When you find a great blog post that you know from the first glance that it's going to be big, you really find yourself dragged to refer to it even if you won't add much.

Eric Gray from VMware, has finally done it! He showed us on his great blog, VCritical.com, how we can run ESX 4.0 as a virtual machine inside a physical ESX host. That's right, not a VMware Workstation, but a real physical ESX server.

Any regular reader of my blog or a follower on Twitter knows that I've been trying to do that since I had my hands on ESX 4.0 starting from the early beta to the RC, but I had no luck doing that. As per Eric, it seems that the new GA build allows you to do this with a little bit configuration tweaks. Eric also mentioned that internally VMware has been running ESX as a VM inside ESX servers with a special build to achieve that.

Which leads me to the question I actually get from people when they know what I want to do: Why would someone need to do something crazy like this?

There are many reasons actually, but here is my personal favorite:
- I want to be able to create a fairly big and complicated ESX labs, and in the same time, I have a fairly huge CPU and memory resources on my existing physical ESX clusters.
- Running ESX on VMware workstation is great, but you are always limited to the amount of memory you've got on your PC/Laptop. 4GB or even 8GB won't really allow you to do much.
- In the Workstation scenario you can't keep your VMs running all the time, you will always have to shut them down to free up your resources.
- Having your ESX servers as virtual machines gives you extreme flexibility, starting from creating as much NICs/Networks as you want, all the way to creating your own libraries for deferent configurations. Imagine now doing that with VMware Lab Manager and the flexibility you can get for building/sharing these libraries with your peers.

Of course everything has its limitation, and one of the things that I can think of right away, is the fact that you won't run some features like FT within a virtualized ESX server. I haven't tried it obviously, but form the restricted CPU requirements for running FT, I don't think it would work in this scenario.

However, I am as much excited about the GA release as many out there now, where I'll finally be able to virtualize ESX 4.0. It's worth mentioning also that, as far as I know, doing the same for other hypervisors is not possible, like Hyper-V or XenServer. So, thanks to Eric for bringing this to our attention, and to VMware for their great flexibility and open mind to allow people to do something great like this.

Sorry for the title, although it's kind of realistic to keep yourself up2date with the latest in the "V" Technology.

So, if you're still conservative about Twitter and think that it's the next evil force on the humanity, or haven't got the time yet to subscribe to the 123,456 online virtualization blogs (and counting), you may have missed one or two of the announcements lately about these great books. I'm putting them all in one shot, with additional links for getting more information about them:

VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment

This book is talking about one of the most important and least talked about topics in the virtualization industry: "Security!". The great thing about the book also is that it is going to cover the VI3 as well as the vSphere, so you won't be missing anything from both platforms. Author: Edward L. Haletky Amazon: Click here

Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell

PowerShell is becoming the universal scripting language now, and gaining more adoption from all kind of vendors and applications. This book is covering the VI3 management with PS. Author: Hal Rottenberg Amazon: Click Here E-Book: Click Here

Mastering VMware vSphere 4

The much-awaited vSphere 4 platform from VMware has a detailed book from Scott Lowe available now for pre-order. Scott has a great blog online here , and also Chad Sakac is writing the Storage chapter in this book, which is another reason for me to must-have this book. Author: Scott Lowe Amazon: Click Here

Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information

Storage is a vital and indispensible part in any virtual environment. This new book from EMC explores deferent storage areas, starting from basic SAN technologies all the way to advanced topics like replication and storage virtualization. Author: EMC Amazon: Click Here

Virtualization for Security: Including Sandboxing, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, Forensic Analysis, and Honeypotting

Another very interesting book about security and virtualization, covering all sorts of subjects like: Sandboxing, Honeypotting, Maleware analysis, Application testing, and last but not least Forensic analysis. It's a must have book for anyone interested in security and how the virtualization can be leveraged in that. Authors:John Hoopes Amazon: Click Here

[Inspired by a Stevie Chambers' tweet , he really has quite unique and interesting daily tweets, I wouldn't be surprised if he wins the next Golden Globe on twitter this year, if there is anything like that]

So, imagine VMware, as the virtualization leader in the market, implemented this cool idea! An on-demand virtual environment for us, the customers/prospects, to create our own labs, demos, evaluations or even proof-of-concepts! It's not that challenging really form a technical point of view! Microsoft is already doing that for most of its applications (Hyper-V not included, YET!). As an IT pro, I can tell you that Microsoft TechNet virtual labs have helped me and consequently my employer BIG TIME for testing or evaluating specific MS products/features. It is really the simplicity that makes it incredibly useful. We are talking about a few mouse clicks here and you have a complete environment instantly to test what you need.

But I'm not here to talk about us, the customers, only. I look at it from a VMware perspective as well. This could be a huge step for VMware, mainly to win more customers who are hesitant to adopt the VI3/vS4 environments, or specific applications (like SRM, LM, View ..etc). Let's take an example here: whenever I talk with anyone who hasn't worked with VMware or knows much about it, they always tell me that they can't use the product because they don't know much about Linux! And then I start spending fairly good time explaining that Linux has nothing to do with us for a day-to-day administration, even for scripting now everything is almost possible through PowerShell. I can't really explain to a customer who has no experience whatsoever in Linux, about things like the VMkernel and the striped RHEL COS on top of it, or even the ESX(i) and the BusyBox! They really need to have the hands-on experience with the product to be convinced that nearly 99% of their administration time will be spent on a GUI.

Now, let's try to make more sense out of this idea by simulating an argument (people love to argue for some reason), even if this whole thing is successfully implemented & running by Microsoft as stated above I wouldn't be surprised if people hated it:

This might not be technically possible.
If I can run on my laptop the entire VI3 stack, including the SRM itself as a multi-site DR solution, I believe VMware can deliver and automate this environments online and on-demand.

VMware doesn't have the facilities for implementing this.
As far as I know, VMware is building (or already built) a huge datacenter in Washington, and dedicating most of it for R&D, I believe they won't mind to dedicate just a small part of it for an idea like this.

Not everything can be done remotely, you will still need physical access.
If you took an official online VMware training, you will know that the entire labs are done efficiently on remote facility, and we are talking here about detailed technical training.

VI3/vS4 is not that easy to install/configure by people on their own.
I believe a 10 years old kid can install ESX(i) in less than 15 min. There is also an endless amount of tutorials & videos available online for that matter, even for vS4 that is not yet publicly available you can see people already started creating these videos (ESX4 here & vCenter4 here)

VMware would kill its partners who are already doing this kind of SaaS.
We are talking here about a limited duration labs deployed and wiped-out for testing and evaluations. May be for proof-of-concepts that will require more time and effort, so they could be presented as a part of their PSO services, but online.

Why doesn't an individual do this on his/her laptop, or an enterprises do this on their own labs.
A 4GB laptop is not that cheap or available for everyone, despite the slowness when running everything in the same time. For enterprises I don't think a SysAdmin would have the time to prepare and build a lab just to test a software he/she's not even convinced yet to adopt, while through this idea it takes only a few mouse clicks to test whatever required on the fly without all other complications.

VMware does PoCs and jumpstarts through their PSO.
Indeed, but we are talking here about the initial steps leading to this phase. Not all the managers out there are open-minded and listening to their enthusiastic techies to start PoCs, they may need something to see infront of their own eyes first, and done by their own team. Besides, VMware's PSO is not available everywhere and this is a fact I'm living in right now.

These are the arguments that I can think of at the moment, if you have any other reasons why this would be a bad idea, drop a comment, I will delete it anyways (just kidding). If you agree, say so or promote the idea on your blog. If you are a VMware employee, present it to your boss and take the credit for yourself, but I'll hunt you down (I'm NOT kidding!)

I've been following the HyTrust security appliance for quite some time now, and been in contact with their great development and marketing team as well for a while, waiting with much anticipation & curiosity to evaluate this promising solution. The HyTrust from one hand is expected to address one of the major concerns that I'm having right now with my VI3 environment, which is auditing and compliance , and when I say auditing here I include the "VI3 DC admin" himself!

From the other hand I'm really impressed with the free-appliance community edition approach, which reflects a good image of the people running this whole thing!

The HyTrust's commercial appliance comes in two flavors, a physical rack-mounted appliance ($7,500), or a virtual edition ($3,000) that can run directly inside your VI3 (and soon to support vSphere). I urge you to visit their website to have a closer look and more information. If you are too technical like myself, you may want to start with David Storm's video review to have an over whole idea.

Speaking about videos, I've downloaded the community appliance to test it in my lab, and will most probably come back with some videos showing the great features and capabilities this new security appliance has to offer.

A new, thin and compact video! Here we'll demo the new GUI based storage vMotion feature built-in vSphere. Yes, GUI based and built in, no more command lines and hassle. It's fast, it's easy and it's very reliable, especially when doing the thin/thick conversions while you're migrating the VMs.

Happy viewing!