VMware

The first official VMware training course I’ve delivered was back in 2007. We were just shifting from ESX 2.5 to ESX 3.0 back then. In the early days I delivered just one training course a month and the rest of my time was filled up with consultancy. In the past few years the numbers of attendees just exploded. These days you will find vSphere within every company and there’s a much higher demand for VMware training courses. The number of VCPs have increased in a high rate as well. The nice thing about being in the training business “for so many years” is, that with every new version, you see some familiar faces back in the classroom.

But let’s jump to the present. At the beginning of this year VMware has announced the EMEA VCI of the Quarter award program. The award recognizes exceptional VMware Certified Instructors from the EMEA region. Potential candidates are nominated by VATCs having demonstrated a combination of consistent excellence in customer evaluation scores and an ability to help students make the most of their VMware technology.  In addition candidates will be evaluated based on their contribution to the VCI community forums, early adoption of new training courses and a commitment to raising the quality of VMware’s education portfolio. Each quarter a VATC can nominate one directly employed and one independent VCI whom they have contracted with the nomination period. The VCIs nominated will undergo a thorough review process to be considered for the award. A panel that includes members of the EMEA VATC education team evaluates each nominee's technical expertise and contributions for the past 3 months. The panel considers the quality, quantity, and level of impact of the nominee's contributions.

I’m very lucky with Raymond Boelhouwer who works as a Business Development Manager over at Global Knowledge. He’s the one who has nominated me and says:  Although Eric is a freelance instructor he has taught many advanced and new VMware courses for Global Knowledge in the last quarter. All his deliveries are granted high scores by the attendees even for first deliveries which are not easy to do. For an organization as Global Knowledge it is easy to work with Eric and you can trust a job well done.

So last month I received an email from Kevin Johnson – VMware’s Northern Region Education Manager congratulating me as the best VMware Certified instructor of the quarter.

The winner for the Independent VCI of the Quarter is Eric Sloof. This was a very easy selection to make. Eric has been very busy over the last 3 months and has delivered 14 classes over a wide range of subjects, two of these classes were LoL. Eric’s scores were also consistently high. Eric is also very active in the VCI community.

You can imagine that  I’m very proud with being awarded as the Independent VCI of Q2 2010. This morning I’ve received the official "Award of Appreciation" plaque from Raymond Boelhouwer. I can only say one thing, many thanks to all, it was my pleasure.  

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager's (formerly EMC Ionix Server Configuration Manager) policy-driven automation detects deep system changes and identifies whether that change is within policy - an expected and acceptable behavior based on industry, regulatory, or your own self-defined best practices - or whether that change has created a compliance violation or security vulnerability.

http://www.vmware.com/products/configuration-manager/

Automate configuration management across virtual and physical servers, workstations, and desktops with VMware vCenter Configuration Manager. Increase efficiency by eliminating manual, error-prone and time-consuming work.

• Avoid configuration drift by automatically detecting and comparing changes to policies
• Maintain continuous compliance with out-of-the box templates and toolkits
• Automate and optimize server provisioning and application stack deployment in the datacenter

Also take a look at:

VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager

Quickly and accurately map your application dependencies to accelerate datacenter moves, precisely plan infrastructure consolidations and confidently virtualize your business critical applications.

VMware Service Manager

VMware Service Manager develops a 100% web architected solution that automates IT Service Management processes in enterprise organizations.VMware Service Manager is independently verified to the highest level of ITIL compatibility for Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management, Service Level Management and Availability Management.

Members of this group have gained the in-depth skills and industry-recognized certification on VMware technology. The VMware Certified Professional Program is designed for everyone who wants to demonstrate their expertise in virtual infrastructure and increase his potential for career advancement. If you are a VCP you can join this group.

If you don’t know what a LinkedIn group is, here is a short explanation : Many professionals advance their careers and business goals by counting on industry and professional groups, alumni organizations, industry conferences and corporate alumni groups to help them make vital new business contacts. The VMware LinkedIn Groups offers extra features stay in touch with one another and discover powerful new business contacts within their groups and beyond.

I’ve been struggling with this error message for moths and I’m not the only one. Duncan Epping over at Yellow-Bricks has experienced similar problems.

When using PXE and kickstart on ESX 4.x, the ESX boots from PXE but the installation fails and in the DHCP server logs there is a new unauthorized client requesting an IP. VMware has released a knowledge base article with the resolution for this problem.

During the installation of ESX 4.x, the VMkernel starts and it boots the service console in a virtual machine. As such, the service console is using a virtual MAC address that is generated randomly at runtime. During the install, the MAC address is written to disk and becomes persistent, but each time you boot the installer, the COS MAC is different.

If you are using MAC address based access control in DHCP, deny unknown-clients, you cannot authorize the service console to get an IP from DHCP. There is no way to predict what the vswif0 MAC address will be.
 
In large deployments, specifying static IP addresses is not convenient. You would need to create a separate PXE configuration for each host. To workaround this, put the IPAPPEND 1 parameter in the PXE configuration for the host.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1012248

The VMware Player 3.1 Release Candidate includes most of the same great features added to VMware Workstation including all of the graphics, performance and virtual hardware improvements. Some release highlights include:

• OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests: The addition of hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.1 support to the WDDM driver enables many more graphics applications to run inside of your virtual machines.
• Improved graphics performance: Significant enhancements have been made to the VMware WDDM driver that have produced benchmark results that are up to 80% faster. The updated driver also produces smoother video playback and addresses many reported rendering issues. Of course games run better as well!
• 8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size: The virtual hardware continues to become more powerful to meet the needs of Workstation customers who are running server class applications.
• OVF 1.0 support: Including the OVF Tool with this release enables users to easily import or export virtual machines and vApps and move them to vSphere or up into the cloud.
• Direct Launch: Blur the distinction between running native and virtual applications by launching an application installed in a virtual machine directly from the start menu or taskbar of the host system.
• Automatic software updates: These VMware applications can now detect when a new version is released and are able to update at the click of a button.
• Fedora virtual machines: VMware is excited about finally offering support for running one of the most popular Linux distributions on the planet!

http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/player

I've just discovered a new VMware corporate blog with the name “The Rain Makers”. The contributing author; Joao Crespo is working on a real cool document which provides a first insight to vCSD look and feel and assists on how to perform some basic administration tasks.

 

vCloud Network Isolation Backed - Create a network pool backed by vCloud isolated networks.  A vCloud isolated network spans hosts and provides traffic isolation from other networks.  The system provisions vCloud isolated networks automatically.

Update: The vCSD - Step by Step Guide was posted at http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/therainmakers/ but was made mistakenly available to the general community. It should have been availlable for registered Beta users only. It has been removed now.

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VMware ThinApp delivers the following new capabilities:

Windows 7 support – This expanded platform support allows for applications of older Windows OS’s to be packaged and deployed on Windows 7 allowing for greater compatibility support of legacy applications.

Relink – Applications packaged using previous versions of ThinApp can be updated to the new ThinApp 4.5 format without the need of associated project files for application. This command line utility helps to speed upgrade process of existing ThinApp packages.

Performance Accelerator – Reduced page file usage for virtual applications and increased memory sharing between multiple instances of applications allows for quicker application invocation and improved application delivery to end users. This helps to improve user experience, at the same time reduces network bandwidth consumption.

Registry Transaction Protection - Ensure registry file integrity and eliminate potential data corruption due to crash or system failure.

ThinApp SDK - Published APIs to allow for integration of ThinApp with third party software.

ThinApp Community Portal - Users can upload application instructions and share with the community.

Enhanced Supportability - Customers have option to share packaging results with VMware for better support…

http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/

VMware will also offer a one day ThinApp  training course in the near future, this course will equip applications-oriented administrators with the knowledge and skills to virtualize Windows applications with VMware ThinApp, modify the package.ini parameters to handle special circumstances, and choose the best deployment and updating processes for their environment.

Application Virtualization with VMware ThinApp - Beta

VMware will shortly announce advanced Certification to follow on from VCP. There will be new Enterprise and Design level Certifications.  I cannot disclose the names of the new Certification tracks but look out for external, communication from VMware this month.  I can tell you I would be very proud to hold one of these titles.

Arne Fokkema over at ict-freak.nl just tweeted about the availability of Workstation 7.1 beta. You can get your copy here: http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/ws?view=overview

The VMware Workstation 7.1 Beta includes several new features and hundreds of minor improvements. Some release highlights include:

•OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests: The addition of hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.1 support to the WDDM driver enables many more graphics applications to run inside of your virtual machines.
•Improved graphics performance: Significant enhancements have been made to the VMware WDDM driver that have produced benchmark results that are up to 80% faster. The updated driver also produces smoother video playback and addresses many reported rendering issues. Of course games run better as well!
•8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size: The virtual hardware continues to become more powerful to meet the needs of Workstation customers who are running server class applications.
•OVF 1.0 support: Including the OVF Tool with this release enables users to easily import or export virtual machines and vApps and move them to vSphere or up into the cloud.•Direct Launch: Blur the distinction between running native and virtual applications by launching an application installed in a virtual machine directly from the start menu or taskbar of the host system.
•Automatic software updates: These VMware applications can now detect when a new version is released and are able to update at the click of a button.
•Fedora 12 virtual machines: We are excited about finally offering support for running one of the most popular Linux distributions on the planet!

The vmClient is a lightweight tool which enables you to control the power of your virtual machines, it’s also capable of presenting the MKS console of your virtual machines. Before you can use the vmClient, you have to install the vSphere client on the same system. After starting the vmClient, you can logon to your vCenter server or individual ESX4 or ESX4i host. A list with available virtual machines will be presented after choosing the Virtual Machines menu item, you can also easily identify the power state of the virtual machines. Grey is powered off, green is powered on, yellow is suspended and red indicates that the virtual machine has an alarm. When you’re working in an RDP session there’s a menu item which can generate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in the guest OS instead of pressing Ctrl-Alt-Ins. The vmClient can run without borders in borderless mode. The menu bar has an option to search for virtual machines, just type in the first characters of your virtual machine name and the list will be filtered. 

The number of virtual machines can be too high to fit in the “Virtual Machine” menu item so I’ve added an extra option to disable this menu and use the search menu instead. The option to customize the user interface of the vmClient can be done by changing a few registry settings. You’re able to show or hide menu items using this hive.

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\NTPRO.NL\vmClient

You can also pre-select a default virtual machine in this hive. There are two recorded demo sessions available, one which show a walkthrough and a second which shows how to convert the vmClient into a VDI client. The trail version is limited to a maximum number of 50 virtual machines and shows a splash screen with my picture in it. The registered version can be bought online and has no virtual machine limit, you can also get rid of the splash screen. :-) The Buy Now link is available in the help menu. If you have any ideas or suggestions on improving the vmClient or you’ve found a bug, you know where to reach me. Have fun with it.

How to convert the vmClient into a VDI client

A general walkthrough

The vmClient 4.0 can be downloaded from this location: http://vmclient.nl/

The session videos recorded by VMware are available at the Virtualization Forum Content Portal, by registering you will gain access to Keynote and Breakout Session records from the 2010 road show.

•  Key-note : transformeer uw bedrijf met VMware
•  Klantverhaal : de virtuele werkplek van PGGM
•  The cloud - internal & external : bouw een interne cloud dat gereed is voor de externe cloud
•  Desktop als een Managed Service
•  Virtualization Management: transformeer het beheer van uw gevirtualiseerde datacenter
•  Application Delivery : implementeer applicaties zonder conflict
•  BC/DR : verbeter business continuity met virtualisatie
•  Platinum sponsorsessies: EMC, HP, NetApp, Trend Micro

http://www.vmware-forum.com/vforum/nijkerk/video/ 

Hi all,

I am happy to announce that beginning today, February 11th, Workstation 7 licenses will begin to go out to all new VCP3s, VCP4s, and those of you who upgraded to VCP4s. If you received a letter (and if you haven't received your kit yet, you will) stating we will be sending you the key, you will now be receiving it!

As for the new VCP Logo, it has been posted to the VCP section of the website. You can download and use the logo on all of your materials.

Apologies to everyone for the delays, and congratulations once again on your achievement!

Regards,

Jon C. Hall
Technical Certification Developer
VMware, Inc.