Red Hat prefers KVM to XEN! No doubt!

It's unbelievable but it's true! Red Hat in cooperation with AMD performs virtual machine live migration between different platforms - from Intel CPU to AMD cpu. You know, there are many difficulties to achieve it - like various extensions, instructions and so on.

So far, it was possible to migrate between processors of different family of one vendor only. Now, Red Hat can do it with RHEL and KVM which means Red Hat confirmed the replacement of XEN with KVM definitely. I wrote about it a few months ago here. The whole video story is published at youtube.

VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 released

Today, it was released the third update of VMware ESX platform, respectively. The third update of VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 was released a month ago. Interesting release policy. Perhaps, it has something to do with the "power on VM bug" (details here) which was critical around the August 12. After that, VMware announced some changes in the quality assurance of their products.

Now, what the third updates of both products brought? Vmware VirtualCenter 2.5 update 3 didn't bring anything new. It is just a bug fix release. Really, check the "What's New" section in the release notes.

VMware ESX 3.5 update 3 is introducing support of next versions of popular operating systems like RHEL 4.7 or Solaris 10 update 6. Further, it has extended support of SATA controllers. Now, it should be possible to install and run it on PC-like servers with Intel ICH-7 chipset. Finally, it was raised the maximum limit of vCPUs per physical CPU core. The old maximum value is 8, the new one is 20!

Aren't you satisfied with the new stuff? Go through the official release notes and you might find more.

VCB, vcbMounter, vcbRestore ...

I have written a series of articles about VMware VCB usage. They are concerned about main VCB principles. The backup procedures are performed via VCB command line utilities. It's not bad idea to make a quick list of articles for better orientation among them:

1. VM identification - how to identify a virtual machine you intend to backup? The command vcbvmname is the answer.
2. VM full backup - how to perform a full backup of the chosen virtual machine? The vcbmounter command can do it.
3. VM full backup data access - how to retrieve data from the virtual machine's full backup? It is possible to mount the backup image with the mountvm command.
4. VM file level backup - the vcbmounter command is able to perform file-level backup as well.
5. VM backup over NFS - this article describes a simple scenario of virtual machine backup over NFS protocol.
6. VM backup restore - finally, it is important to know the process of restoring a virtual machine from the backup. You can use vcbrestore.

I hope this quick list of articles will help you to find what you are looking for. Your prompts are welcome.

Solaris 10 10/08 released

The new version of Solaris 10 was released by Sun recently. Its name is Solaris 10 10/08 or Update 6. The most expected new feature is support of booting from ZFS filesystem. I added it to the summary of Solaris updates as I presented here. So, here it is:

1. Solaris 10 1/06 (u1) - GRUB bootloader, iSCSI initiator, fcinfo command
   
2. Solaris 10 6/06 (u2) - ZFS filesystem
3. Solaris 10 11/06 (u3) - Solaris Trusted Extensions, LDoms
4. Solaris 10 8/07 (u4) - full TCP/IP stack in zones, iSCSI target, branded zones (Linux in Solaris container), Samba AD, enhanced rcapd
5. Solaris 10 5/08 (u5) - Intel SpeedStep, AMD PowerNow!, Solaris 8/9 P2V (to Solaris 10 zones), CPU capping
   
6. Solaris 10 10/08 (u6) - ZFS boot support, many ZFS filesystem enhancements

For more details, click the particular release to read the official release notes.