Eric Sloof

A VMWare cofounder says virtual appliances that run apps alone could threaten operating systems.The virtual appliance model could be a major threat to operating systems from major vendors such as Microsoft Corp., says a cofounder of VMWare Inc. Mendel Rosenblum told an audience at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco last week that a virtual appliance, which bundles a software application with only the operating system code needed to make it run, can then be deployed on a virtualized server regardless of the host operating system. Rosenblum is also chief scientist of virtualization at VMware.

washingtonpost.com

This release of VMware ESX Server offers the following improvements:

• Wyse Multimedia Support can now be installed into compatible guest operating systems using the VMware Tools Installer. Installing Multimedia Support enables supported devices to receive encoded video streams via RDP/ICA. Only Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 guest operating systems are supported when using Wyse Multimedia Support and ESX Server 3.0.2. Please refer to the KB 1001699 for information on installing Wyse Multimedia Support in a supported guest operating system.
• Support for additional backup software from third-party vendors including:
  • CA BrightStor ArcServe 11.5 SP1
  • CommVault Galaxy version 6.1 SP4
  • IBM TSM Storage Agent version 5.3.3
  • Legato NetWorker 7.3.2 Jumbo Update 1
  • Symantec Backup Exec version 11d
  • Veritas NetBackup Exec version 6.0

Continue reading "What's New in the ESX Server 3.0.2 Release" »

Normally you would enter your Virtual Center server host name when logging in with the Virtual Machine MKS Client. But in some circumstances it may be necessary to logon to your ESX server directly. Bypassing the Virtual Center is never a good idea because you can make your cluster instable, but on the other hand if you don’t have a Virtual Center Server anymore and still want to use the Virtual Machine MKS Client you received an error. Until now, with version 1.8 you can both logon to your VC server and directly to your ESX host. Keep in mind that when you logon to the ESX server directly you have to use the service console Linux account instead of your Windows account. When you want to visit the Paypal sponsor page, please use this link. You can find the download link for the Virtual Machine MKS Client v1.8 in the software menu item of my blog.

First of all I would like to thank Robert Baumstark. He is the one who has build the VIClient.dll and helped me tremendously. I created a new version of the Virtual Machine MKS Client, this version has better sizing, very handy when working on a small desktop with large virtual machines. Another new thing is the title bar, it displays the status and name of the controlled virtual machine. You can download the new version here.

Then about the contest, Richard Garthagen joined in so we can expect a MKS tool on run-virtual this summer. Bouke Groenescheij was behaving very strange yesterday. He wouldn’t talk to me and suddenly claimed a new domain name and made an announcement about vvi-world ? I suspect someone has put something in his tea here at Ahrend ;-). I took a peek at his KVM-Tool and it’s impressive. His tool allows you to open multiple console sessions and logs on to an ESX server directly.
What to expect in the future, well I like the multiple screen option so I’m going to build a tear off button. Besides that Dee made a comment and suggested to allow the virtual machine to be connected to the local CD drive on the client. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Continue reading "Virtual Machine MKS Client v1.2" »

Bouke Groenescheij has been added as a speaker for the VMworld 2007 event, held September 11 - 13 at the Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, California. Bouke is a VMware certified instructor and owner of Jume a company that delivers consultancy and training services. His presentation will be dealing with Microsoft clustering in a VMware HA environment.

Continue reading "Bouke Groenescheij is one of the speakers for..." »

When you want to use SftpDrive in combination with your standard back-up software you have to find some way to unlock the flat.vmdk file. Well there is a way and it’s staring you right in the face. The only problem is it isn’t well documented, so it will cost some extra time to figure out how it works. The basis for the unlocking mechanism is the following list of files:

09-03-2007  10:22         827.392 libeay32.dll
09-03-2007  10:22         159.744 ssleay32.dll
09-03-2007  10:29         8.785.920 types.dll
09-03-2007  10:29         1.171.456 vcbSnapshot.exe
09-03-2007  10:29         1.183.744 vcbVmName.exe
09-03-2007  10:29         1.626.112 vmacore.dll
09-03-2007  10:29         1.097.728 vmomi.dll

Continue reading "VMware Consolidated Backup unlocked" »

Scott Herold is Vice President of Product Engineering for Invirtus, a role to which he brings a decade of relevant industry experience in operating system, network, security, and storage design. Herold has been a pioneer in architecting advanced virtualization solutions for many Fortune 100 organizations in R&D and implementation roles. Herold comes to Invirtus from Vizioncore where he served as Director of Research and Development and engineered solutions that solved major challenges in virtualization. He played a key role in helping Vizioncore expand and enhance their solutions for both the SMB and Enterprise market space by gathering feedback from partners and customers. Herold also successfully led the engineering efforts of introducing two new offerings to the Vizioncore product lineup.

Prior to his tenure at Vizioncore, Herold was a Senior Network Engineer for RapidApp where he was responsible for architecting and managing the implementation of virtualization solutions for many of the world’s largest organizations in some of the most advanced virtual infrastructures in use today.

Continue reading "Scott Herold, Vice President, Product..." »

Map you’re VMFS folder of your VMware ESX Server as a Windows network drive with SftpDrive. The SFTP file system network enables all your back-up  and edit applications. Don't drag and drop. Don't transfer back and forth. Just use your VMware ESX Server files directly from your applications. SftpDrive network-enables all your Windows applications by enabling you to map your VMware ESX Server  as a network drive. Save and edit files directly on your ESX server.  Just imagine how easy your backup will become when you use the VCB snapshot tool to unlock the VMDK files…

Dinny Davies has been busy and produced a nice solution for installing ESX3 safely without having to disconnect the server from the SAN. 

During the TSX event in Nice there was a lot of speculation about new features in the next version of VMware ESX server. Mike Laverick  managed squeeze some comments out of Yu-Shen Ng.  And the past few weeks more and more news leaked out. Let’s take a look at the rumors and the facts. The release date of version ESX 3.1 will be around the end of October 2007. In this new version there will be better redundancy for iSCSI. Data replication in the kernel and filtering by third party apps will be possible. Besides authentication with AD, LDAP is going to be supported. When you logon to WebAcces there will be more possibility’s like creation of VM’s and controlling the resource pools and clusters. Different CPU family type’s within the Intel brand and connected internal switches are going to be supported in combination with VMotion. And last but not least VCB file level back-up for Linux VM’s.