In a recent blog entry titled "A brief architecture overview of VMware ESX, XEN and MS Viridian", Massimo does a great job explaining the architectural differences between the competing virtualization products from VMWare, Microsoft, and the open source Xen.  While it's clear that there's no true winner from an architectural perspective, my personal thoughts are that many people are going to adopt Viridian simply because it will be made available more easily and cost effectively.  Time will tell though.

Shawn

So those Mac user's out there that have been using the Coherence feature of Parallels virtualization product, you need to checkout this video posted on VMWare's VMTN blog.  It's pretty amazing!

Shawn

Tim and Kevin (both regulars on SoftGridGuru.com) have announced that they have built training courseware on SoftGrid and will be conducting independent training classes on the courseware.  While this is unofficial training, I'm extremely excited to see this type of thing available for the SoftGrid platform.  I think it's going to be a great opportunity once SoftGrid starts to gain more traction in the industry.  Besides, I'm already biased on supporting independent training.

Read the forum posting on SoftGridGuru.  Add read more about the training on the GridMasterTraining.com.

Shawn

In a forum post on SoftGridGuru, smileyej posted links to download locations for SoftGrid 4.1 SP1.  The strange thing is that the download links are public?!?!  Mistake?  Get 'em while they're hot!

Shawn

Microsoft has posted additional details on the SoftGrid Team Blog about the outstanding survey for participation in the SoftGrid 4.5 Technology Adoption Program (TAP).  Here are some of the interesting plans for SoftGrid 4.5 (bold emphasis is mine): ·         Enhanced client scalability: improvements to allow very large deployments and integration with ESD systems, such as System Center Configuration Manager

·         Availability and maintainability: the most stable and reliable version of SoftGrid to date

·         Security tightening: the first SoftGrid release to go through the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) and enhancements to support internet-facing scenarios

·         Globalization and localization: support for both virtualizing non-English language applications and running the SoftGrid user interface in certain non-English languages

And here are the requirements of the TAP:Requirements for participating in the SoftGrid 4.5 TAP:

·         Executive...

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While it can't be used in a production environment, Microsoft has posted a Tech Preview release of SoftGrid 4.2.  SoftGrid 4.2 brings support for Windows Vista and Side-by-Side (SxS) support for things like Office 2007 and Visual Studio Express.  The release of 4.2 is slated for July 2007.  Read the full details at the SoftGrid Team blog entry.

Shawn

While much of the information is already well known, the SoftGrid Team Blog was updated a few days ago to include some SoftGrid sequencing best practices.  More importantly, the blog article points to a MS KB article that includes more best practices (again most of this is well known info).

Link to the SoftGrid Team blog entry
Link to the MS KB article on sequencing best practices

Shawn

From a blog post from Mike Laverick's site, I was directed towards this VTMN forum post with a great collection of hyperlinks to various VMWare-related whitepapers, articles, etc.  It's definitely one you'll want to bookmark.  Here's the link to the VMTN posting.

Shawn

The MS SoftGrid team has added a blog entry describing how to use scripts within .OSD files to modify the behavior of the application launch.  They've also provided some basic examples of how one would use them.

Read the entire article at their blog here.

Shawn

Massimo has a great blog entry questioning whether or not Microsoft's Viridian hypervisor (coming slightly after Longhorn server) will have any effect of being able to knock vmware from it's dominence in the x86 virtualization market.  Also discussed is the impact of Xen in the x86 virtualization market.  I'm not going to attempt to summarize all of Massimo's points as I don't think I would do it the same justice.  It is a fantastic read though, and coming from a marketplace where everyone is always stating that Microsoft will bury Citrix, my personal .02 is that vmware will be in much the same boat (always staying one step ahead).

Shawn