Eric Sloof

Starting in November the new VMware Infrastructure Design course will be available. This hands-on training course explores how to design VMware Infrastructure 3 architectures with a focus on manageability, availability, and scalability.  The objectives are that at the end of the course, you should understand the principles involved in designing VMware Infrastructure 3 architectures:

•  Implementing best practices and evaluating design considerations to meet business needs
•  Distributing resources across ESX clusters automatically and ensuring high availability
•  Architecting remote and branch offices
•  Designing to support Microsoft Active Directory, SQL Server, and Exchange Server

Link to the course datasheet

I met Michel Roth (thincomputing.net) at the XTG V-Event last week and we were talking about blogging :-) and his white box. He finally managed to build it and it looks impressive. It’s small aesthetical, pleasing and under $1000.

In my day (and night?) job working for Quest I get to demonstrate the Virtual Access Suite (VAS) a lot. In short this means that I have to demo a VAS infrastructure at the very least consisting of a VAS Connection Broker, a VAS Terminal Server, a VAS Virtual Desktop, a Domain Controller, a VirtualCenter server and a ESX host. With a lot of time and patience one would be able to get pretty far with this with a decent laptop up until ESX. ESX will not run on "normal laptop hardware". Period. So let me share how I found my ultimate ESX Whitebox.

Kodiak, from BlueBear, enables unprecedented visibility into and control over virtualized infrastructures, regardless of size or composition. As the industry's only application that's both hypervisor-agnostic and cross-platform, Kodiak sets a new standard in versatility, pushing virtualization out of the datacenter and catalyzing it's widespread adoption throughout the information technology landscape. BlueBear believes useful software should be available to anybody who needs it, and at no cost; hence Kodiak's price, totally free!

http://www.bluebearllc.net/kodiak/video/

VMware launched a brand new website for their upcoming VMworld Europe 2009  Cannes, France. You can take a peek at http://www.vmworldeurope.com. The registration page is already active and there's also a rough version of the agenda online.

Virtually anything is possible at VMworld Europe 2009 From the datacenter to the desktop, virtualization is having an increasingly profound impact on information technology design and management. Now in its second year, VMworld Europe will continue to set the virtualization agenda, inspiring all IT professionals looking for actionable ideas, innovative products and best practices for virtualizing your enterprise.

So join Europe's largest virtualization community from 24-26 February at the The Palais des Festival, Cannes, as VMware hosts VMworld Europe 2009.

The /n software NetCmdlets extend the features of Microsoft Windows PowerShell with a broad range of network management and messaging capabilities. The current release contains more than 30 Cmdlets providing access to network and host protocols such as SNMP, LDAP, DNS, Syslog, HTTP, WebDav, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, Rexec/RShell, Telnet, and more.

NEW: NetCmdlets V2.0 - BETA

NetCmdlets V2 is packed full of exciting new features including PowerShell Server (formerly PowerShell Remoting), Parameter Sets, Object Pipelining, and new Cmdlets for SSH Enabled Remoting and Amazon Web Services (S3) Integration.