Eric Sloof

VMware will shortly announce advanced Certification to follow on from VCP. There will be new Enterprise and Design level Certifications.  I cannot disclose the names of the new Certification tracks but look out for external, communication from VMware this month.  I can tell you I would be very proud to hold one of these titles.

Arne Fokkema over at ict-freak.nl just tweeted about the availability of Workstation 7.1 beta. You can get your copy here: http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/ws?view=overview

The VMware Workstation 7.1 Beta includes several new features and hundreds of minor improvements. Some release highlights include:

•OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests: The addition of hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.1 support to the WDDM driver enables many more graphics applications to run inside of your virtual machines.
•Improved graphics performance: Significant enhancements have been made to the VMware WDDM driver that have produced benchmark results that are up to 80% faster. The updated driver also produces smoother video playback and addresses many reported rendering issues. Of course games run better as well!
•8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size: The virtual hardware continues to become more powerful to meet the needs of Workstation customers who are running server class applications.
•OVF 1.0 support: Including the OVF Tool with this release enables users to easily import or export virtual machines and vApps and move them to vSphere or up into the cloud.•Direct Launch: Blur the distinction between running native and virtual applications by launching an application installed in a virtual machine directly from the start menu or taskbar of the host system.
•Automatic software updates: These VMware applications can now detect when a new version is released and are able to update at the click of a button.
•Fedora 12 virtual machines: We are excited about finally offering support for running one of the most popular Linux distributions on the planet!

You can imagine how honoured I felt when I received an email from the famous Mike Laverick asking me if I would do one of his chinwags. I responded immediately and after some testing the record button was pushed.  Before I’m going to reveal the URL, lets first take a moment and look at the history of Mike’s chinwags. At the end of January Mike announced:

Hey, fellow virtualization blogger. Perhaps your on Eric S list? Well, I have proposal for you. Once a week I want to Video Skype with you and have a good old chinwag. What is a chinwag? Well, it’s defined as ” light informal conversation for social occasions…” but I want our chinwags to be about virtualization. Your challenges, problems, solutions, opinons – hey, maybe you just want to shoot-the-breeze and get something of your chest. Well, you can do it with me via the RTFM ChinWag!

The past weeks some very famous people have appeared on stage:

[Episode 01] Chris Dearden
[Episode 02] Jay Rogers
[Episode 03] Gabrie Van Zanten
[Episode 04] Al Renouf
[Episode 05] Vaughn Stewart
[Episode 06] Mr “Eric” Sloof

We had a great conversation about how I winded up into virtualization, why I became an instructor and of course my little vmClient tool :-) We continued about writing PowerShell code and what a future version of the vSphere client should have. Please visit Mike Laverick’s RTFM Education website to watch a 45 minute show of two 40 year old vExpert instructors talking about their Commodore 64.

I’ve deployed the recently released SimDK Virtual Appliance onto one of my ESX servers and it actually works. Andrew Kutz has created this appliance to demo his most recent invention.

SimDK is able to simulate a vSphere4 environment by replacing the vSphere API/SDK web service with the SimDK web service. The SimDK web service handles requests from vSphere4 clients and instead of communicating with a vCenter database or an ESX server, the requests are handled by the SimDK simulator. The data is persisted in SimDK’s own database tables and the responses are serialized and sent back to the clients.

 

Here’s an example of the Virtualization EchoShell logging onto the SimDK and getting a list of all the virtual machines. The other screen dump shows the PowerCLI Console logged into the SimDK.

During the latest edition #85 of John Troyer’s VMware Communities Roundtable there was a little discussion about using a Linux host as a view client. I’ve discovered a nice little live CD from Thinstation which has the VMware View Open Client 4.0 built-in and it only needs a minimum amount of hardware resources. I don’t know if VMware is planning to release a Linux View Agent but it would be really great for a Linux end to end environment.

Thinstation is a basic and small yet very powerful Open Source "thin client" operating system and some programs which make it possible to connect to servers via a network. Thinstation is mainly intended for office, company or department use. Being a private individual with just one PC you will have little use for Thinstation.

Thinstation is based on Linux, but users may actually never see Linux at all if you decide to connect directly to a Microsoft Windows server, a Citrix server or a Unix server! The user will feel he/she connects directly to the server. But if you want to, you can have a Linux interface - a blackbox or icewm window manager to be exact.

http://www.thinstation.org/LiveCD/

Andrew Kutz already has released amazing pieces of code during the past years, back in May 2007 he revealed the source code of his tool that can add port groups to all your ESX servers. In February 2008 he released the source code of his tool that can be used to create a VI 2.5 plug-in. Andrew really became famous after releasing the Storage VMotion Plug-in. These days Andrew is doing amazing stuff at Hyper9 and announced the immediate availability of the open source (BSD) project from Hyper9, SimDK, a VMware vSphere4 simulator which provides vSphere4 API-compatibility for official vSphere4 clients and other applications built using the vSphere4 SDK.

The picture is taken by Viktor van den Berg.

Andrew Kutz: I think SimDK is one of the most exciting pieces of software released in the realm of virtualization in a long time. If you’re interested in learning more about SimDK or want to become involved with the project, please visit the SimDK homepage (a work in progress). In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at sakutz at gmail. Thanks!

http://akutz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/simdk/