Virtualization news and reviews
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.
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
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:
I really like managing VMware ESX servers through VMware Infrastructure Client (using 2.5 version at the moment), but there's one little thing which really annoys me: most of VM-specific confirmations are asked with dialogue windows which don't mention the name of the VM they apply to.
For example, if I right-click the VM and decide to reset it, instead of getting something like "You're about to reset the HOSTNAME.DOMAINNAME.COM virtual machine. Are you sure?", I only see this:
Annoying Reset Confirmation
I wonder if it's really hard to make these dialogs to be VM specific?
VMware Workstation 6.5
If you were thinking of getting yourself a VMware Workstation, here's your chance to do it 25% cheaper!
If you go to the VMware Workstation Product page and click Buy Now, proceeding to the checkout will allow you to type in a promo code. Use this one to get a 25% discount: CyberMondayDeal.
There's not much time left though, this offer expires at 11:59PM PT on Monday, December 1, 2008.
It's time for another round of desktop virtualization news – they're mostly based on my news feeds, so if I do miss somethin – please take the time to let me know!
I'm going through a rather busy week, so only one thing from the news today: VMware releases Workstation 6.5!
With the ever-increasing number of exciting changes and news in desktop virtualization space, I think this website needs regular summaries, and they will probably look similar to this post today.
Let me know if you like the format and whether you want me to change or add anything.
VMworld 2008 is happening in Vegas this week, so naturally most of the news are to do with VMware!
Seems like the exact list of differences between VMware ESX and ESXi has been a very popular question lately. If you're interested in all the details, I've got some great links to share:
Doing a few experiments with VMware ESX 3.5 today, I've made a typo (twice!) when setting up a password for one of the systems, and this resulted in me locking myself out of ESX server upon the completion of its install.
Luckily, there's a rather easy way to change the forgotten password to something new, and I thought I'll explain how it can be done.