Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware

Oracle feels that not many people want to run their apps in a virtual environment!

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I just noticed the following article by “Oracle Storage Guy“:

Re: Need a favor – Oracle

You are not going to believe this.  Some VMware folks met with Charles Phillips, the president or CEO of Oracle and he said no customers had ever mentioned to him that they wanted Oracle to support their products on VMware.  Or modify the licensing scheme.  He offered if anyone knew of customers who did want better or more support for Oracle on VMware, or virtualization friendly licensing, to email him directly.  His email is Charles.phillips@oracle.com and he really needs to hear that customers run Oracle on VMware, and better support / licensing would be nice!

Apparently VMware provided Oracle a list of customers that wanted Oracle to support their Apps / Databases on VMware and even better change the licensing scheme to one that actually makes sense in 2009. Of course Charles Philips, Oracles President, responded that he never heard about this before. Charles apparently said that anyone who is looking for Oracle’s support or a licensing scheme based on vCPUs should drop him an email. Oracle customers can contact Charles.

Thanks Charles for taking this serious.

Run it with VMware Contest…

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There are still a couple of days left to enter the “Run It With VMware” contest. I just noticed a tweet which had a link to a video of one of the contestants. I thought it was funny, especially the last bit were the woman does the vSphere rap. Anyway, $ 5000,- grand prize and four $ 1000,- second prizes should be more than worth the effort. For more info check this website.

You can find more videos on Youtube.com.

VMware offers upgrade path to Virtual Iron customers

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I tweeted it yesterday and several bloggers already picked up. I wasn’t able to blog it cause I was at a customer site but still want to make sure the word is out. If you are a Virtual Iron customer and don’t want to get stuck on a dead end road this might be the perfect opportunity to make a U-Turn and head in the right direction!

Source: VMware Offers Safe Passage to Virtual Iron Customers
VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that it is offering existing Virtual Iron customers an easy way to migrate their Virtual Iron deployments to VMware vSphere™ 4, the industry’s leading virtualization platform. In light of news reports that Oracle will discontinue development of existing Virtual Iron products, the VMware offer gives companies a cost-effective way to upgrade to VMware vSphere™ 4, and provides customers a clear virtualization roadmap that will help meet their needs as their business grows.

The VMware offer gives Virtual Iron end customers who have a current license and support contract compelling savings on VMware vSphere™ 4 and VMware vCenter™ Server. More specifically, eligible Virtual Iron end customers receive aggressive discounts off the list price on the below products and services:

  • VMware vSphere 4 Advanced Edition, VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vCenter Server Foundation and VMware vCenter Server Standard
  • Support and subscription (SnS) on VMware vSphere 4 Advanced Edition, VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vCenter Server Foundation and VMware vCenter Server Standard

Proof of a current Virtual Iron license and support contract will be required to qualify for the VMware offer. Promotional pricing is limited to the number of Virtual Iron licenses supported by a current support agreement. The offer is valid through September 30, 2009.

VMware vSphere 4 delivers Virtual Iron customers the unparalleled efficiency and performance required to run critical applications in large scale environments, uncompromised control over application security and service levels, and unmatched flexibility of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

VMware vSphere 4 also delivers “Always On IT” for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) and remote and branch office (ROBO) IT environments. With VMware vSphere 4, smaller IT environments can achieve zero-downtime application availability, enterprise-class data protection, disaster recovery and simplified management at an affordable price point.

Existing Virtual Iron customers can learn more about how to migrate now to VMware vSphere 4 by visiting www.vmware.com/go/safepassage or by contacting VMware at SafePassage@vmware.com.

VMware Studio 2.0

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There’s a brand new version of VMware Studio coming up. For those who aren’t familiar with VMware Studio it basically comes down to this: with VMware Studio you can create your own virtual appliances.

Or as VMware puts it:

VMware Studio provides mechanisms for authoring, on-site management, distributing and deployment of production-ready virtual appliances. ISVs, hardware appliance vendors, and developers use VMware Studio to configure and package their solutions in a standards-based Open Virtualization Format (OVF). VMware Studio also enables software providers and developers to leverage the industry’s leading virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure, and offers built appliances all the great management services that VMware Infrastructure delivers.

New features:

  • Windows Support (32 bit and 64 bit) 2003 & 2008 Server
  • Create multi-VM vApp and multi-VM VA
  • 64 bit support for SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 & 5.3, CentOS 5.2 & 5.3
  • Extensible in-guest Management Framework
  • OVF 1.0 support
  • Eclipse Plugin
  • Enable ESX, ESXi, VC, Server 2.0 and Workstation as provisioning engine
  • Automatic Dependency Resolution (Static)
  • Publish OVF to VC
  • Infrastructure enhancements – GUI and Builds
  • Studio-created VM as Input

VMware Studio 2.0 will be available on Monday! Better make sure to get it while it’s hot… even vStu is excited!

There’s more info to be found here.

DIY Patch for VMware Workstation 6.5.1 on Linux 2.6.29 kernel

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I’m running OpenSuse as my primary OS at the moment. One of the problems I had was getting VMware Workstation to work in a normal way. The problem was that the kernel modules weren’t compiled correctly. It’s been bugging me ever since, but due to the fact that it’s the end of the quarter I never had the time to actually look in to it. Luckily VMTN user Krellan did have some extra time on his hands and managed to fix the problem, Thanks!!

Fixing your broken installation is fairly easy:

To use this patch, download it from the attachment, gunzip it, then go to your /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source directory. Untar all of the files. Apply the patch with “patch -p1”. After the patch has applied, re-tar all the files. Then, run “vmware-modconfig –console –install-all” again, under Linux 2.6.29, and it should now work.

Go to the VMTN Forums and download the patch if you are having trouble getting the VMware Workstation kernel modules compiled correctly!