Sun has just released an update version to their free, open source desktop virtualization client, VirtualBox. They are saying the major feature is that they now provide support for SMP (multiple CPUs) for their virtual guests! In addition to that, they have improved 3D support (not that it was too shabby before).

Also, remember that this is available for download on all major OSes (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and even Solaris).

For being a free virtualizer, VirtualBox is definitely some good competition for products like VMware Workstation/Fusion and Parallels. It doesn’t seem to support 64-bit guests yet, though.

Check out the full Changelog and try it out! Let us know what you think!

Edit: stu pointed out that 64-bit guests are in fact supported, but you have to have VT/AMD-V support on your CPU. Most modern systems have this these days, however the desktop I used when I tried it on did not. This was my mistake for assuming it wasn’t supported.

Before we begin, I would like to preface this blog post: The steps and topics contained in this post are purely theoretical and are meant to appeal to academia only. The staff at VMHero assumes no liability for any infringement which may occur as a result of following any of the steps below. We do not encourage piracy, and publish this information only as a theoretical possibility.

Many of you will know that both Apple and VMware support virtualizing OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard Server for testing environments. Some of you will also know that there are ways of fooling Fusion into thinking that a VM running OS X Leopard client is really a Leopard server.

However, there is an issue with virtualizing OS X 10.4, Tiger. Installing the Tiger OS in the traditional sense of mounting an ISO or using the physical installation media will not work. In our tests, no matter what hacks or modifications we made to our virtual machine, we could not get the OS to install. At the time, we were testing for an issue whereby using a hacked ISO from the Internet was not an option.

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You may occasionally find yourself in the situation where your Windows VM has overgrown the size that you created for its disk volume.  After all, why wasted valuable ‘Macintosh HD’ space for Windows unnecessarily, right?

Don’t panic… to do so is very easy as long as your have Fusion 2.x (free upgrade if you don’t)!  No more need to use the ‘vdiskmanager’ tool.  Simply go to the settings for your virtual machine and select the properties for your undersized volume.  Then, just drag the slider to the new desired size.

A couple things to be aware of…

• I had problems getting manually entering the size (without using the slider) to work consistently… so, for best results, just use the slider.
• Having enough space to cover the margin for your new drive is not enough!  The process of expanding the disk actually builds a new virtual disk file.  So, you need to have enough free space for the total size of your new disk for the process to be successful.  Afterward, of course you will regain the space of the ‘old’ disk.

Finally, once you have expanded the VHD, you will need to expand your volume in the Guest OS.  In Windows, this can be done with the Disk Management services using the ‘Expand Volume’ option.

So, there you have it…  allocate space to your Windows machine as needed!

Now that vSphere from VMware is officially available, the first thing on many people’s minds is “when can I get it?”  Ok, so maybe you aren’t quite that eager to uproot the stability of your virtual datacenter and upgrade to the latest and greatest next weekend, but the new featureset is compelling enough to start thinking about it.  One notable change to vSphere is the new licensing model.  Here’s the summary (from VMware) on what’s different:

• License keys are simple 25-character strings instead of complex text files.
• License administration is built directly into VMware vCenter Server. There is no separate license server which must be installed and monitored.
• Customers receive only one single license key for a given vSphere edition (e.g. Advanced). There are no separate license keys for advanced features, such as VMware VMotion.
• The same vSphere license key can be used on many VMware ESX hosts. Each license key encodes a CPU quantity which determines the total number of ESX hosts that can use the license key.
• It is no longer using the VMware Infrastructure 3 licensing server or licensing model.

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As I’m sure most of you are aware by now… VMware has finally released vSphere 4, the first cloud operating system.

From VMware’s site:

VMware vSphere delivers the cloud OS through the following essential components:

• Application Services provide built-in controls over service levels to all applications running on the cloud OS, regardless of application type or operating system.
• Infrastructure Services virtualize server, storage and network resources, and aggregate and allocate them on demand to applications, based on business priority.

This is HUGE news! VMware is really taking the industry several leaps forward with this product. It increases flexibility of IT infrastructures with compromised control over physical and virtual servers all over the datacenter. Cloud computing is finally done right!

Click here to try out a 60-day evaluation of vSphere. And for those of you who have already checked it out, let us know with a comment what you think about it so far.

Earlier this year I posted regarding formalized virtualization training curriculum that we were going to launching in our organization.  I have received many e-mails since then asking for an update and how it has been going, so, here it is…

So far, we have conducted a handful of sessions with our Introduction to Virtutalization session with mainly sales and marketing employees in attendance.  The class was focused around understanding what virtualization is and what its potential is for our business.  It also walked through setting up and running a Windows VM on a laptop machine.  The class also admittedly (and not accidentally) had an evangelistic undertone.  As mentioned in my previous article, we feel that the case for virtualization builds itself from the bottom of the organization (users) up (upper management), and not the other way around.  It has been very well received and highly rated.  We are currently working on curriculum for our “advanced” level class which we plan to begin offering in the fall which will mainly focus on the implications on virtualization in deploying our software solution.  We have already noticed a return on our investment, as sales personnel are out in the field with custom VMs for every situation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Apple platform has recently become an active part of our software development platform.  I set out to build a virtualized Mac test and development environment in the same way that we have been doing for the Windows and Linux world for some time now.  One of things I have quickly discovered is that although we have had some wins on this approach, the industry isn’t quite ready for enterprise Mac virtualization yet.  Here’s the details:

We ordered a high-end Apple XServe with 8 Cores and 16 GB of RAM.  I decided to go with VMware’s Fusion for the hypervisor for several reasons.  First of all the cost was substantially less than other products available, such as Parallels Server ($79.99 vs. $1248.75) for the same relevant feature set.  Secondly, it provides easy conversion with the rest of the VMware platforms that we already use.

Although Fusion is inherently designed to be a desktop virtualization platform (kin to VMware Workstation), it has some features below the surface that make it usable as a virtual server platform for Mac machines (from the Power Users Guide to VMware Fusion):

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