Guest Blogger: Steven Parker
13th Nov, New York
I have been a big fan of virtualization. Microsoft just yesterday announced that their Hyper-V server would be sold at $28 as an add-on to Windows Server 2008. This came as a surprise to me. Microsoft is entering into this market pretty late and with free alternatives from major players already existing, giving it free would have been the best strategy for widespread adoption. But may be Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if it started giving anything for free!!
VmWare which sells its flagship ESX-Server, also gives away free a smaller brother of ESX. They called it GSX and now its called VmWare Server. VmWare released just few hours ago, the VmWare Server 2.0 beta on their servers. This is downloadable for free and has lots of new features built into it.
What's New
New features and enhancements in the VMware Server Beta 1 release:
- Web-based management interface: A new Web-based user interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive way for you to manage your virtual machines.
- Expanded operating system support: VMware Server now supports Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server Beta 3), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.1, among others.
- Greater scalability: Take full advantage of high-end hardware with support for up to 8GB of RAM per virtual machine, up to two virtual SMP (vSMP) processors and up to 64 virtual machines per host.
- 64-bit guest operating system support: Run high-performance operating systems in virtual machines with support for Intel EM64T VT-enabled processors and AMD64 processors with segmentation support.
- Support for VIX API 1.2: This feature provides a programming interface for automating virtual machine and guest operations.
- Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI): This feature enables transparent paravirtualization, in which a single binary version of the operating system can run either on native hardware or in paravirtualized mode.
- Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.
I have just downloaded and installed Ubuntu on it. Doesn't seem like its running on a VM and is pretty stable being in beta. I have yet to play and tweak a few things, but the first impression is pretty neat!! I'm going to install Vista and try quick switching between them... If you want to play with it as well, then you can download it from here. Leave comments about your experience ==>
2 comments:
Is this a press release?
Anyone who's checked the VMware forum knows users are seeing red over the WebUI, the console works a lot better.
If VMware Inc. doesn't continue offering the less resource / screen real estate intensive console UI, a lot of users are going to do our next upgrades to anything but VMware.
A.Lizard
Well I am now working with the beta, First impression, not bad. But after several hours working on the VMs I have created some things just did get it. The VMware server did drag my system down alittle, Will a large amount. and the one thing I seem I can't figure out is how in the heck do I attach a usb device to the guest os?
PS, oh yea then need fix there screen view for the Guests OS, It really does suck in the refresh status.
But over all I like it and it's flexable. I just wish I could find out how to attach a usb drive to it.
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