Entries from Eric Sloof

The VMware Virtual Datacenter Operating System is now an integral part of the enterprise infrastructure for many customers and needs to be managed alongside other infrastructure in the environment. David and Ryan will discuss how VMware works with key partners to enable integrated management of VMware Infrastructure in the datacenter.
 
Speakers: David Friedlander, Senior Product Marketing Manager, VMware
Ryan Day, Group Manager, VMware

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. Here’s my picture.

RVTools is a small .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display the version of the installed VMware tools. It also shows if the tools are upgradeable. The button "Upgrade VMware Tools" starts an UpgradeTools_Task for every selected VM. The latest version of the application has new tab pages with virtual machine information about cpu, memory, disks, nics, cd-rom and floppy drives. With RVTools you now also can disconnect the cd-rom and floppy drives from the virtual machines.

VMware opened up a new section on their VMworld.com website. You can find and post the announcements of all your virtualization events including conferences, tradeshows, seminars, webinars, webcasts or any related activities in the conferences forum. Be sure to post your entry with full details for the community to share and VMware will add qualified events to the conference calendar. I already posted the the Dutch VMUG event announcement.

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/

Of all of the recent technology trends in the world of enterprise IT, virtualization may be the most profound. Almost every organization is implementing virtualization. However, most have not moved beyond the server consolidation stage. How can you take it to the logical next level, without creating serious management, control, and security issues?

This TechWiseTV episode reveals the expertise and the latest solutions that will enable you to virtualize your entire network infrastructure. Learn how Cisco is delivering the capability to provision and manage services with virtual machine–level granularity. See how these new solutions provide for quality of service, storage management, and security capabilities at the hypervisor layer. Watch TechWiseTV and see the newest virtualization technologies and services, including:

•  Cisco VN-Link, which simplifies virtualized and physical environment management by bringing the server and the network closer together than ever before. 
•  Cisco Nexus 1000V, the first switch to embed a network operating system into the hypervisor, providing network-based segmentation and consistent policy implementation on a virtual machine
basis.
•  Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAASv4.1) to accelerate virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) traffic, enabling you to more effectively deploy desktop virtualization.
•  Virtualization assessment, planning, and design services, available jointly from Cisco and VMware, to help you define the next steps in your virtualization strategy.

Thursday, October 23, 2008, 10-11 a.m. Pacific Time

Here’s a sneak preview

VMware uploaded five new video’s at YouTube. VMware Extends Virtual Infrastructure into a Virtual Datacenter Operating System over the course of 2009. For more details visit: http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/
Please let them know what you think of these demos!

VMware 2009 Roadmap Video Virtual Center Part 2 (host prof
VMware 2009 Roadmap Video Virtual Center Part 1 (Host Prof
VMware 2009 Roadmap Video Storage VMotion Enhancements
VMware 2009 Roadmap Video - Fault Tolerance (FT)
VMware 2009 Roadmap Video - vNetwork Distributed Switch

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

Tim Harper, Sr System Analyst at the Kadlec Medical Center has written a great document about  P2V’ing Windows with Exchange server running on old physical hardware. He published it on viops.

This document explains in detail how to successfully P2V Exchange 2003. The physical hosts originally hosting Exchange were experiencing hardware failures causing the servers to spontaneously reboot several times a week. These servers were over 5 years old and without warranties. Because of the size of the mailbox stores, we were also out of hard drive space. With an email archiving solution about to be implemented, immediately followed by an Exchange 2007 upgrade, our current Exchange system needed to be stable and survive until after the eVault project was complete. Our solution: Virtualize!

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/