Entries from Eric Sloof

Lanamark announced availability of the Desktop Analysis Pack for Lanamark Suite. This new analysis pack is designed to help solution providers analyze enterprise desktop environments, identify candidate desktops for virtualization and recommend optimal resource allocation to virtual desktops in order to maximize end user adoption and satisfaction.The Desktop Analysis Pack is designed to accelerate desktop virtualization projects by providing comprehensive analytics around desktops and laptops: Continue reading "Lanamark Desktop Analysis Pack" »

FastScale Technology announced the beta release of a new product that enables system administrators, developers, and software appliance builders to easily create and manage lightweight server software stacks in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).  The new FastScale Stack Manager™ Workstation Edition offers a flexible and automated approach to building software environments that average 95% smaller, require 75% less memory and present a smaller attack surface for increased security. Fully-configured software stacks can be output in right-sized AMI or VMDK format, on-demand. Continue reading "FastScale Stack Manager Workstation Edition for..." »

Installing and configuring VMware Workstation, VMware ThinApp, and creating a ThinApp Packaged Application in a 20 minute video.

VMware ThinApp From Start to Finish in 20 Minutes - Part 2 of 2

On April 21, 2009, VMware will be unveiling how they are taking IT to new heights of efficiency, choice and control through service-level automation—dramatically reducing capital and operating costs and maximizing IT efficiency—with the freedom to choose any application, OS, or hardware.

Join Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware, as he and other VMware leaders officially unveil the next generation of virtualization technology from VMware.

Don’t miss your chance to participate in one of the most groundbreaking events this year.

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Tom Howarth: Data Center Virtualization

Tom Howarth is DABCC’s Data Center Virtualization Analyst. Tom is a moderator of the VMware Communities forum and is ranked #13 among all participants on the VMware forums. Tom owns TCA Consulting and PlanetVM.Net. He regularly does huge virtualization projects for enterprises in the U.K. and elsewhere in EMEA.

Edward L. Haletky, Virtualization Security

Edward has been working with virtualization security since the first days of VMware ESX support at Hewlett-Packard when ESX v1.5.2 was in use by HP's customers. When ESX v2.0 showed up security moved to the forefront of many of his discussions as it was not being used for often critical but low utilized servers. Now that VMware ESX is now a crucial part of many businesses and the hardware has caught up with the software technology, security is even more important. This all started in late 2004. Now in 2009, Edward has written two books on VMware ESX that include discussions on security.

When you want to check a script for errors, and you’re just carrying your thumb-drive this tool might be handy. PrimalPad is a single file, color coding editor for VBScript, JScript, HTML and PowerShell. It supports  line numbers and a multi-tabbed environment. No installation required, just one single executable file.

Another free editor I reguly use is Notepad++ Portable, version 5.3.1 has been released recently. It's the handy Notepad++ text editor packaged as a portable app so you can do your development on the go. It has all the same great features of Notepad++ including support for multiple languages and an extensive plugin system, but there's nothing to install. This release updates Notepad++ to 5.3.1 and fixes portablization of settings. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it's open source and completely free.

Last Friday Xlink released VMware Real-Time Replication Software also known as ProReplicator 3.0. Just take a look at the product description, it’s promising, doesn’t it?

Xlink proReplicator brings data replication to a whole new level, combining both real-time and scheduled data replication for all your mission critical servers. Whether you are concerned about virtual machine backup, database, email or web server continuous data protection (CDP) and disaster recovery, proReplicator will provide a consolidated solution for your enterprise. Data replication in proReplicator could be implemented either scheduled or in real-time, locally or remotely, over LAN or WAN.

Their website offers a full functioning trail, so I thought let’s give it a try and let’s find out if it does what it says. I downloaded the 35Mb and installed ProReplicatior in a virtual machine running Windows 2003.

What can I say, it works!!! The installation runs smoothly, and the configuration is straight forward. Create a primary master and a replica master, select what to replicate and that’s all. I selected real-time replication, before I knew it the Dell folder was replicated to the other virtual machine. There are lots of other features that I haven’t tried out yet but are worth looking at.

I’m excited to announce a new sponsor to NTPRO.NL - David Davis from Train Signal. You probably know David from his VMware training video series. David is working hard on the upcoming vSphere video series, so when VMware will announce the general availability of vSphere, David should be ready.  I know David for a while, in September 2007 I reviewed his “ESX Server 3i Beta in Workstation” video, he has been in the IT industry for 15 years. He currently manages a group of systems / network administrators for a privately owned retail company and authors IT-related material in his spare time.

Unable to Take a Quiesced VMware Snapshot of a Virtual Machine? Virtual machines may become unresponsive during quiesced backup operations (VMware snapshots) on a virtual machine with Microsoft iSCSI LUNs attached within the guest operating system.

When using the VSS or SYNC driver within a virtual machine, the tools attempt to quiesce all I/O (storage, memory, etc) within the virtual machine. Because the virtual machine has a MS iSCSI initiator LUN attached within it, the VSS or SYNC is unable to quiesce the guest operating system in the time allocated for the quiesce operation.

VMware snapshot operations (quiesced or non-quiesced) do not provide backups of any network attached storage mounted within the guest operating system (including iSCSI LUNs mounted via in-guest iSCSI software initiator, or CIFS/NFS share mounted within the guest operating system). For information on creating backups for these types of guest accessible storage, refer to your backup solution provider or storage hardware vendor for an appropriate solution.

KB Article 1009073

Chris Farey has written a whitepaper about "Unlocking VMware ESX with a Storage Virtual Appliance", Chris is co-founder and CTO of StorMagic; as such he is chief architect of the Company’s product line, is responsible for designing the solutions and manages the StorMagic development team.

Unlocking VMware ESX with a Storage Virtual Appliance

StorMagic also unveiled the results of its promotion following the launch of the SvSAN™ storage virtual appliance. Over the past six weeks, the website has been inundated with requests for the software, and, as a result, users have downloaded more than 1,000 copies of SvSAN.