Virtualization and cloud computing – that’s the current buzzwords, they describe the most important platform in the next-generation enterprise datacenter. And just as you’re interested in how to deploy this model for the best possible business benefits, you need the right security to protect your investments.

Recently, Trend Micro partnered with VMware, the leader in cloud infrastructure, in order to bring our expertise to the security challenges of a virtualized datacenter. So if you’re planning to deploy virtualized desktops and servers, private cloud, and public cloud computing, we’ll be here to explain how Deep Security, our new security architecture for the VMware environment, safeguards your data – and more.

Date:
June 22, 2010

Time:
9:00 am – 1:00 pm

Venue:
Pullman Putrajaya Lakeside
(Adjacent to Putrajaya International Convention Centre)
No. 2, Jalan P5/5, Presint 5, Putrajaya

Speaker Profile:
Ian Koay
Ian koay is the Technical Consultant of Trend Micro Malaysia Sdn Bhd. Ian has 8 years experience in the IT Industry where he started off as a IT Consultant focusing on Education and banking sector.

Ian has obtained various certifications such as the HP Accredited Presales Consultant (SWD and BCS), Microsoft Certified Professional, Trend Micro Certified Security Engineer (TCSE) and I am also a certified with ITIL v3 certification.

Ong Kok Leong
Mr. Ong Kok Leong has more than 18 years experience in the ICT industry. During his career, Mr. Ong has worked for both local and multinational ICT companies and has built an extensive network of technical expertise and customer contacts.

He started his career in 1991, providing hardware support and software development. In 1996, he joined Dell to develop and deploy their system integration processes. By 2000, he was promoted to Dell’s Call Center to coach and lead the inside sales team for enterprise businesses and had traveled extensively from 2003 in South Asia to provide Infrastructure Solutions Consulting (Server, Storage, Networking, Backup, BC/DR, Database, etc). In 2005, he joined Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) to focus on Storage Solutions and in 2007, he was hired as the first employee of VMware Malaysia.

With his wide background, Mr. Ong is able to draw upon his experiences from software development, systems integration to ICT infrastructure management to provide an out-of-the box holistic view of the latest trends in ICT infrastructure and management.

Please contact Tammy at +603-9282 3300 or email to tammy @ apaccomm dot com for registration.

Be the lucky attendee to win a 32” Panasonic LCD TV when you come to the briefing. See you there!

• Enhanced VMware ACE authoring – Use ACE (Assured Computing Environment) features to package and deploy Pocket ACE and desktop virtual machines with encryption, restricted network access, and device control. VMware ACE authoring features are now fully integrated with Workstation, and no special ACE Edition is required. In addition to the new features listed here, be sure to read about new ACE-specific features in the VMware ACE 2.5 release notes.
• Unity mode – Integrate your favorite guest applications with your host. Open the application window, enter Unity mode, and the Workstation window is automatically minimized. The guest application windows look just like host application windows, but with color-coded borders. You can access the virtual machine’s Start menu (for Windows virtual machines) or Applications menu (for Linux virtual machines) by placing the mouse pointer over the host’s Start or Applications menu, or by using a key combination.
• Accelerated 3-D graphics on Windows XP guests – Workstation 6.5 virtual machines now work with applications that use DirectX 9 accelerated graphics with shaders up through Shader Model 2.0 on Windows XP guests. Hosts can be running Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Linux.
• More powerful record/replay of VM execution activity – Easily enable this powerful debugging tool, which records full system behavior, including all CPU and device activity. You can now insert markers while creating or playing back a recording and quickly navigate to these markers during replay. You can also browse a recording to replay from any spot.
• Virtual machine streaming – You can now download a virtual machine from a Web server and power it on without waiting for the download to complete. Use the command-line startup command (vmware for Workstation or vmplayer for VMware Player) with the URL of the virtual machine. The download can also be paused and restarted. Note that this feature is not available for ACE instances.
• Better internationalization support and mobility with Unicode – Workstation 6.5 now stores and processes your virtual machine data with a Unicode (UTF-8) encoding. This means you can now create virtual machines with international text in their metadata and that same virtual machine can be used by other users of Workstation 6.5 (Windows and Linux) or Fusion 2.0 (Mac), even if they are using a system with a completely different host language encoding. For instance, you could create a virtual machine on a German Windows XP host with an umlaut character in the virtual machine’s name, and then give it to a user of Workstation 6.5 on a Linux host using a simplified Chinese encoding. The virtual machine still functions properly and the umlaut character is properly displayed in the virtual machine’s name.
• Easy Install option for Windows and Linux guest operating systems – When you create a virtual machine, you now have the option of entering a few pieces of information so that installation of the guest operating system and VMware Tools is performed in an unattended fashion. Easy install is supported on newer Windows operating systems and some version of the following Linux operating systems: Red Hat, Mandriva, and Ubuntu.
• Installer bundle for Linux hosts – Installing Workstation on Linux hosts just got a lot easier. The new bundle format provides a graphical UI wizard for most Linux operating systems. With a few mouse clicks, Workstation is installed. For users who want a custom installation, a command-line interface provides complete control.
• Virtual Network Editor for Linux hosts – On Linux hosts, the new Virtual Network Editor now provides a graphical user interface for creating and configuring virtual networks.
• Expanded in-product help system – When you choose Help > Help Topics, or click a Help button in a dialog box, you have access to four times as much content as was provided in Workstation 6.0.
• Integration with VMware Converter 3.0.3 – This release includes the Conversion wizard component from VMware Converter 3.0.3. You can now use File > Import to create virtual machines from Acronis True Image files in addition to the Microsoft Virtual PC, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, and StorageCraft ShadowProtect file types previously supported. You can also convert Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) appliances. For Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server virtual machines, you now have the option of sharing the source virtual hard disk (.vhd) files.
• New features for VMware Player – VMware Player now includes the following features, which were previously available only in Workstation:
• Networking performance using NAT – You will see significant improvements in networking performance if a virtual machine is configured to use NAT. Performance is ten times better than in the previous release in some cases.
• Folder sharing and dragging, dropping, copying, and pasting text and files – Transferring files between virtual machines or between host and guests using these features is up to 25 percent faster.
• USB devices – Several optimizations have reduced latency of I/O to USB devices by as much as 50 percent.
• I/O performance – A new asynchronous I/O manager boosts performance on Windows hosts under heavy I/O loads.
• VMCI performance – Applications that make use of VMCI will see a significant increase in throughput. Several optimizations have been added.
• For more information about performance tuning, see the new Performance Best Practices and Benchmarking Guidelines.
• New virtual hardware version – This new hardware version lets you use the following new features if the guest operating system supports them: Add or remove some virtual devices while the virtual machine is powered on (“hot-plug”). Use LSI Logic SAS (serial attached SCSI) adapters in the virtual machine. Hot-add virtual CPUs and memory to guests that support this functionality. For virtual machines with this hardware version, 3-D graphics capabilities are enabled by default for Windows 2000 and later guest operating systems and most Linux guests.
• (Experimental) Support for smart cards in virtual machines – You can plug a smart card reader into a host and insert your smart card to authenticate yourself on your host or on a guest. Smart cards can be shared between the host and guests or between guests.
• Replicate the physical network connection state for mobile users – If you use virtual machines on a laptop or other mobile device, enable this new link state propagation feature if you use bridged network connections (not NAT). As you move from one wired or wireless network to another, the IP address is automatically renewed.
• Text copy and paste enhancements – On Windows guests, you can copy and paste text in rich text format, and copy up to 4MB of text. (On Linux guests, the old limitations still apply. You can copy and paste up to 64K of plain text.)
• (Experimental) Replay debugging – Record the execution of an application you want to debug and then use the Integrated Virtual Debugger for Visual Studio to examine the recording repeatedly. No debugging is performed during the recording process, so debugging activities do not affect the normal execution of an application. This powerful tool enables you to fix bugs that cannot be reliably reproduced.

For more information and to download please visit: Download VMware Workstation for multiple operating systems

According to MSNBC, open source software supplier Red Hat is racking up growth figures that much of techdom might envy. Sales rose 32%, to $157 million, in the quarter ended May 31, and profits climbed a respectable 7%.

One possible suitor is virtualization software company VMware (VMW), which some industry executives says is on the lookout for an operating system to add to its portfolio. Former VMware CEO Diane Greene, ousted by her board in July, had set up meetings with Red Hat in part to position VMware as friendly to open source and possibly as a prelude to a buyout discussion, according to a person familiar with the conversations. Representatives of both companies declined to comment.

Read more on MSNBC.

VMware often adds features during the beta cycle. You should always keep an eye out if a certain beta release doesn’t yet include your heart’s desire. The Fusion team has just released Beta 2 of Fusion 2, and has added what looks like a whole version’s worth of features over Beta 1. Multiple snapshots, my favorite, barely even makes the highlight reel, because they’ve gone and built on top it a feature called AutoProtect, with Time Machine-like automated snapshots in case you get into trouble.

This latest public beta, a free download, builds on VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1, adding the Unity 2.0 suite of Mac-Windows integration features, new ways to protect and manage your virtual machines with multiple snapshots, and a garage full of power tools for technical professionals.

And as previously announced, VMware Fusion 2.0 will be a free downloadable upgrade for all VMware Fusion 1.x customers.

Download VMware Fusion 2 here.

What is Unity mode?
VMware Workstation Integrate your favorite guest applications with your host. Open the application window, enter Unity mode, and the Workstation window is automatically minimized. The guest application windows look just like host application windows, but with color-coded borders. You can access the virtual machine’s Start menu (for Windows virtual machines) or Applications menu (for Linux virtual machines) by placing the mouse pointer over the host’s Start or Applications menu, or by using a key combination.

Click here for more about VMware Workstation 6.5.

Personally, I’m using VMware ESX 3 and VMware ESX 3.5 and I have evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V. But I have never try Citrix XenServer yet and I found VMware blog said why VMware is better here.

“The architecture for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V puts standard device drivers in their management partitions. Those vendors claim this structure simplifies their designs compared to the VMware architecture, which locates device drivers in the hypervisor. However, because Xen and Hyper-V virtual machine operations rely on the management partition as well as the hypervisor, any crash or exploit of the management partition affects both the physical machine and all its virtual machines.”

“The Xen and Microsoft architectures rely on routing all virtual machine I/O to generic drivers installed in the Linux or Windows OS in the hypervisor’s management partition. These generic drivers can be overtaxed easily by the activity of multiple virtual machines – exactly the situation a true bare-metal hypervisor, such as ESXi, can avoid.
Hyper-V and Xen both use generic drivers that are not optimized for multiple virtual machine workloads.”

“Products like Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V lack an integrated cluster file system. As a result, storage provisioning is much more complex. For example, to enable independent migration and failover of virtual machines with Microsoft Hyper-V, one storage LUN must be dedicated to each virtual machine. That quickly becomes a storage administration nightmare when new VMs are provisioned. VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMFS enable the storage of multiple virtual machines on a single LUN while preserving the ability to independently migrate or failover any VM.”

In fact, I do agreed with VMware. I like simplicity of VMware Infrastructure Client, I like Virtual Center Centralized management, I like Update Manager and etc.

Look at the screen about the comparison!

Comparative Hypervisor Sizes (including management OS)

As the numbers show, ESXi has a far smaller footprint than competing hypervisors from vendors that like to label ESX as “monolithic.”

Wow! 1461 days uptime! So far, My running VMware guest does not have more than 365 days yet.

Check here for more information.

How about you? What do you think?

click here for biggest picture.

My desktop setup:

• Microsoft Windows Vista x64 SP1.
• 8GB physical RAM.
• Non-brand Desktop.

Let me explain what I did:

• More than 75 applications running simultaneously. (Still can’t beat 165 Linux applications)
• Running 2 x VMware ESX 3.0.x(1024MB RAM for each ESX Server) on top of VMware Workstation 6.0.3
• Running 2 x Windows 2003 Server(512MB RAM for each Win2K3) on top of VMware Workstation 6.0.3.
• Running Ubuntu 8.04 beta(1024MB RAM) on top of VMware Workstation 6.0.3.
• Running Windows 2008 Data Center(2048MB RAM) on top of VMware Workstation 6.0.3.
• Running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (1024MB RAM) on top of VMware Workstation 6.0.3.

Look carefully on my Windows Task Manager -> Performance:

• CPU Usage about 30%
• Memory usage 7.79GB
• Page File 7179M

Conclusion:

I don’t feel any lack, slow or halt  in my machine so far and I’m happy with the results.I know this is not a good benchmark test but I think I’m happy with return of investment.

Upgrade your PC and PC fair is coming soon!

PIKOM PC Fair 2008 (I)
Dates and Venues

Initially I have a 4G ran running and I think it’s going to fully utilize soon. Am I crazy?

I’m actually running Vista x64 with service pack 1 and VMware Workstation 6.x.

Beside this, I have 2 x VMware ESX 3.x, OpenFiler(iSCSI storage), 2 x Windows 2003(one for VMware license server and another one for Virtual Center) running on top of my VMware Workstation 6.x. Again I have SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 & 10, Ubuntu 8.04 beta, Windows Server 2008, Windows XP Professional running in my VMware ESX server. Look, high demand right?

Mostly this is my development and production(so called) desktop for my personal interest, testing, R&D.

If you would like to have the similar setup like me, please remember to split your virtual guest and host into different hard disk. The bottle neck is on hard disk, hdd read and write input output may slow down performance. Just my personal tips