System News for Sun Users - The Blog

With VBoxVmService, VMs Truly Run in the Background

With the VBoxVmService, users can easily create up to 127 VMs and run them as a service in any flavor of Windows, or so says Joe Mocker in his Weblog. Mocker tried it with Windows 7 on x64. He did have to implement a workaround to have his VMs identified by name, but other than that, he now has his VirtualBox VMs running in the background with no console windows or anything else. Plus, VBoxVmService can start virtual machines without anyone having to login first.

(Get More Information . .)

IDC White Paper Discusses How Sun’s Solution Addresses Customers’ Pain Points

An IDC white paper written by Jean S. Bozman examines the rise and needs of high availability in a virtualized world. Spotlighted is the Solaris Cluster and how it addresses many pain points experienced by IT operations looking to improve availability for applications and databases, while utilizing virtualization technologies.

(Get More Information . .)

For Rapid Configuration and Deployment of Applications

Oracle VM Template Builder is an open source, graphical utility that makes it easy to use Oracle Enterprise Linux “Just enough OS” (JeOS)-based scripts for developing pre-packaged virtual machines for Oracle VM. End-users and ISVs have the option to either develop their Oracle VM Templates by using these JeOS-based scripts directly or via the graphical Oracle VM Template Builder.

(Get More Information . .)

Sun Engineer Mick Jordan on Project Guest VM

“…an awful lot of what goes into a modern operating system is just taking up space — space that could be put to better use,” writes Al Riske in his interview of Sun Senior Staff Engineer Mick Jordan, who is currently at work on a project called Guest VM, which involves the use of hypervisors to study the better uses that might be made of a modern operating system.

(Get More Information . .)

Best Practices Guide Addresses Issues Related to Virtual Machine Sprawl

Virtualization has transformed the data center. The cost savings and efficiencies virtual machines (VMs) feature along with the ease in implementing them within an infrastructure have blinded many into acting versus planning for the technology. Anil Desai has written a best practices guide on implementing and managing a viral infrastructure. His article provides recommendations for managing virtual environments and for preventing issues related to VM sprawl.

(Get More Information . .)

Major Enhancements: SMP Support, VMs Management Capabilities

Download the freely available Sun VirtualBox 3.0 and get symmetrical multi-processing (SMP) support, meaning support for guests that have multiple virtual CPUs (vCPUs), with up to 32 vCPUs in a single virtual machine (VM). This new release also allows users to deploy, start, stop, etc., VMs within a network or datacenter for ease in management. There are additional updates and added desktop support in this latest version, which Sun identifies as “significant”.

(Get More Information . .)

Maintenance Release Fixes Reported Bugs

VirtualBox 2.2.2 is available as a maintenance release. It comes less than a month after major release VirtualBox 2.2 and fixes 31 reported bugs. VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also open source.

(Get More Information . .)

This Beginner’s Guide Comes from Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy

Before attempting to setup virtual machines on your own, check out this beginner’s guide that walks users through the installation of VirtualBox, a free open source virtual application. In the article by Kevin Purdy, he suggested that anyone who wants to use a separate operating system (OS) might want to consider setting up a virtualization system.

(Get More Information . .)

Version 2.2 Speeds Virtual Applicances Move from Development to Production Environments

The latest release of Sun’s high performance, free and open source virtualization software, VirtualBox 2.2, is now available for download. It introduces support for the new Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard that enables virtual machines or appliances to be imported and exported, and adds significant performance enhancements and other updates. VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware.

(Get More Information . .)

Hardware, Personnel, Power and Cooling Costs — All Drop Significantly

The U.S. Army Intelligence Center (USAIC), the professional training school for military intelligence, provides cross-branch training to as many as 17,000 personnel annually. In an effort to improve overall efficiency and reduce costs, the USAIC migrated its training system from a PC-based solution to a distributed client-server solution based on 6,000 Sun Ray thin clients, Sun Ray Software and 200 Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers running 2,500 virtual machines.

(Get More Information . .)