Hello all! I noticed a dramatic increase in the website’s traffic yesterday! That is a very good sign! It seems that you out there, like what we present here and that motivates us to keep up the flow of news and inside info’s.

Let’s see what the boys @ VMworld bring us today!

Although I wasn’t able to join the VMGuru team to Cannes I can still blog about newly released products from VMware.

One of those newly released products is the 4th update for VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 containing:

• Customization support for Windows 2008 server VM’s
• Performance overview charts which gives the system administrator a overview of CPU, memory, hardisk and network usage in a single chart.

More information can be found here.

Last, but certainly not least, we attended the Partner Award Ceremony at the end of our day. This is the place where VMware awards its Partners for a year of hard work. We knew that Centric was nominated so we were a bit nervous but at the we did not receive an award

We already wrote about it but here are the highlights of the 2009 Partner Day @ Cannes on video.

Eric Sloof showed us the fun in taking and posting video’s, so here are our first videos from VMworld Europe 2009, the trip to Cannes.

Almost all of our collegues and friends think that VMworld Europe 2009 is one big party.
Hereby I want to tell them that they are eh, right?

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Today at VMWorld Europe 2009 in Cannes VMware introduced their strategy for the coming years.  Chargeback, CapacityIQ, Orchestrator, ConfigControl and self service are a couple of the building blocks that create the foundation for the next level in the virtualization game.

vCenter Chargeback as part of the management vServices. vCenter Chargeback enables automated tracking of costs and chargeback to the business enabling IT to function as a utility with true visibility into operating costs.

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The process of blogging is through several means from making notes during the session the old fashioned way or by using new technology. (Got the laptop charging again). Also lots of photos or video are shot during the process and we will have to run through them all to filter out the high lights and the remarkable things we noticed. Also seeing my collegues hard @ work translating the handwriting to a nice blog post feels good. The first day is running into the late afternoon and after several sessions today we have picked up lots of new ideas and opportunities for 2009.  The head is spinning already but its worth it. SO stay tuned.

February 10th I participated in a VMware WebEx on their new vCenter addon, vCenter Server Heartbeat and today the news will be released in Cannes at VMWorld Europe 2009.

vCenter Server Heartbeat is an important addon which creates high availability for vCenter Server. vCenter Server Heartbeat monitors and protects VMware’s management platform against network, hardware, OS or application issues. This fully protects the infrastructure which helps VMware users to deploy critical applications on VMware.

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Today VMware announced a new team member for the EMEA region for the fastest growing market world wide, his name is Maurizio Carli. Carli has more than twenty years of experience in the technology industry, including five years at Business Objects where he was Senior VP and General Manager for EMEA. Prior, Carli was with IBM where he rose to VP of the EMEA Software Group. He was snatched from the position of EMEA Managing Director for Google Enterprise were he worked before joining VMware. He choose to come over to VMware because he believes its the place to be for the next coming years with virtualization growing rapidly and shifting the way the IT operates completely.

We @ VMGuru.nl welcome Carli and wish him luck in his new position.

We just enjoyed the General Session for Partner day 2009 and the message is ‘the virtualization business is still growing’, ‘2009 is all about client virtualization’ and ‘get up, register opportunities, close deal, dig deap’.

The keynote was presented to us by Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware. He stated that we can achieve change by two means, evolution and revolution and that evolution is the best as it tends to stay longer. VMware is the platform to achieve this evolution. He revealed a few public secrets, VMware vSphere, vShield zones and VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat. VMware vSphere is the new name for ESX but we knew, and blogged on that, already. VMware vShield zones a security initiative based on VMware Safe.  VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat is VMware’s new feature to create a high available vCenter Server, mostly for implementations where vCenter is still on a physical server.

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Just a couple of minutes ago the keynote ended. Now it’s time to post some photo’s.

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After a short night it all begins, VMWorld Europe 2009! Today we start with Partner Day, a day where VMware  shows the latest partner programs, sales and training programs and marketing initiatives. Partner Day is the place for all partners (including Centric) to:

• Hear from the senior VMware management team about the vision for our partner community;
• Get the inside scoop on new partner programs and training roadmap;
• Learn about new sales and marketing tools;
• Network with your peers and the VMware team.

This is the chance to hear Paul Maritz, (VMware CEO) and Carl Eschenbach (Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations) share their vision for the partner community. And maybe, just maybe, VMGuru gets a chance to interview Paul Maritz. We will see, come back soon to hear the latest news.

I  dropped the boys off at the airport. They are in flight at the moment and will touch down in Nice in about 20 minutes or so. Let’s hope they make it in time to get the bus to Cannes.

I hope we will see enough pictures since mister MeAgain forgot his digital camera at home. We might want to provide him with a proper shopping list for the next VMworld.

Stay tuned for more hot news and posts directly from VMworld in Cannes!

In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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Today the last preparations, pack our suitcases, check all equipment and batteries and off we go. We fly tonight at 20:25 from Schiphol (KL1273) and hope to arrive at 22:45, just in time for the shuttle busses to Cannes. After a short night sleep VMWorld Europe 2009 will finally start. We checked the weather and it looks very promising, sunny and 15-18 degrees. See you all monday morning …… bye.

While reading some documents from Anne Jan and Erik about migrations of physical machines by means of P2V I noticed there was information about the ports that are being used for this migration:

• Physical machine to the converter server port 443
• Converter server to physical machine ports 445 and 139
• Converter server to vCenter server port 443

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Earlier this week Anne Jan and I migrated a physical server with P2V with Blackberry Entetrprise Server. After the migration we of course asked the client to test all the services and application on that server.

At that time all seemed just fine, but today the client comes running in telling us that the Blackberry service isn’t mailing attachments anymore. Everything else just worked fine.

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After making a P2V of a couple of physical Citrix servers at a client, Anne Jan and I did some tuning for the best performance. Since the servers were on old hardware they now are already faster, but we wanted to get the most out of it. We first removed hardware drivers like Anne Jan’s article mentioned earlier. (more…)

VMware just posted in one of their blogs a list of new

As part of an ongoing effort to improve our understanding of and our external content around timekeeping and virtualization, a new series of articles have been developed. Knowledge base article 1420 has been retired as part of this initiative.

Since timekeeping is a hot issue in virtualized environments I recommend reading the articles mentioned.