The Storage Architect » VMware Fusion http://thestoragearchitect.com Storage, Virtualisation & Cloud Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:08:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Playing with Virtual Box http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/08/25/playing-with-virtual-box/ http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/08/25/playing-with-virtual-box/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:25:48 +0000 Chris M Evans http://www.thevirtualisationarchitect.com/?p=1649 I’ve been using VMware products for close to 10 years now.  Scanning back on my purchase history, the first version of VMware Workstation I bought was 2.0.1 for NT & 2000 back in August 2001.  I was an immediate fan of the product and at the time used it on a software development [...] ]]> I’ve been using VMware products for close to 10 years now.  Scanning back on my purchase history, the first version of VMware Workstation I bought was 2.0.1 for NT & 2000 back in August 2001.  I was an immediate fan of the product and at the time used it on a software development project I was doing.  I developed the software on my laptop then used Workstation to run Windows 98 to test client interaction.  When I bought my first MacBook last year, I also bought VMware Fusion and I found the experience OK, but not great.  Despite having 4GB of memory, Windows 7 seemed sluggish and Unity mode was cool but slowed the machine down somewhat.

Now that I’ve moved my main desktop to Mac, (new iMac 27″ with the i7 processor and 8GB of RAM) I decided to revisit desktop virtualisation to plug the gaps on the Windows tools that don’t have a direct Mac equivalent.  It was also a great opportunity to set up an environment to use Office 2010 more frequently.  I decided to move away from VMware and try out the free Virtual Box from Oracle (nee Sun).  So far I’ve been quite impressed.

Installation of the software was a breeze; I’ve included some screen shots of the installation process in the gallery at the end of this post.  I installed version 3.2.8 for OS X, which is a 74.5MB download.

Before diving into a “production” Windows 7 installation, I thought I would have a bit of fun seeing whether I could virtualise hypervisors.  First off was Hyper-V.  I had no problem with the installation but Windows wouldn’t let me add the Hyper-V feature after installation.  Next I tried ESXi, 4.0.0.  This time I was more successful, after setting on using RedHat Linux as the emulation type.  I also managed to get the installation to work with FreeBSD.  However despite installation working, I found it wasn’t possible to start a virtual machine; Virtual Box just hung and had to be force quitted.  I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised by this behaviour, however I did think ESXi might work as older versions of VMware Workstation worked on processors without any virtualisation capabilities.

So back to my Windows 7 experiences.  I installed Windows 7 64-bit onto a new virtual machine, giving it 1GB of memory.  Once I had Office 2010 & Visio (2010) installed, I gave Visio a spin.  So far, I’ve found that Windows 7 in Virtual Box on Mac runs better than my previous native Windows 7 PC.  I suspect there are few reasons for this.

Firstly the i7 processor in the new Mac is way quicker than the previous machine spec (AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 4400+).  Second (and possibly more importantly) the graphics capability of the iMac are far superior and Virtual Box supports 3D and 2D Video acceleration.  3D support attempts to use the underlying 3D graphics hardware (if it exists).  I was fortunate that when I recently ordered my iMac the new models with enhanced graphics had just been released, so I have the ATI Radeon HD 5750 with 1GB of RAM.  This definitely improves the overall responsiveness of Windows 7 in this situation, even when not running full-screen, which most of the time it isn’t.

Overall I’ve found Virtual Box simpler and easier to use than VMware Fusion.  Whether it’s as fully function or not remains to be seen as I use it further.  However for free, it’s an excellent and worthy tool. vbox_logo2_gradient TVA Virtual Box Image 1 TVA Virtual Box Image 2 TVA Virtual Box Image 3 TVA Virtual Box Image 4 TVA Virtual Box Image 5 TVA Virtual Box Image 6 TVA Virtual Box Image 7 TVA Virtual Box Image 8 TVA Virtual Box Image 9

]]> http://thestoragearchitect.com/2010/08/25/playing-with-virtual-box/feed/ 0 Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part IV http://thestoragearchitect.com/2009/12/10/review-sun-storage-7000-unified-storage-system-part-iv/ http://thestoragearchitect.com/2009/12/10/review-sun-storage-7000-unified-storage-system-part-iv/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:10:21 +0000 Chris M Evans http://thestoragearchitect.com/?p=803 This is the last in a four-part series of posts on the Sun Storage 7000 USS storage arrays.  Previous posts in this series can be found here:

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part I

]]> This is the last in a four-part series of posts on the Sun Storage 7000 USS storage arrays.  Previous posts in this series can be found here:

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part I

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part II

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part III

Previous posts have discussed the physical hardware and what you can do with it.  Sun also do a simulator version of the 7000 series array, which can be used to evaluate the technology.  The Simulator is available for both VirtualBox and VMware.  I chose the VMware version and deployed it on VMware Fusion on my MacBook.

Installation

The installation process is remarkably simple.  Download and unzip the simulator (link here) and for Fusion, simply use File -> Open to open the file “SunStorage.vmwarevm”.  The configuration process then asks for some simple details – IP address, default gateway, password and so on.  Once this is complete, the simulator starts up and can be accessed via the standard web interface on port 215.  I’ve included a few screenshots at the end of this post that highlight the configuration process.

Configuration

Once logged into the simulator, a disclaimer is presented to the user indicating that this deployment isn’t for production usage or performance measurement. This is pretty obvious; the simulator shows functionally how things work but will never provide the same performance as a dedicated device.

The simulator provides 15x 2GB drives, which although not ‘real’ are more than enough to do evaluation with.  As far as I can tell, the simulator appears to be fully functional.

Summary

Sun have provided a simulator package that appears to pretty much mirror a real USS 7000 array.  Having a fully functional system like this enables new users to gain confidence with it; although not much training is needed, making the mistakes on a simulator is much more preferable to making them on the real thing.  In addition, it’s easy for any potential purchaser to get a real feel for how easy configuring the 7000 Series can be.

The 7000 simulator is probably equal or better than the Netapp simulator, which I’ve raved (and probably ranted) about many times.  It’s a shame that Netapp don’t choose to make their simulator open to all users, but that’s another discussion entirely.  The Sun 7000 simulator simply rounds out what to me is a great product, offering storage and simplicity in a single device.

Disclaimer: Sun Microsystems provided a USS 7000 series array on loan in order for me to evaluate this technology.  The unit has since been returned.  I have not been paid by Sun to write this series of posts or received any other benefit or inducement of any kind from Sun Microsystems.

SunSim1SunSim2SunSim3SunSim4SunSim5SunSim6

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