performance improvements, and among the new features came one of the most anticipated features – support for Windows 7 VMs.
Frankly, I am surprised as how well Win7 performed in a VM with just 512Mb!