Entries from Eric Sloof

Heard of Murphy's Law? Meet Murphy. Good thing his company has VMware.

Juan Casares, a VMware Interaction Designer in Palo Alto has dropped a little post in the Create a GuestOS type of ESX3.5 for deploying test ESX3.5 Servers VMware community discussion.

We are considering making ESX a guest OS type and make running ESX easier in Workstation. Unfortunately, there are many questions regarding how officially we can support this. There are implications on mobility, hardware restrictions, execution mode, performance, QA, etc.

Not everyone is happy with this consideration.  Ulli over at sanbarrow.com gives his 2 cents.

Juan - please do not officially support this kind of usage. I prefer if folks like jmattson just tell us what to do and in this respect ESX -support has been pretty good in the last few weeks. Please go on like that and don't scratch your heads about official support - good tips and quick answers help us much better. Just my 2 cents. Ulli

Brian Madden Keynote at IT Oost Nederland in the Grolsch Veste in Enschede on 24 june 2008.

This document provides the information that you need to deploy Open Systems SnapVault® 2.6 in a VMware® virtual infrastructure. Many of the best practices that have been identified for previous versions of Open Systems SnapVault apply to this version as well. However, backup features that are new to this version require an additional level of best practices and design strategies.

The following document provides detailed configuration information NetApp® storage systems in an ESX environment with Site Recovery Manager from VMware®. The purpose of this document is to set appropriate expectations for customers and NetApp employees with regard to automated failover using SRM.

Before people get married at VMware, they are traditionally dunked in a VMware fountain or pool, then forced to wear a ridiculous costume. It's training for being married. ;-)

This newest version offers the capabilities from before, plus an array of new features, increased performance and stability—including a broader range of guest operating system support, direct access to virtual machine consoles, an intuitive Web-based management interface, and increased memory for greater scalability. With over 3 million downloads worldwide, VMware Server continues to innovate to provide users with a superior introductory experience to virtualization—for free.

What's New

• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS):  Properly backup the state of the Windows virtual machines when using the snapshot feature to maintain data integrity of the applications running inside the virtual machine.
• Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI): Support for fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host.
• Support for SCSI pass-through (generic) devices: Allows for SCSI devices such as tape backup devices to be connected to virtual machines.
• Expand disk capacity on the fly: Allows for adding new SCSI hard disks and controllers to a running virtual machine.
• Firefox 3 as a supported browser for the management interface.
• Remote Client Devices: Access devices such as CD-ROMs that are not physically connected to the host via VMware Remote Console

At the 3th of October the Dutch market leader in virtualization training XTG will deliver the Dutch virtualization event. The Xpert Training Group V-Event is the key virtualization event of the year. At this event you will receive the latest product updates and information, see live demos and get deep level of understanding required to turn your infrastructure challenges into a competitive advantage through server, desktop and storage virtualization solutions and technology. No commercial presentations but the real deal from VMware certified trainers. You can register at the following link.

Last week my VMworld session proposal was denied, I wasn’t the only one because the presentation proposed by Scott Herold over at VMGuru.com was also denied. On top of that this evening Tarry Singh informed me that our panel discussions is denied.

This panel discussion will involve industry experts such as Mike Laverick, David Marshall, Eric Sloof and Tarry Singh (panel moderator). The focus of this panel discussion is to engage in a deep dive session on VMware's SRM (Site Recovery Manager) and VDM (VMware Desktop Manager). The panel discussion is an advanced session where industry and world renowned analysts and experts join together to discuss the disaster recovery and desktop virtualization. This is an advanced session where the audience gets to participate as well. Takeaways are: - Learn from the experienced trainers what the benefits of SRM and VDM are. - Learn when you should not use them. - Enjoy an independent discussion and participate in it yourself! - Meet industry analysts.

I’m curies what the VMworld agenda will bring us.

Unfortunately my proposal didn’t make it to the finals, you can download it here.

Dear Eric Sloof,

Thank you for your interest in speaking at VMworld 2008. We received a record number of session proposals for this year's conference.

We were presented with the difficult task of deciding among hundreds of excellent proposals to fill a limited number of openings, while keeping in mind the need to cover a variety of topics and a good mix of industries, geographies, and business sizes. Unfortunately, we will not be able to include your following proposal in our upcoming event:

Session ID: 1420
Title: VDM2 Install and Configure
Track: Virtualizing the Desktop - VD

We greatly appreciate the time and effort you took to submit a session proposal, and we hope that you will consider applying again in the future.