Eric Sloof

Today I attended the Virtual Desktop Manager 2 Train The Trainer course at VMware in Frimley (UK) delivered by Andy Cary, Undeleeb Din and Richard Garsthagen.  It was a great day with lots of discussion about Group Policy’s and mandatory profile’s besides that we looked at the classroom setup. As always I brought my camera with me and made some pictures during the course. I even managed to collect some video footage and posted it on Blip.tv.

Monday the 7th of April I’ll fly to London Heathrow. I’m staying at the famous Lakeside International Hotel. This hotel is also known from the Frimley Green Darts Tournament. On Tuesday I’ll attend the Virtual Desktop Manager Train the Trainer. This hands-on training course, aimed at experienced VMware Infrastructure 3 administrators, covers installation, configuration, and management of a VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) using VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM). I’m among the top VMware trainers from Europe, so stay tuned, because I’ve packed my camera and microphone.

Last moth Dell released an updated version of “Installing Dell™ OpenManage™ Software in a VMware® ESX® Server Software Environment�?. This document provides installation steps, usage, and support information for the Dell™ OpenManage™ systems management suite on VMware® ESX Server software. Dell OpenManage is a suite of system management applications for managing Dell PowerEdge servers. This section lists the features available in Dell OpenManage and details what is supported and what is not supported when running Dell OpenManage on VMware ESX Server software

This morning I posted an article about the Yankee Group report regarding the comparison between Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn) and VMware ESX. This report contains a lot of errors and is pulled from the Yankee Group site to be reworked. But why is the report still available at the Microsoft website ?

  What's New in VMware Workstation 6.5

- Use Unity to integrate your guest apps with your host
- More Powerful VM Record and Replay
- Support for Smart Cards & Smart Card Readers
- Enhanced ACE Authoring
- Link State Propagation Networking
- Improved 3D graphics Support

Plans for Workstation 6.5 include adding support for additional host and guest operating systems such as CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Asianux, and newer editions of operating systems already supported. Windows Server 2008 is experimentally supported as a guest. You are welcome to try Workstation 6.5 on these operating systems and send feedback. Precompiled kernel modules are not available for the newly added Linux operating systems. Therefore, when you start Workstation for the first time, a dialog box might prompt you to compile the kernel modules. If you experience issues with this new module updater feature, run the following command: vmware-config.pl --compile.

I’m delivering an instructor led VMware Sales Professional training this Friday so I thought what’s the best way to deliver such a training? The first thing I did was getting certified myself. After studying hard on the sales topics I’m finally a VSP. Hoera! Here are my scores :

Selling Infrastructure Optimization Solutions  01-Apr-2008  83.0%
Delivering the VMware Message  31-Mar-2008  81.3%
VMware Solutions Overview  31-Mar-2008  93.4%
VMware Products Overview  30-Mar-2008  90.0%
VMware Corporate Overview  30-Mar-2008  87.5%
Virtualization Overview   30-Mar-2008  0.33 90.0%

The VMware Sales Professional (VSP) program is an online, self-paced curriculum that has been broken down into an accreditation for each of VMware’s four main solution areas. The first accreditation can be completed in about 5-7 hours and each subsequent accreditation requires about 1-2 hours. Together, this sales-focused training curriculum:

• Jumpstarts a person’s understanding of how to sell VMware products & solutions
• Reduces the time needed to be effective
• Ensures a consistent message is being evangelized