VMware - 26

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!

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/

Today VMware invited their Benelux Partners at the VMware Partner Forum 2008 which was held in the Brasschaat, Belgium. I attended the forum and managed to collect some video footage. You can see a part of the opening keynote from Bas van Kesteren, Marc Groetelaars and the infamous Richard Garsthagen. During this Benelux VMware Partner event, the attendees were informed of VMware’s vision & strategy, market opportunity, product roadmap and also marketing activities. They also learned about new sales, presales and marketing tools, and had the opportunity to network with peers and the Benelux VMware team.

VMware Partner Forum 2008 Video from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

VmwAROS is a pre-configured AROS desktop envirnoment available in two formats: a bootable live-CD installable on the hard drive, and a disk image for VMware. The AROS Research Operating System is a open source lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 at the API level, while improving on it in many areas.

VmwAROS VE (Virtual Environment) is a complete AROS desktop environment running on VMware virtual machines. Targeted to final users and to developers, VmwAROS allow testing and using the AROS Research Operating system without really installing it on the hard drive. It can be a reliable way to access this interesting OS for people with powerful, but yet not supported hardware.

You can use OVF to distribute and import virtual machines and appliances. For example, you can create a virtual machine within VMware Infrastructure, then use OVF Tool to export it into a bundle for installation, either within your organization, or for distribution to other organizations. OVF facilitates the use of virtual appliances, which are preconfigured virtual machines that package applications with the operating system they require. Because OVF runs on multiple platforms, you can make a virtual appliance ready to run without significant additional configuration.

The son of a former Zimbabwean farmer, Maritz, who in the 1980s and 1990s served as one of Bill Gates’s top executives at Microsoft, has been appointed CEO of VMware, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies.

The University of Cape Town computer science graduate and Hilton College old boy was in SA this week on VMware business. He admits he misses Southern Africa, though he emigrated in 1977 to seek a career in hi-tech. After a brief stint in the UK, he moved to California to take a job at chipmaker Intel. “Through Intel I met these two crazy guys in Seattle, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, and, in 1986, right after it had gone public, I joined Microsoft,” he says. “I remember thinking that the ride was already over. But, as it turns out, I was literally involved in the birth of the industry.”

Read the full story here.

Extend the OS disk the easy way (ExtPart.exe). The ExtPart utility provides support for online volume expansion of NTFS formatted basic disks. Before installing ExtPart and extending a volume, ensure that you have a working backup of your operating system. It's only 40Kb and free :-)

extpart [volume size]
volume - the volume to extend. e.g. f:, g:, etc (only basic volumes)
size - the size in megabytes by which to extend the volume.

Example:
To extend the g: volume by 1 GB (1024 MB) use the following command:
extpart g: 1024

Screenshot’s and a Dutch 'how to' are available at Arne Fokkema’s ICT-Freak.

With VMware Update Manager, you can automate patch management and eliminate manual tracking and patching of VMware ESX hosts and virtual machines. VMware Update Manager scans the state of the physical VMware ESX hosts, as well as select guest operating systems, compares them with baselines set by the administrator and then applies updates and patches to enforce compliance to mandated patch standards. This capability dramatically simplifies the patch management process while helping you protect your data center against bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Vmwarevirtualizationtraining.com is offering more than 100 Interview Questions with Answers in Storage & VMware Virtualization. Think about this as if they collected interview questions from real interviews attended by their website readers and put it in a document. That helps you understand what are the expectations of the interviewers. It’s like you have a ready list of probable questions , you can get an idea of what to expect if you are going to face an interview soon. But VMware Virtualization is a vast technology & chances are there are a ton of possibilities of different interview questions. Its not an automated exam hence this is not a cheat sheet , this is not a exam dump. This is just questions collected from people’s experiences of attending real VMware job openings.