VMware - 21

Since the start of a new year seems to generate a lot of top list, I thought it’s time for another one. The Top 10 Virtual Appliances. Nothing fancy tough, I just grabbed the best raking virtual appliances from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace. At number one, Microsoft with Windows 2008 Enterprise Server.

1. Windows 2008 Enterprise Server
   By: TuxDistro.com
   Windows 2008 Enterprise Server (60 Day Evaluation) Virtual Machine
2. Mandriva Linux One 2009 KDE4 Virtual ApplianceBy: TuxDistro.com
   Mandriva Linux One 2009 is one the best ways to start using Linux.
3. Arch Linux 2008.06 - bagvapp
   By: aakeg
   Independent linux. Gnome 2.22.2 desktop and VMwareTools e.x.p-84113 installed
4. Sabayon 3.5 Virtual Appliance
   By: TuxDistro.com
   Sabayon Linux is a Gentoo-based operating system created by Fabio Erculiani, and produced in Trentino, Italy.
5. ESX Deployment Appliance (EDA)
   By: brugh
   EDA is an appliance dedicated to deploying ESX servers fast and easy. It has a scriptbuilder to quickly create %post-scripts.
6. WiKID Strong Authentication Server 3.2.9By: nowen
   The WiKID Strong Authentication Enterprise Edition VMware 3.2.9
7. Fedora 10 Virtual Appliance
   By: TuxDistro.com
   Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software.
8. StoneGate Virtual IPS Appliance
   By: Stonesoft
   Protects Internal Networks from Malicious Traffic in Demanding Virtual Environments
9. ADempiere 352a
   By: red1
   ADempiere Community Open Source ERP/CRM/MFG/POS
10. Foresight Linux 1.0 VMWare Virtual Machine
    By: TuxDistro.com
    Foresight is a desktop operating system featuring an intuitive user interface and a showcase of the latest desktop software.

Draw your virtualization challenge or help the community define virtualization. Create your own diagrams to illustrate your point with the WHITEBOARD by GRAFFITI.

VirtualizationConversation.com is a website owned and operated by IBM and Intel. The following bloggers post their virtualization stories on a regular basis: Dave Altavilla, Johan De Gelas, Matthew Shaw, Steve Kovsky and the The Insight Community.
The Insight Community engages communities of experts within a proven framework to generate the best insightful analysis about business, government policy, and technology issues. Floor64, the company behind both the Insight Community and the analysis blog, Techdirt, has been providing insights to companies for nearly a decade. Through its sites, Insight Community cases can tap into a network of over 800,000 subscribers.

Jon Bock has launched a new VMware blog, called Uptime, that will focus on data protection, availability, and disaster recovery with VMware environments. Site Recovery Manager is of course one of the featured stars in that space, so be keep your eye on what gets posted there. You can find the blog here.
In the first posting, Lee Dilworth covered some of the common questions VMware gets from users about Site Recovery Manager along with some tips on how to get Site Recovery Manager working in your environment. They've also posted a video (with Richard Garthagen) that gives an overview of Site Recovery Manager. They have more posts in the works covering various aspects of Site Recovery Manager, so stay tuned!

A month ago Hany Michael launched his weblog called Hypervizor.com. Today he posted an impressive article, a video tutorial about installing VMware SRM.

This is the first video tutorial in a series to come for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), one of the most interesting and efficient products from VMware. It’s my very first video in my blog also so please leave your comments and let me know your opinion. Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to be notified in time for future videos.

Update : The second video tutorial is online, SAN Setup using the Lefthand VSA.

Update : This is the third video in the SRM series, here we configure the SAN replication between the two datacenters, and then configure the ESX hosts to connect to the new  iSCSI SAN.

I just received Season’s greetings from VMware, their online Christmas card looks like some kind of a Sphere.

"Please enjoy this festive period with your friends and family, Have a great xmas and new year."

I just wanted to send everyone a bit of Christmas Cheer!

Dutch: Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! or Zalig Kerstfeest
English: Merry Christmas
German: Fröhliche Weihnachten
French: Joyeux Noel
Flemish: Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuw jaar
Greek: Kala Christouyenna!
Russian: Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva is Novim Godom
Spanish: Feliz Navidad
Thai: Sawadee Pee Mai or souksan wan Christmas
Turkish: Noeliniz Ve Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
Farsi: Cristmas-e-shoma mobarak bashad

I received a message from Twitter telling me that lasrstr is following my updates. Before I’m following back, I checked out his profile and discovered vmfaq.com. This website is all about frequently asked questions regarding VMware like “I need more performance out of my VMware environment”. Lars Troen from Norwegian also created a nice little tool called vmktree, a free web tool that shows you the graphs of resource usage of VMware ESX Server, VMware Server (on Linux), GSX Server (on Linux) and a few other data center devices (ilo/ilo2/rsa2/ds4000). On VMware Server (and GSX) and ESX 3.x vmktree provides it’s own agent that collects system statistics and does not depend on vmkusage like it does on ESX 2.x. The version for ESX3.x is still in beta and is available for download here.

I attended the VMware Communities Roundtable yesterday evening and had a chat with John Troyer about the huge success of the Dutch VMUG event. I wasn’t the only one online. You can also listen to discussions about VMware Mobile and the “Read Only” SDK in the ESX 3i free versions.

Guys like esiebert7625, jasonboche, jonowings, knudt, rick_vmwaretips, sbeaver, alanrenouf, bscheitel,   deason_uk, depping, GabesVirtualWorld.com, Maish_SK, Rod Haywood (rodos), stumchugh,  Svenh , astorrs, MatthewJohnson and Scott Lowe were also participating in the discussions. John announced the enrolment date of the new VMware Virtualization Professional Program “VVP”. It’s going to happen by the end of this week, the first VVP’ers will be nominated in January.

When you’re locked out of your vCenter Server because someone has assigned the “Read-Only” role to the “Domain Users” group and has set the permissions at the highest level, you’re in deep trouble. You can log on to vCenter but can’t change anything because your Administrator account is also a “Domain User”.  There are several ways to fix this problem. First of all never use default Windows groups to create VC roles. Second there’s an easy way and a hard way.

The easy way is to shutdown VC and disable authorization checks by adding:

<security>
       <enabled>false</enabled>
</security>

within the <config> tags of vpxd.cfg. Start VC and remove the permission, then shut it down and turn security back on again by removing these tags.

The hard way is to open the VC SQL database and open the table : VPX_ACCESS, then add another row :

ID: 1
Principal : Administrators
Role_ID : -1
ENTITY_ID : 1
FLAG : 3

Afterwards you need to restart the vCenter Server services. Credits to Koen Warson and Phil Cohen.

Maurizio Carli is responsible for strategic planning, business operations and management of key functions for the region, including sales, channels, services and marketing. He will report directly to Carl Eschenbach, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, for VMware.

In the past Carli was EMEA Enterprise Managing director at Google, SVP/GM EMEA at Business Objects and VP Software Group IBM EMEA at IBM.