Entries from Eric Sloof

New Release of VMware Infrastructure Helps Enable SMBs to Simplify IT and Achieve Enterprise-class Disaster Recovery, High Availability and Management. VMware, Inc., the virtualization leader, today announced three new VMware Infrastructure product packages tailored for small and medium businesses (SMBs). The new bundles are designed to enable IT administrators and decision makers at SMBs to easily deploy virtual infrastructure and quickly reap its transformative benefits. The bundles are expected to be available later this year.

Simplify management of your virtual infrastructure by automating patches and updates with the new VMware Update Manager. This essential component of VMware Infrastructure makes it easy to manage tracking and patching of ESX Server Hosts, as well as select Windows and Linux virtual machines, giving you the ability to: Secure your data center against vulnerabilities, Reduce risks associated with patching of virtual machines, Reduce or eliminate downtime related to host patching.

Enable live migration of virtual machine disk files across storage arrays with VMware Storage VMotion. Building on the proven value of VMware VMotion, VMware Storage VMotion lets you relocate virtual machine disk files between and across shared storage locations while maintaining continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity. These capabilities make it possible to: Perform proactive non-disruptive storage migrations, Simplify array refreshes/retirements, Eliminate virtual machine storage I/O bottlenecks and Free up valuable storage capacity.

I have captured all the excitement and inspiration of VMworld 2007 and I uploaded my 10 minutes videos on how this year’s conference rocked my world like only the virtualization industry's largest event could do. Please rate my videos. You’ve got until October 14 to enter your rates and give me a shot at winning the Grand Prize: a fully loaded Alienware Gaming Laptop. Rock on.

This week I bought myself a FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7170. I threw out my Quattrovox and hooked up my fax, ISDN phones and analog phones to the FRITZ!Box. Normally I don’t read the manual but this time I had to look some things up before I got everything working ;-). From now on all my outside calls are routed over the internet using the sip server over at Voipcheap.com. I don’t have to pay any outside telephone calls to the KPN (the largest Dutch telecom company) anymore. Now I’m talking over the Internet with Voice over IP -- without turning on your PC, and without changing my phone number. And FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN also puts my PCs on the Internet at ADSL speed -- over Ethernet, USB or wireless LAN -- always with firewall protection, and with wireless encryption activated out of the box. When you are going to configure a FRITZ!Box the first thing you should do is put it in expert mode. Don’t forget to create a dialing rule for all the numbers that start with a 0. Happy phoning!

Vizioncore is proud to announce the GA Release of vRanger Pro 3.2. vRanger Pro 3.2 is the recognized industry-standard backup and restore solution for virtualized environments..  Now enabled with a VSS driver, vRanger Pro 3.2 can provide transactional consistency in backups and restores.  vRanger Pro is the only agent-less backup tool that can provide a consistent backup of running VMs.

Jainoxi made over 50 ESX 3i screenshots. Among these screen shots you can see how to create a virtual machine, how to import a virtual appliance, the Update Manager the Remote CLI VM and the Remote CLI console. But the most important is the imported Nostalgia virtual machine, this is an old DOS game running within a VM. :-)

I bought myself a 100 € Samsung 500 Gigabyte SATA disk and hooked it up to my workstation. On the configuration tab in the VI Client I selected the Storage option and created a VMFS.  I immediately received a failure message stating that “The response is not well- formed XML�?. There was still a format task running so I waited for a half hour before I restarted the VI Client. On the Storage Adapters configuration page I discovered my newly build VMFS. I made some screen dumps during this process.

When I tried to create my first VM on an ESX 3i Server, I realized that I needed to put an ISO on my newly build VMFS. The transfer of ISO’s with FastSCP or WinSCP doesn’t work anymore because there’s no Service Console in ESX 3i. But how do I transfer an ISO to my storage ? Well you can use the Datastore Browser to upload a file from the VI Client machine to a datastore in the VI Client inventory.

To upload a file:

1. Right-click on the destination datastore, and choose Browse Datastore.  The Datastore Browser dialog box is displayed.
    
2. Browse to the location to which you want to upload the file.
3. Click the Upload icon in the Datastore Browser toolbar. The Upload Items dialog box is displayed.
4. Navigate to and select the item you want to upload.
5. Click Upload.  A progress indicator displays the progress of the upload.

Well after the update I experienced my first purple screen of death. When I pressed the escape button I started an interactive session with the VMKDBG AKA the kernel debugger. I could see the logs and reboot the ESX 3i server. After another restart the server presented the new build number 54662.

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