About a month ago, I setup a cloud server over at the Rackspace Cloud just to play around with it. The CloudServers are configured with 4 virtual cores on them powered by the host machines Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2374 HE.

I decided that this sounded like a lot of CPU power to go to waste while I simply “played around” with the cloud server, so I setup Folding@Home. Once the 4 clients got work, they started hammering at it full time. The load average on the server was essentially 4.0+ the whole time. It ended up that for each work unit, it took approximately 24 hours total real-world time to complete (I had bigpackets=yes). I’m not sure how impressive this is because it’s been a while since I’ve run any F@H clients to get a feel for how quickly work gets done on a given system.

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Joanna Rutkowska has announced an interesting OS that is highly focused on security and isolation of individual components. The OS is called “Qubes” and it is based off Xen, X, and Linux. It will rely on virtualization layers to isolate applications from each other. It even uses sandboxes for the system level processes. There will be a concept for “AppVMs”, which are user-defined security domains for specific tasks to run in each. For example, you could create a ‘banking,’ ‘personal,’ ’school,’ or even a ‘guest’ AppVM to run applications separately within them to keep information secure and isolated from the other apps running on the same machine.

Rutkowska says it is very much in the Alpha stages right now, so we cannot check it out quite yet. However, she plans to have a full release by the end of 2010.

I cannot wait to see how it comes together. Read more about it at the original article, or the slashdot article.

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