Friday, March 6. 2009
āVMware VI3 Implementation and Administrationā a must read for every VMware enthusiast
As an experienced VMware Certified instructor, Iām involved in delivering VMware courses on a daily basis. I know how important it is to keep your students involved in a course. When you start reading this book, I can assure you, you will read it from A to Z. In the past three years Iāve seen lots of books. Eric Siebert did a great job with this one. He was able to write up topics varying from āinstallingā and āadvanced configurationā in a clear and understandable way and put them together in this book.
The VI Toolkit Mastery
:-)
This section is dedicated to VI Toolkit techniques you can use to unleash the full power of the VMware Infrastructure API. This was initially a set of 3 posts I made in February 2009. Since it would be a fucking long read from start to finish, I have retained the original post headings to break it up a bit. I imagine this page will be updated as new features come out both in PowerShell and the VI Toolkit, or as I discover new features of the incredibly powerful shell that isā¦ errr, PowerShell.
Thursday, March 5. 2009
StarWind Makes IP SAN Solution Free
StarWind Software announced a free version of its iSCSI Target software will be available to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of storage virtualization. Since 2003, StarWind iSCSI Target and StarPort iSCSI Initiator have been used by thousands of companies and users.
StarWind ISCSI Target Free Version installs on any Windows-based server and converts it into a SAN. It can also support virtual environments such as VMware ESX or VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V and can even run inside an individual VM itself. The lightweight version is built on trusted, proven and mature technology of the fourth generation StarWind Server product. One of the key features of the StarWind iSCSI Target is that it supports Server Cluster environments with Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, VMware ESX and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and other server solutions. The manageability, quality and performance of StarWind IP SAN encourage many users to recommend StarWind to others.
Key Features of StarWind Free Version include:
ā¢ Support for Server Clusters with VMware ESX and ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V
ā¢ Unlimited number of supported concurrent iSCSI connections
ā¢ Compression, Encryption and CHAP authentication
ā¢ iSCSI RAM disk for network performance tuning
ā¢ iSCSI CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD emulation
ā¢ Ease of use and simple manageability
ā¢ Support for 4 CPUs and CPU cores
The Free Version of StarWind iSCSI Target takes only a few minutes to download and install and is very simple to configure with Windows Server Clusters.
Wednesday, March 4. 2009
The Complete Managing VMware With PowerShell Video
Last week I recorded the complete Tuesday version of the Managing VMware With PowerShell session on a Flip. It took some time before I had the time to convert and upload this session to Vimeo, itās 990 MB of data which is a tremendous job to process, but finally itās online.
You will see Carter Shanklin, The Product Manager, Andrey Anastasov MTS and Dennis Zimmer presenting. After the VMworld Europe 2009 Carter flew right to Bulgaria where a team of brilliant programmers is working night and day to create even more command-lets. They saw the video this afternoon and were really enthusiastic about Carterās presentation.
TA01 - Managing VMware With PowerShellĀ Introduction
CIS-Group's ThinstallHelper will become part of VMware View
Using ThinApp it is possible to run an application shielded on a system without the needs to install it. No files or registry entries* will be stored on the system running the virtualised application. Other applications don't even notice the application is present or even running. This allows to run different applications or the same application with a different version (like Microsoft Office) that normally would not allow such a situation. This works even if you don't have the priviliges to install an application.
Creating a virtualised application however requires extensive knowledge of the configuration files of the Thinstall application. All settings have to be made by hand (in textfiles). As this is a fault-prone operation, CIS-Group created a tool called ThinstallHelper to ease the configuration task. The ThinstallHelper application allows to configure the numerous settings using a graphical environment (GUI).
Initially the ThinstallHelper was developed for internal use only. Soon however the public need for such a solution was detected and CIS-Group decided to release is to everyone.
The following tasks can be performed using the ThinstallHelper:
- Manage your projects.
- Recently opened projects and projects in your configured project locationcan be (re-)opened with just a single click. It's also possible to create a backup of your project (zip).
- Compatible with Thinstall 3.x and ThinApp
- Some of the new introduced features (like AppLink and AppSync) will not work if it is not supported by your version.
- Configure the project settings.
- Configure the settings that influence the build process, generated output (MSI) or run behavior.
- Manage folders using a graphical representation (like isolation mode).
- Manage the registry usign a graphical representation.
- Build the project ...and generate the application(s)
- Completely FREE, Free of cost, advertisement, banners, popups, everything!