Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

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.