Eric Sloof

Ed Albanese also know as desktop ( VMware) answered some really interesting questions about  Project North Star formally know as ThinInstall.

1) Why a new name Project North Star? No one knows it. I did google for thinstall forum and dindn`t found this one. Thinstall is already a good name and people know it, I wouldn`t change it.
It's a product code-name, not the planned name for the product release. The final product name for the Thinstall technology is not decided; it could remain, it could change. A big part of the release of any new product are things like trademark searches across the world. VMware will need to do these things for any such name we issue. I didn't want to wait for all of those things to happen before we release a product in beta to market, and thought it would be better to get it into Vmware customers hands now - even with a codename - than wait till all the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted with product name requirements. I'm glad you found this beta despite the codename!

2) The price.... 4000-5000 is really really to much.
3) Can you Port it to Linux because your other products are also multi platform. Linux has really no similar thing ?

You can read all about it in this discussion.

At the VMworld in Cannes XTG received the award for VMware Authorized Training Center (VATC) of the year for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). During the VMworld Europe conference in Cannes this prestigious award has been handed over to Willemien Visser, director of XTG. According to the jury report XTG has deserved this award because it’s the market leader for three years in a row in the field of delivering VMware training. Absolutely no other VATC in EMEA has trained more course participants. Also the quality of the training and the instructors is commented as excellent. The scores measured by the independed evaluation system filled in by the course participants are high. The instructors of XTG have thorough professional knowledge and broad practical experience and I’m proud to be one of them :-).

I first discovered this post on the Dutch ICT-Freak website, thanks Arne Fokkema. He also created two nice screen shots. The original story came from vinternals.com.

At last! VMware have finally added passthrough auth support in VC 2.5, although it is currently classed as experimental. This is something I have been waiting / asking about for quite some time. And even better, it's on by default! To use it, simply add -passthroughAuth -s vchostname to the end of the shortcut used to launch the VI 2.5 client.

Invoke allows third-party applications, such as Perl scripts, Java applications, or other .NET programs, to be launched directly from within the VI 2.5 client using the currently authenticated session cookie. Aside from our original SVMotion plugin, Invoke is the most important piece of software designed to extend the VI client to arrive on the scene to date. Invoke is by its existence proof that a simple idea can be incredibly powerful in implementation. Download the Invoke plugin and see what kind of mash ups you can create!

A groundbreaking disaster recovery solution for VMware Infrastructure 3 that combines backup and replication in one product. Veeam Backup is the first solution that combines backup and replication in a single product for fast recovery of your VMware ESX Servers. Backup is easy – recovery can be hard. But with Veeam Backup, fast recovery is easier than you ever thought possible. Backup and Replication in one - Now, with Veeam Backup, organizations can benefit from a unified solution for both backup and replication to protect mission-critical virtual machines from both hardware and software failure. From vm4all.com :

SxS is a relatively new OS feature supported by Windows on XP, Windows 2003, and Vista. SxS is a must�?have feature in order to deploy most modern software products such as Microsoft Office 2007, Adobe Reader 8, and .NET 2.0/3.0. VMware Project North Star (Thinstall) is the only application virtualization solution which supports SxS. In the early days Microsoft recommend installing DLLs to c:\windows\system32 if you wanted to share them with other applications. This lead to “DLL Hell�? since one applications installer would install one version of a DLL and another installer would install another version overwriting the existing DLL. If the new version of the DLL wasn’t compatible the older application would suddenly break and stop working. This is still how the majority of applications install their DLLs, even Office 2007 installs approximately 7 DLLs to c:\windows\system32. Slowly the industry is moving to deploy shared DLLs using SxS as XP becomes mainstream and Visual Studio 2005 forces this on you if you want to use the Version 8 C Runtime libraries. With SxS technology, applications can install DLLs to version specific directories tell Windows what version of the DLL should be used when they load a DLL by that name. VMware is proud to announce the VMware Project North Star Beta (Thinstall). New features at general availability (GA) will include dynamic linking between "virtual packages" (Application Link) and over the wire updates via HTTP/HTTPS to update deployed virtual applications (Application Sync). Download the VMware Project North Star Beta (Thinstall) today.

Alex Bakman, the founder and CEO of Vkernel announced the beta of the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer on his weblog.

Your virtual data center is growing. You are adding a ton of new VMs every week. Wouldn't it be really cool if you head a "crystal ball" that told you in how many days you will run into capacity bottlenecks and what type of bottlenecks it will be (cpu, memory, storage) ? Now you can. Join Vkernel's beta program for Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer that will kick off in early March.

Larry Loucks, CISSP/VCP/VCI/SCP/MCSE, is a 22-year veteran of the IT industry who has served in many capacities including Novell/Microsoft/Cisco engineering, network design and optimization, and security consulting. During the past 10 years, Larry has worked in consulting with an aim toward improving infrastructure performance while lowering costs of IT to business. Larry joined the virtualization industry around four years ago, and is a former VMware Senior Consultant.