Eric Sloof

Last week my VMworld session proposal was denied, I wasn’t the only one because the presentation proposed by Scott Herold over at VMGuru.com was also denied. On top of that this evening Tarry Singh informed me that our panel discussions is denied.

This panel discussion will involve industry experts such as Mike Laverick, David Marshall, Eric Sloof and Tarry Singh (panel moderator). The focus of this panel discussion is to engage in a deep dive session on VMware's SRM (Site Recovery Manager) and VDM (VMware Desktop Manager). The panel discussion is an advanced session where industry and world renowned analysts and experts join together to discuss the disaster recovery and desktop virtualization. This is an advanced session where the audience gets to participate as well. Takeaways are: - Learn from the experienced trainers what the benefits of SRM and VDM are. - Learn when you should not use them. - Enjoy an independent discussion and participate in it yourself! - Meet industry analysts.

I’m curies what the VMworld agenda will bring us.

Unfortunately my proposal didn’t make it to the finals, you can download it here.

Dear Eric Sloof,

Thank you for your interest in speaking at VMworld 2008. We received a record number of session proposals for this year's conference.

We were presented with the difficult task of deciding among hundreds of excellent proposals to fill a limited number of openings, while keeping in mind the need to cover a variety of topics and a good mix of industries, geographies, and business sizes. Unfortunately, we will not be able to include your following proposal in our upcoming event:

Session ID: 1420
Title: VDM2 Install and Configure
Track: Virtualizing the Desktop - VD

We greatly appreciate the time and effort you took to submit a session proposal, and we hope that you will consider applying again in the future.

  Latest Version: Beta 2 | 6/23/08 | Build 99530


Can we start a VM in ESX 3.5 on WS 6.5 ? Yes we can :-)
The beta 2 of VMware Workstation contains a permanent fix for this problem......







New Features in VMware Workstation 6.5:

-Seamless integration of guest & host applications with Unity
-Advanced VM Record and Replay with Visual Studio integration
-Support for Smart Cards & Smart Card Readers
-Link state propagation networking
-Enhanced ACE authoring capabilities
-Easy Install Option's support for Linux
-Improved 3D graphics Support
-Virtual Machine Streaming

Chris Skinner, a Technical Trainer over at VMware created a document for clustering VirtualCenter 2.5 with MSCS. Feel free to distribute to clients and colleagues. A special thanks to Seva and Charu for challenging Chris to do this based on their VC2.0 document. This paper documents the steps to successfully implement a high availability solution for VirtualCenter 2.5 using Microsoft’s cluster services. There are some basic requirements to start the process. Microsoft requires Active Directory for cluster services. Additionally, Windows 2003 Enterprise server or higher will be necessary. This document was compiled from several sources. It demonstrates creating a VC cluster on the same ESX host (cluster-in-a-box) with a SAN-based quorum disk. The hyperlinks at the end of the document has more detailed information for other types of configurations, such as, cluster-across-boxes and physical-to-virtual.

Their customers have been asking to manage their physical and virtual infrastructures through a single console - and we know that many of you have significant investments in HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.  That's why Veeam's acquisition of nworks, announced today, is exciting news for all our customers.
 
nworks' products are the Smart Plug-In for VMware for HP Software Operations Manager and the Management Pack for VMware for Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager. These connectors allow you to directly incorporate day-to-day VMware management into enterprise management frameworks from HP and Microsoft.

By combining Veeam's resources with nworks' proven enterprise management expertise, we're moving the industry closer to eliminating the management separation of the physical and virtual worlds that has been problematic since the inception of virtual infrastructures.

Openfiler converts an industry standard x86/64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs. Building upon the popularity of server virtualization technologies such as VMware, Virtual Iron, and Xen, Openfiler can also be deployed as a virtual machine instance.

This deployment flexibility of Openfiler ensures that storage administrators are able to make the best use of system performance and storage capacity resources when allocating and managing networked storage in a multi-platform environment.

Openfiler addresses all the key data storage concerns

Reliability - Openfiler supports both software and hardware RAID with monitoring and alert facilities; volume snapshot and recovery.
Availability - Openfiler supports active/passive high availability clustering, MPIO, and block level replication.
Performance - Linux 2.6 kernel supports the latest CPU, networking and storage hardware.
Scalability - filesystem scalability to 60TB+, online filesystem and volume growth support.

What's new in Openfiler 2.3

Per-network NFS.
Tuning Enhanced CIFS Options.
Multiple NIC Bonding.
Advanced iSCSI Setup.
Fine-tune NFS client access; set wdelay,sync, origin port etc.
Advanced CIFS share configuration enables enhanced application compatibility.
Create multiple bonded NIC configurations to improve performance.
Create multiple iSCSI targets and map LUNs and snapshots.

Well they did it.  The Advanced Technical Design Guide written by Mike Laverick, Ron Olgesby and Scott Herold is finally available. Scott Herold got an email from the publisher with the following information:

I just talked to Brian, and we outlined the final steps of the process to get this book printed.  Our goal is to have this thing wrapped up and at the printer by next Friday (6/6). This means we are about 5-6 weeks out from this showing up at people's doors and it will be available for actual order soon.

Scott Herold:

I've been flooded with emails lately, as have friends of mine who are simply associated with the book for reasons of technical editing or they simply know me very well.  I know I've said it before and you are probably sick of hearing it, but we are close to done.  The content has been completed for some time.  Anyone who read the first book knows that we had a LOT of grammatical errors in it, and it took quite a bit of time to clean that up this time around.  Throw Mike Laverick into the mix, and heaven help the person that needs to edit this thing.  It's still not perfect, but will be significantly better than the first book.

A few weeks ago I conducted an interview with Mike Laverick. We were attending the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager Train The Trainer at the VMware headquarters in Frimley. At the end of the interview Mike said one or two things about the new Advanced Technical Design Guide. I recorded the interview and you can download it here.

Sven Huisman an Matthijs Haverink over at http://virtualfuture.info have written a  comparison chart with the following products:

Microsoft Softgrid
VMware ThinApp
Installfree Bridge
Citrix Application streaming
Symantec Appstream
Xenocode Virtual Application Studio

This comparison chart is an objective overview of features of the major Application Virtualization solutions. Some of the major advantages are:

• Migrate to new operating systems without upgrading or replacing legacy applications.

• Lock down corporate endpoints by running applications in user mode without locking out users.

• Minimize application conflicts and regression testing.

• Replicate your virtualized applications like any other enterprise data to maintain an instant-on fail-over plan for your applications.

Alistair Sutherland over at B2V updated their ESX command guide. This guide has been compiled by the consultants & trainers at Taupo Consulting and is based upon their personal experiences with the VMware ESX Server 3 product and is updated frequently. The information in this guide is not verified or sanctioned by VMware and they encourage their website visitors to use www.vmware.com/vmtn as the primary source of VMware product information. They are of course delighted if you find their shared experience documented in this guide of use in your environment and always appreciate being linked to.

VKernel has released its Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer virtual appliance, and they are offering a FREE 14-day trial in your own data center. Everyone implementing virtualization is — or will be — challenged by capacity bottlenecks. To maintain optimal performance in your VMware ESX environment, you really should give the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer a try. You'll quickly be able to:

• Find current capacity bottlenecks (CPU, memory, and storage).
• Predict future capacity bottlenecks — e.g., you will experience a memory bottleneck in cluster X in 7 days.
• See exactly how many more virtual machines can fit into any of your hosts, clusters, or resource pools.

The trial is free, deployment is instant, and you'll have 2 full weeks to put it to work. Why not download the trial right now ?