Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

Information technology (IT) media company TechTarget announced the acquisition of The Brian Madden Company, the leading independent, website and conference to address the needs of IT decision makers on the topics of desktop virtualization, terminal services, and application virtualization.

As an addition to TechTarget’s portfolio of market-specific media, The Brian Madden Company brings the largest community of IT professionals specializing in application delivery and desktop virtualization. This includes hundreds of thousands of visits to BrianMadden.com, and attendees to BriForum, an annual event held in Chicago and the only independent conference covering the desktop virtualization space.

http://www.techtarget.com/html/pr/pr-11192008.htm
http://vmblog.com/archive/2008/11/19/techtarget-acquires-the-brian-madden-company.aspx

Every once in a while I check-up on Hal Rottenberg’s weblog TechProsaic. Just curious if his upcoming PowerShell book is available yet. Hal’s last post mentions a Community tread which contains a script to install the VMware tools on a bunch of virtual machines without rebooting them. Here is the PowerShell script.

$cluster = "< >" # Enter the required cluster name
$installerArgs = 'REBOOT="ReallySuppress"'
Get-Cluster -Name $cluster | Get-VM | % { (Get-View $_).UpgradeTools_Task($installerArgs) }

VMware launched a new referral program gives you rewards when you recommend VMware products to others.

It's as simple as 123:

1. Write an online recommendation of your VMware product.
2. Share it with their friends (via e-mail, IM, blogs, or social networks).
3. Allow their friends to sign up for a special offer.
4. Earn 10$ rewards when their friends sign up.

John Troyer says:

You get $10 credit (which can go straight to your PayPal account or to a gift card or charity) every time two VMware Store purchases are made from your referrals. (That $10 number tells me that we expect to moving more copies of Fusion and Workstation than VI Enterprise through this referral, but go crazy selling ESX if that's what you're into.) In any case, it's a great way to spread the word about the solutions you use every day that make your life easier and got you your last promotion.

Thomas ten Dam has entered the world of VMware bloggers. He created tendam.info and has already published some interesting articles.  His latest addition is “SRM in a Box”:  configured! In this article he shows a working SRM environment hosted in Workstation 6.5 and as shared storage he used the free Netapp Simulator.

After a few difficulties i have managed to set up a SRM in a Box configuration with the free Netapp Simulator. The problem i had in the previous post, was because i had no data in the volume that has to be snapmirrored. So i created a vm and did an snapmirror update and voila, the LUN was shown in the array configuration.

Update :  SRM in a box preview document available

The big problem for a consultant or engineer is how to test and learn how SRM is working. If you want to test this, expensive hardware must be available for quite some time. You need double storage, a couple of esx servers and some hardware to host 2 domain controllers, virtual center servers and SQL servers. And how about a demo for a customer? You can’t have all the expensive hardware at your site for just showing how it works.

Update : SRM in a Box final release (the complete setup)

Finally I’ve just finished the complete pdf on “Building a VMware Site Recovery Manager demo with the Netapp simulator” This document will guide you trough the setup of Site Recovery Manager with the Netapp simulator, just on 1 host. I changed a few things since the preview document so ctrl_del the preview document and download the latest one here.

Dan Chu, VMware's VP of Emerging Business, intends to take an industry leader's perspective next week when he presents a breakout session at SYS-CON's 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (November 19-21, 2008) being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA. Chu will apply that perspective to the new disruptive trend in the market that everyone is calling cloud computing.

In his session, "The Enterprise Cloud: Applications On and Off Premise," Chu will uncover among other things VMware's plan to leverage its technology leadership in virtualization to deliver reliable, mobile technology to its customers and service providers worldwide. He will explore cloud pitfalls and uncover new methods for delivering applications on or off premise.

Zenoss 2.3 includes improvements in Windows and Java application monitoring as well as native VMware management for Zenoss Enterprise Edition. Version 2.3 is also taking the opportunity to highlight over 30 new ZenPacks developed by the Zenoss community for expert monitoring of Asterisk PBX, Brocade Switches, Cisco Security Appliance, and many more. Zenoss Enterprise features Native, Agentless VMware Monitoring of Entire Virtualization Infrastructure.

• Automatic discovery and inventory of all Virtual Infrastructure (VI3) components including Virtual Machines, ESX Servers, clusters, and VMware data stores.
• Physical and Virtual resource usage and performance (memory, disk, CPU, and more).
• Real-time detection when Virtual Machines move from one VMware host (or ESX Server) to another (VMotion).
• Physical and Virtual performance and availability information correlated and displayed in a single, central web console.

When you sign-up as an attendee for the Dutch VMUG event on the 12th of December you will receive an envelope which contains a VMware sticker. When you place this sticker at the most original place you are eligible to win a Nintendo Wii.  At a Tech·Ed EMEA TV Interview VMWare's Richard Garsthagen discusses their Hypervisor and their accessibility offer – which includes the software sitting on top of the product. Hear how this is an important aspect which allows you to work with the tools once set up.

At the end of the interview Richard places his VMware sticker at the back of a Microsoft guy You can also take a peek at the photo’s from the other contesters, but Richard Garsthagen should defenately win the Dutch VMUG sticker action.

The Virtual Appliances at Virtualappliances.net are nano-sized virtual machines for deploying instant infrastructure and applications. They are Ubuntu Server Edition 8.04 based and available for VMware, QEMU, KVM, Parallels, Xen, Virtual Iron, Virtural PC, and Virtual Server. Available Virtual Appliances are a LAMP Server, LAPP Server, Apache Tomcat Server, and Cacti Virtual Appliance. These are the smallest, most functional, and easiest to use Virtual Appliances available. They are certified for use on VMware and Parallels.

At virtualappliances.net you can download infrastructure oriented appliances. They have 5 different appliances available.

• LAMP Server provides an easy to use Linux/Apache/MySQL/Python/Perl/PHP development and deployment server.
• LAPP Server provides an easy to use Linux/Apache/PostgreSQL/Python/Perl/PHP development and deployment server.
• Apache Tomcat Server provides a J2EE Java application server.
• Cacti provides the popular network date collection and graphing application.
• NTOP provides the realtime network traffic analysis application.

These appliances are build on Ubuntu Linux. Updates and patches are very easy to manage with the appliances using Ubuntu's own repositories for update management. As well there are hundreds of applications that can be installed on the appliances from the Ubuntu repositories.

Each room you enter has a room chat, so you are only chatting with those people you can see in the room. Type your text and press enter to send everyone in the room a message. As you move from room to room, you will be able to talk with people in that room. You can invite a person to a room with no one in it, to have a more private conversation. Use the chat window to control pavilion interactions using a series of / (slash) commands.

Broadcasting turned on for all conferences attendees right now, you can broadcast to all rooms by using the one of the many slash commands. Slash commands use the "/" key with a string. To broadcast you can use /b to send you message to all rooms.
You can use the /pm command to send a private message to a user eg. /pm userid message.
Find Users Online You can use the /who command to see everyone who is currently online .
See who else is in this chatroom /who /who chatroom.

You can use this link to get access to the VMware Converter 4.0 Beta Program.

Welcome to the VMware Converter 4 beta program. We are excited to announce that VMware Converter 4 beta is now available. Your involvement in beta testing VMware Converter 4 is an important part of the release process, and your timely and thorough feedback is critical to the success of the beta program and to the release.

As part of this beta, we request you to extensively test several areas of feature enhancements including P2V support for Linux and Win 2K8 sources, hot cloning enhancements as well as workflow automation enhancements. Your active participation in this beta program is critical. We appreciate and value your efforts to install upon downloading the software and actively provide us with your valuable product feedback.

Continue reading "VMware Converter 4.0 Beta Program launched" »

VMware's upcoming release of VMware Converter 4.0 Standalone product includes many exciting
enhancements that our customers have been requesting including P2V support  for Linux and Win 2K8 sources, hot cloning enhancements as well as workflow automation enhancements. They are certain you will find participation in this beta program a valuable experience. They are looking forward to working closely with you during this beta program.

As part of this beta, they request you to extensively test several areas of feature enhancements including P2V support for Linux and Win 2K8 sources, hot cloning enhancements as well as workflow automation enhancements. Your active participation in this beta program is critical. They appreciate and value your efforts to install upon downloading the software and actively provide them with your valuable product feedback.