Entries from Eric Sloof

Just out of curiosity I double clicked the VMware Update Service icon and before I knew it, I was downloading and installing bug fixes into the Firmware of my ESX 3i Server. The VI Client and the tools component (whatever that may be)  were also automatically updated. I took around 45 minutes and I had to restart my ESX 3i Server. I made some screenshots during the process. You can even schedule the  Update Service.





 

David Davis over at HappyRouter.com created a 16 minute training video that steps you trough the installation of VMware ESX Server 3i Beta in Workstation.  Now, you can learn how to virtualize it for testing and demo purposes by running VMware ESX Server 3i Beta on your existing PC OS. Take a look!

This great song was the winner of the VMware Virtually Famous video competition.  Lodge McCammon, Brian Bouterse and Sammie Carter (employees of the Friday Institute) posted a YouTube video you can see their video clip on a large video screen for 10.000+ attendees at the VMworld. After the session they were presented with a check for $15,000 which was donated to the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.

For some reason, it seems that most VMware users shrug NFS off as only being good enough to store ISO files. Many wouldn't dare run production (or in some cases, even development) environments on anything other than FC or iSCSI. Unfortunately, Thomas Bishop feels that many are missing out. You can read the full article at Scale The Mind.

Besides the fact that the performance is a bit slow (Jive is still working on it) the new VMware Technology Network looks great. If you are familiar with VMware Technology Network (VMTN), you will see all of the functions you have come to know, plus a number of new functions like personal blogs for all community members, collaborative wiki documents, wysiwyg editing of discussions and wiki documents, tagging of all content, improved search, and replying to threads via email. These features are meant to increase the benefits you get from participating in the community. You really should take the quick tour.

WP over at the Virtual Desktop Blog was so slammed at VMworld over the last week that he haven’t had the time to let everyone know the Beta 1 for VDM 2.0 is now available. VDM 2.0 is a sesion broker for VDI deployments offered by VMware and is built from the Propero technology they acquired back in April of this year.

Scott Surovich created a 3i boot from disk how to. This document covers how to get the 3i USB memory stick image to a hard drive and it boots from the HD.  It still needs the memory stick for ONE check the boot does for the USB Boot partition - but the rest is all HD loaded.  This allows servers that DO NOT boot from USB devices to use the 3i Beta. He hopes to get that check pulled so you can boot 100% from a HD.

Thomas Bishop figured out how to automatically let your ESX 3i server start in the interactive shell mode. Well that’s great but what to do when we are logged in. Do we have the same environment as the service console or are there less or new features? I captured a list of commands you could use in the ESX 3i interactive shell. Have fun with it and use at your own risk.

When you are going to create you own software and want to connect to the VCserver the MOB is your friend.  With the Managed Object Browser (https://server/mob) you have the opportunity to browse trough every object you can address from within the SDK.  Since I’m involved in building software (Virtual Machine MKS Client), I was  wondering if there are any new objects in the ESX 3i MOB, and there are. I found a lot of new references, but there where two of them who triggered my attention; the FileManager and the  VirtualDiskManager. Those two I haven’t noticed before and they seem to deal with files and disks.

Just days after the VMworld 2007 event a lot of company’s released new versions on their software. Alessandro Perilli over at virtualization.info made a nice roundup.

VMware Workstation 6.0.1
Dunes VS-O Lifecycle 1.0
OpenVZ for Linux kernel 2.6.22
PlateSpin PowerRecon 3.1
Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite 5.9
CiRBA Data Center Intelligence 4.4
Surgient VMLA 5.3
Parallels Desktop 3.0 Feature Update