Eric Sloof

Here is a video sample from David Davis's upcoming VMware vSphere video training course which will be out before VMworld 2009 in San Francisco. In this 18 minute video, you will learn how to run VMware ESXi version 4 / vSphere inside VMware Workstation.

This year’s VMworld will last four full days instead of three. At Monday August 31th VMware will organize their first developer day. You get a chance to learn about VMware developer products from the engineers who built them. This one-day event will include seminars ranging from the vSphere SDKs to the vCloud API.

• New features of vSphere SDK 4.0
• vSphere Web Services SDK 4.0 Best Practices
• vSphere API Performance Monitoring
• vStorage API - Virtual Disk Development Kit
• Orchestrator API
• VIX API
• VMware Studio
• Developer productivity tools, Record/Replay...

More info can be found here and here.

This afternoon I presented at the 8th Belgium VMware User Group meeting. The slides and a short video of the demo part can be found here (thanks to Viktor van den Berg for recording). The location was great, we enjoyed some beers at the Palm Brewery in Steenhuffel. Never heard about Steenhuffel? Me neither, I was glad my Tom Tom accepted it and guided me. Eventually around 80 people showed up, much more than I expected. We had a great day.

This afternoon I presented at the Belgium VMUG event. My presentation is called “Managing VMware vSphere 4 with The Virtualization EcoShell.”, here are the slides.

Continue reading "Drive PowerCLI to the max" »

PowerBoots makes it easier for scripters to create graphical user interfaces in PowerShell, exposing much of the power of WPF to PowerShell in a simple syntax which supports events, threading, and much, much, more.

PowerBoots is written as a script module which dynamically generates functions into static script files for each WPF control, combined with a compiled module called PoshWpf which was originally part of PoshConsole (and includes the Out-Wpf cmdlet and New-BootsWindow cmdlets among others) ... the module enables threaded UIs as well as enabling support for styles, control templates and data templates.

DinamiQs developed a compeling VDi solution that enables system administrators to manage thousands of VDi desktops within one single management console. If you want to deploy one or 100.000 clients? Virtual Storm will manage it for you.

Full software management through Active Directory enables you to keep track on licenses, saving tremendous amounts of money, every day again.

• Scale from 1 to 100,000 clients
• Out Perform end user expectations
• Reduce Entire IT Environment Requirements to absolute minimum
• Secure your data- beyond military grade security
• Save on all levels-hardware, licenses, bandwidth, power, administration, support, maintenance
• Simplify installation, management and applications
• Attain 98+% Application Compatibility and Interoperability
• Improve your bottom line, ROI in 6 months or less, then see real savings
• Experience the scalability, performance and cost savings only available through DinamiQs

Here’s the a Dutch spoken video showing Virtual Storm in action managing desktops hosted on vSphere 4. The demo is presented by Mike Jansen. Continue reading "Demo Video of DinamiQs Virtual Storm" »

This evening I attended a Dutch VMUG meeting hosted by Sun Microsystems in Amersfoort. As usual I was able to collect some video footage. The speakers at this mini event were Viktor van den Berg, Jaap Romers, Sander van der Post and Mike Jansen. They delivered a good show.

I had the opportunity to see a great demo of the Sun Ray Connector for VMware View Manager. It connects users of Sun Ray clients to Windows virtual machines via the VMware View Manager. It provides a Sun Ray kiosk session that allows users to connect to their virtual machines. The kiosk session prompts the user for their Active Directory user name and password. Then the user is shown a list of available desktops, or is logged directly into their desktop, if there is only one available. The user does not have to enter their password again at the Windows login.

Forbes Guthrie just wanted to let everyone know he moved:

I've moved. vmreference.com is so old school.  I've decided to "keep up with the Joneses", and become hip with the new vReference moniker.  After VMware decided to rename everything, I thought it might be a good idea to go with the flow.

www.vReference.com

Forbes is currently working his way through all the vSphere4 documentation, he hopes to have the vReference reference card for version 4 ready in the coming weeks.  He plans to create a brand new one, and maintain them both separately.  In the meantime, you might want to check out his growing vSphere4 notes.

VMdigest created some great T-shirts at Cafepress.

I downloaded a copy of this workflow package and did some tests with it, these guys are awsome.
PowerWF Studio for VMware is a suite of tools for automating and administering virtual machine operations and the guests within virtual machines. Leveraging the VMware's VIX API plus several other PowerWF activities packs, PowerWF Studio for VMware offers levels of automation typically only seen in enterprise class solutions. The product supports management of VMware Server, Workstation, Player, and Virtual Infrastructure (both ESX and vCenter).

The VIX activity pack furnishes building blocks that allow you to quickly develop complex workflows that automate virtual machine operations, as well as the guests within virtual machines. PowerWF supports all the functions available within VMware's VIX API with none of complexities. PowerWF protects your existing investments by giving you myriad ways to use your workflows, including within shell scripts, an existing .NET application, or integrated with PowerShell. 

Continue reading "PowerWF Studio for VMware" »