Earlier this year VMware announced their new partner program. In the past there were a whole bunch of titles/statuses you could achieve at VMware, VIP or VAC, Premier, Enterprise or Professional, VAC-only. That’s all going to change. The requirements to become a Premier, Enterprise or Professional Partner have also changed. Below are the new VMware Partner Network statuses a VMware Partner can achieve and the requirements.

Professional Partners have to achieve these new goals by October 31th, Enterprise and Premier Partners have until February 15th 2010 to meet the program requirements.

Besides that VMware announced a new collection of competencies a VMware Partner can earn. This way it is possible for a VMware Partner to stand out in a crowd of VMware Partners and display skill in four different areas, Infrastructure Virtualization, Business Continuity, Desktop Virtualization and Virtualization Management.

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Today Emulex announced the general availability of their new OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapter (UCNA) Product Family, specifically the OCe10102-I 10Gb/s Ethernet iSCSI Adapter and OCe10102-N 10Gb/s Ethernet Adapter are very interesting.

The Emulex OneConnect UCNA is a single-chip, high performance 10Gb/s Ethernet adapter that provides connectivity for network and storage traffic over one multi-function server adapter. Unlike first generation CNAs that only provide FCoE convergence, the Emulex OneConnect UCNA technology provides optimized performance for TCP/IP, FCoE and iSCSI protocols.

The OneConnect UCNA comes in three different versions (N, I and F):

• OCe10102-N: 10Gb Ethernet Adapter;
• OCe10102-I: 10Gb iSCSI Adapter;
• OCe10102-F: 10Gb FCoE  Adapter.

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Yesterday VMware released version 7 of VMware Workstation which has advanced capabilities to help developers, QA engineers, technical sales professionals, and IT administrators get up and running faster and streamline tasks that save time and improve productivity.

New features include:

• Windows 7 support (32 and 64 bit);
• Improved 3D graphics acceleration which enables you to run Windows Aero Glass and other 3D applications with DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL 2.1;
• Improved VM configuration  maximums:
  • 4 vCPUs;
  • 32GB memory;
• 256-bit AES encryption;
• Supports 200 operating systems including ESXi and vSphere 4.

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

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A few years ago I didn’t pay much attention to the thin clients. If a customer wanted them fine, you choose a model started a pilot, bought the thin client and you were done.  As we now see that Green Computing is no longer a hype and the interest in centralizing desktops is growing every day. All of a sudden the possibilities and choices in the thin client market are booming. I thought the time was right to inform myself more about the thin client.

Last week I attended the AVNET “Thin is In Event 2009” it was a well organized event with a quick presentation of the Wyse, Chip PC, Igel and Samsung products. Afterwards there was the opportunity to meet with all the vendors to speak about their products and to see some live action. The funny thing about Thin Clients is that they are becoming more and more fat clients!! If you want a flexible solution with all the features and a minimal risk of non functioning peripherals you are forced to use the WinXPe or the new Windows Embedded Standard.

The conclusion for this afternoon was. Thin clients are al the same and yet they are all different. What I mean is they all provide their share in making IT more green. They all provide tooling for management of the thin client firmware. They all make maintenance a lot easier, etc, etc and yet they all have a unique selling point. So if you are thinking about centralizing your desktop environment define your wishes, select two vendors and two models of each vendor a start your pilot.

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Earlier this week the following message popped up in my twitter: ‘@Microsoft: Amazon says Windows 7 is the biggest pre-order product of all times, even over Harry Potter in the UK’.

Comparing Harry Potter to Microsoft? Hmm, this got us thinking, what if we compare Harry Potter to VMware, what if Harry Potter lived in the VMware era.

It’s 1995, Paul Maritz (Harry Potter) lives with Microsoft (his aunt and uncle) in a small village. Paul (Harry) spends most of his time locked up in a closet under the stairs. One day Paul (Harry) starts receiving daily messages from the APIs (owls) asking him to come to Palo Alto (Hogwarts) because Mendel Rosenblum (Dumbledore) and Diane Green (McGonagall) have left.

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My week started on a down with me being ill for two days but it finished on a high with two days of Vizioncore vFoglight training.

The training was given by Paul Jackson, an external consultant, with a bit of support of Danny Claproth from Vizioncore Benelux.

vFoglight is derived from Quest’s Foglight which is a tool to manage and monitor a physical environment and is designed as a virtualization management solution that provides performance monitoring, capacity planning, and chargeback for virtual and physical infrastructures.

It is offered in two editions – vFoglight Standard (SE) and vFoglight Pro. vFoglight SE is monitor the performance of their virtual infrastructures and the Pro version adds advanced capabilities for Capacity Planning, Chargeback, Physical Operating System Monitoring, Third-Party Integration, etc.

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Last week I held a presentation for our Sales department. As we sold a lot of Citrix Xantippe over the last few years they wanted me to tell them more about the differences between a VMware View and the traditional terminal server based Citrix XenApp solution. So I made a summery about the differences and similarities. When VMware also asked me about the presentation I decided to translate it into English and share it with you all.

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

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Last Tuesday was a very good day for me. First of all because the VMware Partner Forum 2009 was very interesting and we got a lot of valuable information but most of all because I won an XBOX360 at the SBK08 competition at the stand of CDG.

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After taking the XBOX360  home and explaining that I won it and did NOT buy it I set it up and of course I had to prove that I was really that quick. After a few practice laps I succeeded and I even managed to improve my time I recorded Tuesday (1.49) by 2 seconds.

Thursday at a Citrix event CDG had the same competition and a colleague almost won the XBOX360 that day but unfortunately he became second.

I’m enjoying myself very much and I definitely know what I’m going to do this weekend.

The hosts were oa Andre Pieterse and Dinesh Raghoenath and not the famous Xzibit but nevertheless……..

THANKS CDG, FOR PIMPING MY LIFE!

Today was a special day, VMGuru.nl celebrated it’s 1 year anniversary and to celebrate VMware organized a party, how thoughtful

Seriously, today we attended the VMware Partner Forum at Bussum in the Netherlands. So at 5:45 my alarm rang because we had to be in Bussum at 8:30. We arrived tight on time and after a cup of coffee we attended the keynote ‘Energize Business Through IT!’ Here VMware told us how important their partners were and what business to focus on during these difficult times and Jeremy van Doorn presented the news from VMworld 2009.

After a refreshment break it was time for our first breakout session. Anne Jan and I went to ’5 great reasons to upgrade customers from VI3 to vSphere 4‘. The title says it all, convince customers to upgrade based on better scalability, flexibility, manageability and integration.  This session was completely my style, to the point, not too technical and without basing of the competition (as many of the other vendors do, much to my disgust). Citrix XENServer and Microsoft Hyper-V were mentioned and compared but the conclusion was all up to the listeners.

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One year ago, October 13th, we announced our new website/blog called VMGuru.nl and October 15th we posted our first article ‘No guest customization after upgrade to Update 2′. Much has change since then….

The birth of VMGuru.nl
When, in August 2008, I changed my Internet provider I had to look for a new place to host my personal website. Luckily a colleague, Alex, has a web server on-line and offered to host it for me. The only thing I needed was a domain name, so I registered at NederHost and tried some domain names. Most were already taken but my first good one was VMGuru.nl, however I discarded the idea because my personal website has nothing to do with virtualization. After registering Motor-Freak.net I decided to keep VMGuru.nl just for the fun of it. Maybe in the future me and some colleagues could do something nice with it.

When I mentioned the domain name again in the beginning of October 2008 Alex grabbed the opportunity and quickly deployed a website using WordPress. The idea was to use it to  share our knowledge and experiences with colleagues as we don’t have a good enough Intranet to do that. Quickly the idea broadened and we decided to share with the VMware/virtualization community which required us to write in English.

My first steps
From the start reactions were positive, with 851 visits and 80.316 hits for the remaining two weeks of October we were very surprised. In November the number of visitors grew to 4.538 and in December we had almost 10 times the number of visitors we had in October, 7.059 . In these first two and a half months we wrote 72 articles with subjects like ‘What if life was a virtual machine..‘, ‘VC Upgrade went haywire‘, ‘Faulty HP ESXi 3.5 USBs‘ and ‘Hyper-V, not in my datacenter!‘.

My first fight
In the beginning of February we ran into a nasty comment in the community claiming that we ‘stole’ someones domain name. It turned out to be a comment of Scott Herold (VMGuru.com) who, after finding out a colleagues had registered ‘vmgu.ru’ just to annoy him, discovered VMGuru.nl. All ended in a fizzle, after explaining our intentions and the idea that we could both contribute to the community, each in our own way, all was well. Scott turned out to be a decent guy and we planned to meet up at VMworld in Cannes at the end of the month. We even did a video with him on VESI.org!

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

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The Mac adepts amongst you probably already knew this, but VMware is coming with Fusion 3. It is scheduled to be released at Oct 27.

VMware Fusion gives you the possibility to virtualize on Apple Macintosh computers.

PALO ALTO, Calif., October 6, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that VMware Fusion 3, the best way to run Windows on the Mac, will be available worldwide on October 27 and is available for pre-order today. VMware Fusion 3 makes it easier than ever for users to move to the Mac and to run Windows applications – including graphics-intensive games – alongside Mac applications, with a Mac user experience.

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Last Friday we had a session with Microsoft about ‘the Cloud’. We already heard a lot about clouds, but I must admit that both Microsoft presentations that day were refreshing.

Every cloud provider does his best to bring cloud thinking to the mind, but what exactly is ‘the Cloud’ ? There seems to be more than 76 different definitions for cloud computing.  While Googling for some background information I came across a quote from Larry Ellison (Oracle) which he did at Oracle OpenWorld:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing [..] The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

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Today VMware Education Services announced that they will allow a second shot for those who have failed their first attempt at the VCP 410 exam. This second shot is free but you will have to register before you attend your first exam.

It is a two part process:

1. Enroll in the 2nd Shot Upgrade Program at the VMware Education Services website;
2. Use the voucher number you receive from VMware to book your exam. This will entitle you to the free second shot  – in case you fail.

If you fail the exam that was scheduled with your unique voucher number, you may schedule a free retake by entering the promotion code: UPGRADE at the time of registration.

Important: This discount will only be valid on retakes of exams that were initially scheduled using your unique voucher number.

I passed the exam a few weeks ago and compared to my VCP310 exam I found the VCP410 exam to be quite difficult. It’s not an easy walk through exam so to register for a second shot is definitely a good idea, just in case.

Visit the Pearson VUE website or the VMware website for more information.

Visit the VMware Education Service website to enroll for the second shot.

As a real VMware View enthusiast I’m really anxious to work with the new VMware View 4 with PCoIP. Just like vCenter Site Recovery Manager, were the new version was released last week,  VMware View has to be adjusted to support VMware vSphere 4.

The release of VMware View 4 is expected at the end of this year and earlier this week VMware launched a private beta.

The major difference will be  software version of the Teradici PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol which VMware View 4.0 will contain. The demo at VMworld Europe 2009 looked very promising and I’m very curious how this will perform.

This video I found on YouTube certainly looks very very promising indeed.

I’m not invited to this private beta (yet) but I hope that my VMware contact can arrange an invitation soon so I can experience this new technology soon so I can implement this at client sites as soon as it is released.

During the last months it has become very clear that the fight in the VDI space is on. Citrix and VMware have released new and better versions of their product and Microsoft stumbles behind with their MED-V ‘solution’.

Last February, around VMworld Europe 2009, VMware announced an open source version of their VMware View client. Now that VMware View with the long awaited PCoIP is on the horizon, VMware has released the VMware View Open Client 4.0 for the public beta. With this VMware is hoping to conquer a large number of thin client providers so many new devices will contain an out-of-the-box VMware View client.

Samsung is the first to take advantage of this new opportunity with the release of their new 930 DN 19″ LCD monitor with integrated PCoIP.

The VMware View Open Client 4.0 beta includes support for SSL tunneling, two-factor authentication with RSA SecurID and a Command Line Interface (CLI).

Unfortunately there is no support for:

• USB redirection
• Multiple desktop sessions
• Multimedia redirection

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

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Back in April we we’re the first to report the limited management and automation support in vSphere, but now VMware has released version 4.0 of vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Besides that vCenter Site Recovery Manager can now be used with VMware’s vSphere 4 it has some additional new features and improvements, like:

• Support for NFS storage arrays;
• Support for Shared Recovery Sites;
• Support for VMware Fault Tolerance;
• Support for Distributed vSwitches;
• Maximum number of protected VMs increased to 1000;
• Graphical interface to advanced settings;
• Support for DB2 as an SRM database server;
• Fully compatible with Distributed Power Management.

Licensing remains to be socket based as it was the case with SRM 1.0

For more information visit VMware’s website or see the release notes.