Eric Sloof

Today, virtualization is in the forefront - helping businesses with scalability, security and management of their IT infrastructure. VMware is pleased to invite you to join them on Tuesday 12 June at VMware Symposia 2007, an exclusive one-day event designed to stimulate the exchange of viewpoints and strategies among industry experts and leaders who are harnessing the power of virtualization. You can find more info on the VMware Symposia website.

Location : FCCC - Elisabethzaal, Koningin Astridplein 26, 2018 Antwerpen, Belgium

Solko brought me up to date with another great tip. When you are tired of all the error message’s Winscp is giving you and you want to integrate SSH and all the other functions you are using to communicate with you VMware ESX server in just one program, you may want to take a look at a great tool with the name Tunnelier. This tool is a friendly and flexible SSH client for Windows which includes state of the art terminal emulation, graphical as well as command-line SFTP support, an FTP-to-SFTP bridge, powerful tunneling features including dynamic port forwarding through integrated proxy, and also remote administration for our SSH server, WinSSHD. Tunnelier is free for individual use and you can get it here.

This week I am delivering the VMware course VI-3 install and configure to twelve enthusiastic people. One of them told that he is using a very handy (and free :-)) tool that can be used to manage multiple remote desktop connections. Royal TS allows you to organize and manage multiple remote desktop connections. Connect to any machine where terminal services are enabled. Organize connections in custom categories for quick access. Connect directly to the console session and find out who else is connected to the machine. You can get a free copy here. Thanks to Solko.

Last week at the TSX in Nice I had an interview with Richard Gartsthagen. He was very enthusiastic about at tool called nLite. With this tool you can remove Windows components like the Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN Messenger and more….. When your are creating a template for your virtual machines, you don’t want a modem driver or a sound card driver. In fact the only drivers you are using within a virtual machine are the one’s within the VMwaretools. After the removal of all the overhead from your Windows  ISO the virtual machine becomes very small and Windows will start faster than ever before. Its even possible to slipstream the virtual machine drivers into you ISO and get rid of the press F6 message for  the LSI driver during the setup of your Windows XP virtual machine. Richard has build an ISO image for the VDI labs with a size of 72 Mb. After the ISO is installed you have a Windows XP virtual machine witch starts up in seconds and the size of the hard disk is only 500 Mb with still 200 Mb free disk space. This is the first step in creating a JeOS (pronounced "Juice") witch is an abbreviation of Just Enough Operating System. This technique lets you create and ship your software within are ready to run virtual machine. You can get a free copy of nLite at http://www.nliteos.com/.

Today I recorded the last two interviews, actually Viktor van den Berg interviewed me :-) , and I had an interview with Bouke Groenescheij. Bouke started his training and consulting company called Jumé recently. Jumé stands for commitment, professionalism and flexibility - new way of thinking. Jumé provides the best possible service, technical knowledge, enthusiasm during training and consultancy. That way you will get the best and honest solution, guaranteed!

I want to thank all the people at the TSX for this great event.