VMware is pleased to announce that the new version of VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, including VMware Virtual Desktop Manager, is currently in the “Release Candidate? status . Beta applications are still being accepted on a limited basis, depending on availability and the partner or customer feedback needed. To register please visit this link. As attendee of VMworld Europe 2008 you have the opportunity to not just visit a great selection of break-out sessions, but also get ‘your hands dirty’ with the hands-on labs. The “VMware VDI - Explore the Benefits of Centralized Desktop Management “ lab will help you to understand how to centralize desktop IT, using VMware VDI. You will get the opportunity to configure a VMware VDI environment based on VMware VI3, VDM 2 and VirtualCenter. This lab is self-paced allowing participants to spend as much time as required to explore and test the different configuration options of the VMware VDM 2 connection broker. Vmware’s team of experts will be on-hand, if required, to help guide you through the configurations and associated use cases of VMware VDI. This lab will allow you to experience firsthand what is possible with the VMware VDI solution.
Tuesday, January 15. 2008
How to setup a virtual Thinstall SetupCapture server
Since Thinstall is acquired by VMware I was wondering what Thinstall’s advice for a virtual SetupCapture server would be and found the following how to : When creating a Thinstall project using SetupCapture, they recommend using a "clean" install of Windows. If you don't already have a clean PC sitting around for this purpose, they recommend using a product like VMWare to maintain a clean image of Windows. With VMWare, you can install Windows into a virtual machine one time and take a "snapshot" of the entire machine in its clean state (no application installed). Then after you have used Thinstall's Setup Capture application to capture an application's install, you can use VMWare to discard your changes and revert the virtual machine to a clean state where it is ready to capture a new application. The guide shows how to install and configure VMWare Server with a base clean OS. As of this writing, VMWare Server is available for free from VMWare. MSDN subscribers can also obtain a free license to a similar product from Microsoft called VirtualPC. They recommend VMWare over VirtualPC if you have a choice in selection....
Monday, January 14. 2008
The complete white box list
Two weeks ago I published an article about the ultimate white box, well I wasn’t the only one searching for some cheap hardware to host ESX 3.5. Dave Mishchenko, a VMware community champion from Vancouver, discovered a way to extract a list of supported hardware from the VMware-esx-drivers-scsi-sata RPMS file. He created a complete list with all kinds of ESX 3.5 compatible motherboards and SATA controllers. You can find the list in this discussion.
Service Console redundancy
Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks revamped his new website and it looks great. The Yellow Bricks website just became online recently but already contains a lot of informative articles. Today Duncan published an article about how to workaround service console redundancy warning:
The last couple of weeks more blogs and topics appeared around the warning VirtualCenter gives when there’s no service console redundancy. Several people posted about a workaround to clear this warning. The workaround is very easy: temporarily assign an additional nic to the service console vSwitch and reconfigure your HA. Notice that I used ? workaround? cause I definitely don’t see this as a solution for the problem. With the current technology there’s not much reason not to have a redundant service console in my opinion, especially when you are using HA.
You can read the full story at the source.
Introducing Monét - Free VI Syslogging
Schley Andrew Kutz over at Lostcreations introduced Monét - Monét (as in "Count de...") stands for "Monitors Events and Tasks" and monitors an ESX or VirtualCenter? server, recording tasks to standard out, a syslog server, or a Windows event log server. This application teaches several important VI3 SDK concepts: creating property filters, waiting on updates, and creating multi-threaded VI3 SDK utilities. Monét comes in a variety of flavors; it is currently implemented using Microsoft .NET with C# 2.0, the VI Perl Toolkit, and Java. There is running a tread about Monét and vm4all.com has been updated.
Friday, January 11. 2008
When will VMware switch-over to Net2Display ?
I was a bit curious about the Net2Display release date because there is a great change that VMware will drop RDP in favour of the new Net2Display standard for its upcoming Virtual Desktop Manager 2 product. I contacted a Net2Display Chair member. Dr. Kenneth Ocheltree over at IBM Research told me that they are making progress in the standard but still have a number of areas to complete before the standard is ready for the VESA approval process. He is targeting to have the standard completed in the first half of 2008. As Net2Display is a VESA standard, it is available only to VESA member companies during the development process and will be generally available when it is an approved standard.