Chris Farris

In case anyone was wondering, you can run the VI client inside Parallels Desktop on a Mac. As I plan to switch to VMware Fusion if I get Snow Leopard for my birthday I hope it works in that too. I’d really like to virtualize my Windows box. Ew, assuming I can get the USB pass through to work in ESXi. I need to be able to use the scanner in my VM.

So a few months ago I started thinking about virtualization and the future of my profession (System Administration). So much of the hassle we have involves software compatibility issues with libraries and the code that runs on it. My thoughts were that is would be much easier if, instead of big OSes with lots of services running on it, we had a micro-distribution running just a single application. A DNS or Mail server could be shipped as a virtual appliance with some form of hooks for shared storage via NFS or MySQL for its configuration information.

VMWare ESXi 4.0 is out. It has most of what I’ve been wanting in ESXi, in particular IDE support. 4.0 supports SATA drives in the host, and IDE drives and some form of USB in the guest OS. Ever since windows 98, I’ve has a policy of never running anything ending on .0 in a production capacity. I’ve got it running in the lab at work and look forward to putting it through the rounds when I get back from my business trip.

I’m not a big fan of the idea of VMware running on a host OS for production servers. One reason for that is that you have direct access to the VMware data files. You could do something unfortunate, like: `I’m not a big fan of the idea of VMware running on a host OS for production servers. One reason for that is that you have direct access to the VMware data files.