Announced this week at Parallels Summit 2010, Parallels is now going to offer a baremetal hypervisor for Mac X Servers. You no longer have to run Max OS X Server with a virtualization server on top of it, which can bring better performance to the running virtual machines.

Some of the features include the ability to move virtual machines between servers, templates, and snapshots. In addition, they support upto 12 virtual CPUs, 64GB virtual RAM, 16 virtual NICs and 2TB virtual hard drives for each of your virtual machines

Learn more at http://www.parallels.com/products/server/mac/baremetal/

Download it and try it out!

I recently got a new PC with a fresh install of Visual Studio 2008.  When I attempted to install the new vSphere client (4.0 Update 1) I received this:

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VMware vSphere Client 4.0
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The Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Second Edition installer returned error code ‘4113′.
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OK  
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Solution: Uninstall the Visual J# that comes with Visual Studio.  After doing so, vSphere Client completed successfully.  Apparently this issue is not specific to Update 1, however.

Rackspace is now taking names for their beta program for Cloud Servers for Windows. They plan to launch the beta in early 2010 with competitive pricing (vs their Linux servers):

Prices for Linux servers start at 1.5 cents per hour for 256 MB of RAM and a 10GB hard disk.

They plan to offer both Server 2003 and Server 2008 and will be running them on “a Microsoft-supported hypervisor.” Your guess is as good as ours as to what exactly that means.

And remember, with the Cloud Servers API they provide (I assume they will provide it for the Windows Servers also), you can develop scaling infrastructures.

To find out more, and to sign up for the beta, click here.

Today was the long awaited release of VMware’s Fusion 3.0 for everyone who has upgraded to Mac.  It would seem that things are off to a good (?) start…  VMware posted this on their Facebook feed this afternoon:

“Too much demand making it hard for everyone to get their VMware Fusion 3 upgrade. While we make things better, download the following 30-day trial to get up and running with VMware Fusion 3. Sorry for the delay!”

Fusion 3.0 is not a free upgrade.  In fact, it’s actually a not-so-modest $39.99 upgrade.  Pre-orders have been available for some time now, but for some reason they chose not to allow pre-orders for the upgrade version.  Even so, there are many ground breaking features for a desktop hypervisor that will make it worth the wait and the cash.

Some of the biggest one (from VMware):

• Optimized for Snow Leopard. Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion 3 leverages Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s advanced architecture with a new 64-bit core engine and native support for the 64-bit kernel, delivering even better Windows on Mac performance.
• Ultimate Windows 7 Experience. VMware Fusion 3 is the first to enable the full Windows 7 experience, side-by-side with your Mac, complete with Windows Aero and Flip 3D.
• Switching Made Easy. VMware Fusion 3 makes it easy for users to bring their entire PC to their Mac in a few easy steps – a simple Ethernet or Firewall cable – allowing customers to protect investments in existing Windows software, and to keep using the programs they still need.
• Best-in-Class 3D Graphics. Support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 enables users to run their favorite 3D Windows games and applications – all without rebooting.
• More Mac-Like than Ever. Run Windows applications even more like Mac applications with new features like an “always-on” applications menu to find and launch Windows apps, even when Fusion isn’t running.
• English, French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, andItalian all in the same download

If you haven’t already, get in line for your upgrade download here.  Enjoy!

First-look review coming soon!

The sign of the times indeed…

I wanted to highlight Microsoft’s VHD Test Drive program to make your software evals that much easier and seamless.  You can now even download a 90-day pre-built Windows 7 virtual machine.

Other trending products include Office Communicator, Server 2008 R2, and Exchange 2010 RC.

Enjoy: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb738372.aspx

Recently I ran into an interesting scenario in which I used the VMware Converter 4.0 to P2V (Physical to Virtual) machines on a stand-alone training network to VMware Workstation/Player images on a removable harddrive.   I then took those images and used Converter to put them on ESX 4.0.  Everything went smoothly.  When I attempted to power on the converted machines on ESX I got this: “Device ‘USB’ is not supported”  Obviously, I know this….  no USB on ESX.  But, since the physical machiens were originally converted to a Workstation image (which does support USB) they were maintained.  When I edited the Virtual Machine settings and attempted to remove the “USB” devices, it would not actually remove them (although it pretended that it did.

If you find yourself in this situation, you will need to edit the VMX file or use the ‘Advanced’ settings editor in vSphere Client to remove the references to the USB devices manually.  Once that is done, they should fire up with no problem!

Dear VMware,

In case you hadn’t heard, I wanted to formerly notify you that Microsoft will be releasing its next generation operating system: Windows 7 this month on October 22, 2009.  I hope you will be able to make it a supported Guest platform sometime in the near future.

Sincerely,
Ryan

Ok, seriously…  I was told by VMware in the spring that Windows 7 would be fully supported in vSphere.  To date, I cannot run the vSphere client on my Windows 7 PC without “hacking it.”  Likewise, I can’t run Windows 7 RC or RTM as a guest on ESX 3.5 or 4.0 without doing some un-orthodox hassles with different versions of the VMware tools and network adapter drivers.  Admitedly, Windows 7 has not been officially released yet… but much of VMware’s target customer spectrum has had access to the RTM now for several weeks.  In my organization, we are deploying it both in production and our test labs.  Maybe I am being a little harsh on VMware, but beiong that OS virtualziation is their bread and butter, I have an expectation that they would be on top of this (relatively minor) Windows upgrade… especially considering that Microsoft has done a pleanty good job of making sure that IT and Developers have had access to the product and documentation throughout the release schedule.

In the meantime, if you are looking for a business case for Hyper-V, this could be it.  Not surprisingly, Windows 7 works right-out-of-the-box.