There has been a rumour that VMware circulating that are going to move to a per VM Guest licensing model rather than the traditional Host based licenses. Well it looks like the first move to this has been taken
TVP Tag Archives
End of Availability for ESX all but vSphere
VMware has just announced the End of Availability but not End of Life (EOL) for some of its pre-vSphere ESX products (Announcing End of Availability), specifically all but the latest releases of ESX 3.x and vCenter 2.x however, it has dropped availability for the ESX 2.x products completely.
Open Source XenServer? ESXi to Follow?
Citrix has recently joined the Linux Foundation, and there is a report (which they seem to have endorsed) that they plan to open source XenServer. That’s not Xen, it’s XenServer – not the kernel, the product, the thing you stick on your server instead of ESXi, or sometimes vSphere.
It is entirely possible that Citrix’s lawyers have noticed that XenServer was so infected with GPL code that it was already Open Source anyway.
VirtualBox OSE 3.0 – Still a viable Open Source option?
In trying to re-use some old server hardware I re-vsisted VirtualBox/Ubuntu, a viable and completely free Open Source option for non-virtualization-enabled hardware. It is a neat solution, simple and well-supported, but the open source version of VirtualBox is nobbled to make it extremely awkward to use, in a different way to VMware’s nobbling of the non-Open Source (but also free) ESXi.
Now is the time, for Oracle/Sun to put all the features of VirtualBox into the Open Source version, and let it live on, perhaps not for use on Linux servers, but as free virtualization platform for other operating systems on Windows. If Apple ever loosens up the licencing on MacOS, it could turn 15 million PCs into Macs – overnight.
Measuring Hypervisor Footprints
There have been several interesting posts in the blogosphere about virtualization security and how to measure it. Specifically, the discussions are really about the size of the hypervisor footprint or about the size of patches. But hypervisor footprints from a security perspective are neither of these. The concern when dealing with hypervisor security is about Risk not about the size of the hypervisor or the size of a patch it is purely about the Risks associated with the hypervisor in terms if confidentiality, availability, and integrity.
VMware Forcing Third Parties to NOT Sell Products for Free ESXi
Veeam has posted a blog of their own trying to explain why they are no longer selling Veeam Backup 3.x for the Free version of VMware ESXi. It is perfectly understandable that Veeam would comply with VMware’s requests in this matter as Veeam as a company depends upon their relationship with VMware to further their own business aims. In other words, Veeam has done nothing that could be considered wrong. However, VMware making the request in the first place should be a major concern to current and future vendors of VMware products.