VMware ESXi for Free

As I wrote several times, I'm working on virtualization at work recently.

Two days ago, VMware made an announcement that they will provide VMware ESXi for Free.
According to their press release, ESXi seems to be the next generation hypervisor. But, so far as I know, ESXi is a subset of VMware ESX Server and the only difference is that ESXi does not contain the service console which is actually RHEL3 based Linux dedicated for management.
In other word, ESXi is the same as Virtual Infrastructure 3i. Here 'i' stands for 'Installable', not 'i' of something cool or superior like the 'i' of iMac.

I'm wondering what kind of revenue model they are thinking about from now...

Xen Summit 2008 Fall

I didn't know that the next Xen Summit (2008 Fall) would be held in Tokyo, Japan.

I was wondering it would be difficult going to both VMWorld and Xen Summit in this fall, but that means it's not impossible doing so because I do not need to making business trip abroad twice in one quarter. :)

In addition, yesterday I got an idea about a DBMS performance issue on top of virtualization environment, especially Xen hypervisor. :)
So, the only problem is that if I can really make time working on the idea...

Day 294 : First Clinic

Today was the first day she went to a clinic except regular health checks.

Recently, my daughter had a runny nose and we thought she caught a cold.
But, it turned out that she had a glue ear. :(
Anyway, it's lucky that we found the glue ear got correct medicine.

BTW, she cried out loud at the clinic, and I think she got tired there. So, she fell asleep just after finishing the last milk tonight. I hope she has a lovely dream tonight. :)

Day 293 : Growing Chair

I wrote about the first chair for my daughter in May, but actually we rent the chair at that time.

Recently, my wife found a good wooden chair, and it looked very cool for me too.
So, we bought it. :)

Here is a piece of picture of my daughter enjoying(?) the chair.


The chair is 'mobo' by 'Timkid', a German company.
'mobo' is a kit of knock-down chair, and the below are pictures during the assembly process.
Actually, the chair is highly flexible in adjusting its height, and so it seems to be usable from 7 month to 10 years old. Actually, the chair also grows with babies. :)

One thing I felt happy is not the do-it-yourself activity but that my daughter crawled to me and pecked my arm. :o

Day 293 : Stand Up! (Soon)

Well, recently my daughter shows surprisingly rapid progresses. :)



I'm looking forward to walking around with her soon. :)

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

I have to confess that I didn't know about Professor Randy Pausch in neither his speciality area nor his last last lecture. :(

Today, I read that finally he past away in a news paper and listened to his last lecture at CMU, "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."

Here is an excerption from his slides, "Important Advices":

• Be good at something: it makes you valuable
• Work hard... "what's your secret?"
• Find the best in everybody; no matter how long you have to wait for them to show it
• Be prepared: "luck" is where prepration meets opportunity

I like the first one best, and now I'm wondering what kind of advices I can give to my daughter. :)

Time to Say...

Today, I heard that one of my colleagues would leave our workplace next month.

I'm working for a special organization for one of the most bureaucratic and legacy company in Japan, and its purpose is putting together engineers working on the same kind of technology area from its subsidiaries and make their activities more efficient for all of the group companies.

The colleague is excellent in terms of skill driving an organization for a practical direction. Furthermore, he understands wide range of technologies sufficiently including from emerging ones without working on the new ones by himself to legacy ones. But, sad to say, according to traditional way of career track of the company, a person especially on the fast career track would stay at one place at most five years or less, and he is. Thus, he was also to move to other workplace. In a sense, it's time to say good-by for him.
Anyway, I hope he can get a challenging workplace from next month.

Here, recently I'm wondering what kind of actions should I do in my career path.
I quit a company about five years ago, and one reason why I did so was that there was actually no career path being an engineer not a manager in the company, and one of my bosses who interviewed me told me that they were trying to design a career path for those engineers. But, after all I'm feeling it's was an illusion.

Thus, I'm wondering if it's time doing something also for me recently.

Day 288 : Crawling

Hoho, my daughter finally began to crawl around the room. :)

One thing I and my wife are talking about is that we have to do up our rooms.
Especially, there are a lot of cables and PC related things in my room. So, it's the most dangerous(?) area in our house. But, my room is also a lumber room, and I'm wondering if I really can find any room for gadets there. :o

Day 288 : A Tooth

Finally, my daughter got a tooth. :)



To tell the truth, we found the tooth yesterday at Aeonmall Musashi-Murayama, but it was difficult to take pictures of that. The above picture was taken when she was in a good humor after taking a bath and had milk enough. :)

Day 287 : Anpanman

Anpan-man is one of the most popular cartoons for children in Japan.
Today, we went to Aeonmall Musashi-Murayama and found the below at a bakery shop there.



My daughter does not understand Anpan-man yet, but I'm wondering someday I take her to cartoon movies such as Anpan-man. :)

BTW, Anpan means a Japanese original style bun with read bean paste.
That's why it makes sense that a bakery creates those things for advertisement. :)

Day 279 : One-piece Dress

Today, we had guests and it's the first time that my daughter wore her Sunday's dress presented by her granduncle. :)

BTW, the guests were colleagues of mine at work, and they are well known around me that they are very much education-minded. I was a bit surprised that their 5 years daughter created a toy credit card by paper craft during their stay our home. Especially, she recognized lines printed on the back side of the card as "patterns" not "characters" and copied them. The characters were of course Japanese Kanji.
A great pattern recognition engine... :o

Day 275 : 9 Months

It's my daughter's 9th month birthday today. :)

In the above picture, she wares Jinbei (甚平, じんべい) which is one of traditional casual Japanese clothing presented by her grand mother. It's made of gauze, and very good for this Summer season. :)

BTW, today I was very busy and stucked bya trap colleagues of mine at work (Hey, Furuta-kun, Morisa-san. I'm talking about you guys. :o)
Although I've kept taking a bath everyday with my daughter since she got back from my wife's home town to Tokyo(*1), the record was terminated today. :(

(*1) The only exception is my business travel to New York in the last month.

Osaka Groumet?

Today, I was sent to Osaka in order to do a kind of trouble shooting work.
It's a damn all-night work :( , but it's not the point of this entry.

It's my second visit to Osaka, and there were some discoveries for me.
For example, in Osaka there are good and cheaper plate menu restaurants than Tokyo. :)
The below is a photo of tonight dinner.
Well, the plate has a hamburger stake, a cream croquette, some pieces of fried chickens and a boiled sausage. It seems to be more than 1600K calories! :o

In addition, free for another bowls of rice.
Anyway, I had a happy dinner time tonight. :o

The below picture is a barbecue restaurant I saw on my way to the destination.
The red signboard says "情熱ホルモン" (Jo-netsu Hormon) in Japanese which roughly means "A Passion Barbecue." :o



If it was not before the work, I must have had a happy dinner with beer at the restaurant. But, unfortunately it's not... :(

Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, NY

I wrote several times about the Tokyo branch of Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, and I love the bar veeery much. :)

Today, finally I had a chance to go to the head quarter in New York. :)



Oysters were good, but the catfish plate I had was too well-done and actually it was a mistake. :(
According to a Japanese guy with me there who lives in New York, the Shinagawa branch is better, and now I'm feeling he is correct...

Day 258 : Oversea Communication?

Well, now I'm in New York (Of course, it's a business trip :o), and I had an oversea communication with my daughter.

The above is a snapshot during the communication via Skype at the hotel room which I'm staying at. :)

BTW, it's on June 22 for me, not 23 in New York local time. But, the day counter is based on my daughter's daily ife basis, thus the timestamp is June 23. :)

Day 254 : A Reverse Position?

My daughter moves well when she is sleeping.
In short, she is an untidy sleeper.

Today, I saw a funny scene after my daughter fell asleep, and the below is a snapshot. :o

Day 251 : Mama Down

My wife got a fever last night, and today she was in her futon whole day.
It's not so serious one and we're expecting she will be better soon.
But, anyway she was down today, and I was my daughter's baby sitter. :o



In the above picture, my wife is of course taking a rest, and my daughter is taking a siesta, untidily. :o

OpenSolairs 5/08

Well, about 8 years ago, I worked on SPARC/Solaris.
In those days, it was Solaris 2.6 which nowadays means Solaris 6.

Recently, I was trying to install OpenSolaris inVMware Workstation 6.0 running on Windows XP using ThinkPad X61. But, I got troubles and finally gave up it. :(

At first, I configured a VM with 512MB memory and saw progress bar of the OpenSolaris installer (which says transferring LiveCD image) stopped when it showed 84%. :(
After I read this discussion and gave the VM for OpenSolaris 1280MB memory, it passed the 84% barrier, but the installed instance of OpenSolaris never booted up. :(

So, I gave up VMware and tried VirtualBox which SUN recently acquired because OpenSolaris people mentioned that there many successful installations using VirtualBox.

The below is the first grub screen after my installation on VirtualBox.



The below shows the first OpenSolaris kernel message.
As you can see, the first line says "SunOS 5.11" that means Solaris 11, not Solaris 10 which SUN recently released the latest version of. In short, the relationship between OpenSolaris and Solaris is like the one between RedHat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core.
That's why I wanted to try OpenSolaris. :)



BTW, there is one more thing I don't like.
The first line above says "32-bit," and this might be because of VirtualBox's limitation. :(



The above is the login screen of OpenSolaris, and I'm wondering if I can make time playing into Solaris Zones before setting for New York. :o
Well, yes, I'm looking into Solaris deeply (again) from a view point of virtualization.
Reading "Solaris Internals", sometimes I feel deja vu and at other times I'm concerned with the progresses of the years I was absent there.

BTW, I found that I forgot almost everything about Solaris system administration. :o

On VMI, Again

3 days ago, I saw linux console messages which says "VMI Rom detected" for the first time using VMware ESX Server 3.5U1 and vanilla linux kernel 2.6.25.

The below white paper by VMware says that we can get better throughput even using DBMS benchmarks such as sysbench.

• Performance of VMware VMI
  

I did a kind of DBMS benchmarks, and I expected lower CPU consumption rate against the same macroscopic workload because in general lower CPU cost is one of the major advantages of para-virtualization. But, what I got was almost the same CPU consumption rate and I was a bit disappointed. :(

But, there is only 32bit mode of VMI support and I guess it's still early stage.
That means there can be a room working on that area. :)

BTW, for me, the biggest problem is that reducing sleeping time is the only way for me working on such issue. I'm wondering if someone can employ me instead of my current employer ... :o

Day 247 : Ayako Notes

My wife takes very much detailed notes of our daughter.
Of course, I also write lines sometimes such as, "Today, she began to laugh out loud and express emotion somehow."

The first notebook was "10 Little Rubber Ducks,"
the second was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."

As we are finishing the second notebook soon, my wife ordered new ones several days ago, and today delivered! :)

The new notebook is "The Pippi Longstocking." :)