Dugie’s Pensieve

A little off topic for my blog, but deserves a special mention.  Ages ago I remember something about Google cramming portable data centres in a shipping container.  Can’t find any info on it though.

Anyway, I guess Sun bought it to market with their “Project Blackbox“.  It looks very impressive.  A single shipping container houses:

• 146 teraflops
• 2 Pb of storage
• 9 Tb of memory

Some piccies are below:

If you want to know more check the Sun website. “Project Blackbox“

Patrick over at the Windows Server Division blog has shed some [welcomed] light with the confusion with Vista’s EULA and Virtualization. 

Check out his post “Virtual Hard Disk format becomes open“, a snippet is below:

A few weeks back we introduced a type of non-binding agreement for Web services software called Open Specification Promise. Today we announced that the same agreement now aplies to the virtual hard disk (VHD) image format used by Microsoft for encapsulating the OS and app within a virtual machine. Some early coverage has appeared in eWeek and CNET. And Sam posted an audio interview with XenSource’s Simon Crosby at Port25.

So what’s this mean for the 60+ partners who previously licensed VHD under a royalty-free agreement? It means that you can either stick to the terms of the existing VHD agreement, or you can choose to accept the OSP terms. Your call.

And why should Windows Server customers care about this news? I’ll venture to say that the friendlier terms of OSP will be appealing to more (than 60) vendors, who will then create new VHD-based solutions for Virtual Server and Windows Server virtualization. And I suspect many of these solutions will be interoperable with the open source world.

While the OSP news is goodness, the timing is a bit odd. Just yesterday our brethren on the Windows client team posted the new EULA for Windows Vista. There were some inaccurate interpretations of the EULA in regards to was is/isn’t allowed when it comes to virtualization technologies. If you read the EULA - and you’re not an attorney like me or many of us out there - it’s not hard to misinterpret the language. An anonymous comment to Alessandro’s post shared the correct interpretation:

This does not limit your use of the software in a virtual environment. It is intended to limit your use of the same license for multiple installations. For instance, if you buy a new desktop with a copy of windows installed, you can’t take that same license of Windows and install it in a virtual machine. This would be similar to not allowing you to install the same license on another machine. Ultimate edition opens up licensing and allows you to use the same license inside a virtual machine, even though the license is already installed on the physical machine. 

I hope to see an official clarification from the Windows Vista team on this topic.

Patrick

The “VHD Specifications” are available as a download from microsoft.com

The spec is a17 page document (released October 11, 2006 - Version 1.0) and covers as the name suggest the internal workings of the VHD file format (bytes, offsets, and all that good stuff).  I’ve skimmed through it and found it fascinating.

Anyway a snippet from the overview is below:

This paper describes the different virtual hard disk formats supported by Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server and provides information about how to store the data.  This paper focuses on how to store the data in files on the host file system.

The reader should be familiar with virtual machine technology and terminology, such as the terms guest and host as used in the context of virtual machine architectures. The user should also be familiar with hard disk technologies and should understand how data is accessed and laid out on the physical medium.

Not a lot more can be said other than: Unng Yaaa Naaa Vista Mmmmm

I mean really, I’m about to take a huge leap of faith here.  My (I mean my her) MCE will be upgraded to Vista RC2 in the next few days.  Like I said a huge leap of faith — because everyone knows what happens when [her] shows don’t record.  It’s pain, and the worst kind.  Come on Parky, you’ve got to back me up here.

Anyway, Kleefy is pleased with performance, and Tristan’s already upgraded. 

Finger’s crossed, and off we go….

Sweet! I’ve won a Scripting Guys T-Shirt (I never win anything) – as part of the 500th Hey, Scripting Guy! Article Celebration and Giveaway, I wont me a t-shirt:

Congratulations! You’ve won a Scripting Guys T-Shirt as part of the Send Us a Postcard Sweepstakes! Please send us your name, address and phone number (all are required for shipping) and we’ll send you your T-shirt. 

Thanks for entering the Hey, Scripting Guy! 500th Article Celebration Sweepstakes!

Wow!?  Ken Schaefer (presented some of the IIS sessions at TechED AU) has an impressive VPC setup.  Check out his post and photos, “Need to run a lot of Virtual Machines?”, and a snippet is below:

• Main machine I use today is a Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet PC
• To further boost VPC performance I increase the number of hard disks … The modular bay has a second hard disk, and I attach one or more external disks connected via USB. All up, with 2 x 80GB and 1 x 100GB drives, this gives me 260GB of storage
• I actually carry a number of these small 2.5″ laptop drives around with me - the total amount of storage I carry in my laptop bag is 420 GB. Not too bad for 2.5kg
• I can can simulate a decent sized network [four network connections in each laptop allows for routed networks using ISA Server or Windows RRAS]
• Carrying just two laptops and a couple of external 2.5″ bus powered hard disk enclosures.
   

Ok, so by know everyone more or less knows Virtual PC 2007 Beta, is available for download.  So here are my first impressions (not really facts).

• It looks like the old version
• A few dialogs, and defaults are different [and better]; eg properties of a VM, and the “New VM wizard” are subtly different
• Runs VMs from the previous version
• Save states are not compatible between versions
• Save states are much faster
• Creating a new VM is much nicer, with the option to specify a disk size
• Leaving a VM at the “Reboot and Select proper Boot device” will still max out your CPU
• Better with laptop power management (Fix for IntelPPM issue)
• Supports greater than 2.2GB ISO images

Now for those who are going to install Vista (and I imagine most of you are because) it installs so much better. the VM Additions included 13.709 supports Vista 5472.5 and your mileage will vary.   You may want to grab the latest additions 13.715 from connect.microsoft.com
 

The details for Virtual PC 2007 Beta are now on connect.microsoft.com.  At the time of posting, there are no files in the download section - I imagine they will be there soon.

Anyway, the official news on the site, Beta 2 now supports:

• Hardware-assisted virtualization if you have it (enabled by default)
• Vista as a host
• Vista as a guest
• 64-bit hosts (no guests though)

Keep you posted as I find out more.

I thought this was funny, and the post is a bit verbose - but hey this appeals to me. 

It looks like Microsoft SoftGrid (aka Softricity SoftGrid) is still finding it’s home within Microsoft.

Today I stumbled across KB 924287 Support policy for Microsoft programs running in third-party virtualization environments..  The KB is definitely aimed at Microsoft SoftGrid’s [supported] ability for virtualization and redirection of:

• Registry virtualization
• File system virtualization
• Kernel components such as semaphores, mutexes, and so one
• Namespace coexistence and redirection
• COM and DCOM objects
• Services
• Fonts
• Initialization (.ini) files

Anyway, if you jump to the bottom of the KB article you will see that the KB applies to the product “Microsoft Virtual PC 2004″ :)

..that I thought was funny.  Poor mis-understood SoftGrid.

Just had [one of] the weirdest MSN chat with Paul.  Some of you may remember Paul as the guy who did the SOX presentation at TechED — but he’s also the guy that happens to use the worlds highest grade of heat rated explosives at his workplace.

Anyway, Paul’s got comms problems - it’s all to do with that pesky volcano messing up the link to the island.  So even though Rabaul has over 1ft of ash over it, DFSR is still replicating  50+ Gb of data quite happily over his 300 Kb connection.  Cool huh?

Like I said, [one of] the weirdest msn chats.  Here’s a pic of volcano: