Thinking, Learning, Questioning
Virtualisation
Dave Sobel's Virtualisation Guide
Jun 17th
Novell's Virtual Machine Driver Pack
Jul 23rd
The recent edition of LinuxToday magazine has some info on the Virtual Machine Driver Pack (VMD) from Novell for Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10. The VMD Pack allows for unmodified Windows OSes to run on the Xen Virtualisation technology in SLES 10. No more having to install VMWare server to do this or modifying the OS kernel, you can do this straight out of the box now. An Annual subscription for the VMD Pack for up to four virtual machines costs $299, while if you want to run unlimited VMs, then it’s $699.
I’m assuming the VMD Pack has come out of the Microsoft/Novell deal and I have to say this is great news! The corollary of this is that SLES 10 will be running on Microsoft’s Virtualisation Technology in Server 2008 and this has already been demonstrated. What a great choice for customers!
Upgrading to Trixbox v2.2
Jun 24th
I’ve finally upgraded my old Asterisk@Home installation with Trixbox v2.2 (which is what the project is now called). How straight forward was this? Easy peasy! Just downloaded the VMWare image (650 MB zip file) and as I’d been running using VMWare Player, then I just had to open this new image. I set the IP address of the new VM and copied over the config to Trixbox and hey presto, we’re up and running! Okay, so I’m running this on my SBS 2003 box and VMWare Player gives warnings that you shouldn’t run this on a domain controller! I upgraded VMWare Player from 1.03 to 2.0 but that started causing BSODs on the SBS machine when starting the Trixbox image – not good! So, I reverted to keeping VMWare Player 1.0.3 – it works fine. The longest thing was finding how I enable voicemail? It actually has to be installed through one of the admin menus before it’ll appear in your Extension setup. The fact that I get a ton of sophisticated VoIP features and cheap calls is amazing. Seeing as Unified Messaging is all the rage at the moment, then even small businesses can be doing some clever stuff! I love the flexibility virtualisation is affording me as well.
The Trixbox Appliance looks really cool as well!
VMware Server now generally available
Jul 14th
VMware server is now generally available and is a free download. I’ve not really got in to Microsoft’s Virtual PC and Virtual Server (which is a free download as well). VMware server is a virtualisation technology which allows you to run multiple operating systems on a platform. So, you can run Linux on top of Windows or run Windows on top of Linux. It supports quite an impressive list of OSes. It’s a really cool technology for testing, demoing and learning.
Recent Comments