VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

Hello Folks!

Today Erik celebrates his 36th birthday. We’re happy to have his party today and we all wish him many happy returns!

Well, it’s done, as far as we’re concerned. The migration to new hardware is a fact. You might see a significant speedup in the site (we do). We’re very happy with the results, allthough we had some issues, but then again, which migration hasn’t?

We made some pics during the swap. The quality is pretty poor but you can’t expect much from a mobile phone. Here they come! (more…)

Good news! Our brand new server is finally ready for production! Next Friday we will replace the old workhorse with a brand new one, with many thanks to our friends @ Dell (a big hurray and thank you to you all over there!) Our new infra will, of course, be fully virtual. Since we have more processing power AND more RAM, our site should benefit a lot in terms of speed and stability.

We hope that service will hardly be interrupted but as with all migrations, you never really know until it’s over

Work starts Friday at 10:00AM CET and ends when it’s ready

Update 15:41 CET+1 (AJ): Basic functionality of the site is up again. We’re still doing some tweaking during the next couple of days. If you get an 404 error, just try again.

Two months ago, I heard Citrix was giving away a free VDI version called XenDesktop Express for a maximum of 10 users. The general idea is that you can experience the Citrix product advantages without investing anything but time and hardware. I downloaded it but didn’t have time to actually get some hands-on experience until last Wednesday.

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hey folks!

First of all, a happy newyear to you all!

With 2009 behind us, we look forward to a new and intense 2010. Personally, I think 2010 will be a very interesting year. With the world economy leaving the ruins of the crisis and alot of new trends and technology introductions ahead, we are in for quite a treat. Also, we are eagerly looking forward to VMworld in Copenhagen, later this year. We hope to see a lot of you in Denmark!

However, a quick look back is in order too. (more…)

Where the development team of Windows 7 did it’s best to release the final version of the product before the holiday season of 2009, the enterprise boys of the MDOP team (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) weren’t that quick. MED-V, which is the desktop virtualization product by Microsoft and part of the MDOP suite, will not support Windows 7 in the next release, which is planned for October 2009. Instead, there will be a separate update in the first quarter of 2010  through release of a service pack (Med-V 1.0 SP1).

Read all details here.

‘ello Folks!

Today we’ve updated Wordpress to its latest version. There was a serious bug in a previous version and we already had some nice people testing our security. So, from this spot, I’d like to thank them all for their work of probing our site about 5 to 10 times on a daily basis for securityholes, as well as testing our spamfilter for postings for 1.836 times.

Anyway, we’re up-to-date again and we hope to stay safe!

Cheers,

Froos

As Microsoft Exchange server is one of my area’s of expertise (or so they keep telling me )  I have had numerous discussions in the past whether you should virtualize Exchange or not. For ages Microsoft has claimed it cannot be done, performance would suffer severely, you would not receive support in a virtual environment etcetera.

To be honest, I didn’t really care about it. We’ve designed perfectly working Exchange organizations on VMware when MS was still refusing support. There are some rules you need to respect when you design your messaging environment, but generally it is no problem if you have the required resources available!

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This morning I was  bored a bit so I upgraded the website to the new version and updated some plugins too. If all went well, you should not have noticed anything and services should be up as usual.

Cheers,

Froos

The site has been down for about an hour or so. Due to a shortage on another server in the rack, the powerbar decided to close down the whole rack for damagecontrol. The cause has been found and the machine removed, so we’re back up and running.

Yes, I hear you all think “why is this important webserver not on HA”.. well.. we’re working on that For the time being, let’s hope it just doesn’t happen again.

Cheers,
Froos

Hello Folks,

Recently we opened up the site for comments without registration. We really love the feedback we get from you guys out there. It’s a motivator to keep up the work we’re doing. So keep commenting!

However, there is one downside to this. Some people on the net are very concerend about our lovelives and seem to think we are in desperate need of pharmacutical aid with that particular part of our existance.  They frequently try to post links to sites using the comment function, where we can buy these specific pills and in the process also unintentionally join their network to “spread the word”.

In short, the amount of spam posted on the site is rising. We try to keep the site clean of spam and unwanted posts (by using filtering and such) but if we miss one, please drop us a message on twitter, mail, msn, gmail, whatever so we can clean it up.

Thanks!

Froos

Now most of our loyal followers know, I usually do not post any content on this blog other than things related to the hosting of website. It’s my “job” to keep this part of the infrastructure running (well, that’s not quite how it is, but that’s another subject for another post ). In my day-to-day job I see a lot of infrastructures pass by and recently I started to notice that some of my colleagues look at virtualisation as an application. They think in boxes.. “we need a DC, and a filer, and blahblahblah”…So I thought, let’s post an entry here and see if you all have something to say about it.

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We experienced some trouble with the “User Photo” plugin which caused a load of PHP code to be displayed in the comments.

We couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause and we decided to disable it. Now I’m no PHP hero (actually, far from it) but I’ve been through the code and I cannot find anything wrong inside.

So, to cut it short, it’s not working, it’s no disaster, we can live without it for now, so we’ll keep it deactivated for now.

Cheers,
Froos

life is hard.. one minute you’re at the french Riviera (Nice/Cannes,17 degrees Celcius, sunny) and the next minute you’re struck by reality (Amsterdam, 5 degrees Celcius, drizzle). Grissa and myself went to Schiphol Airport to pick the boys up. Fortunately they had a good flight, but the weather was very confronting when they got out of the plane . On our way back home we even ran a flat tire, but we made it safely after all.

For me, I’d like to say to all of you a big thanks for the huge amount of interest in our blog! I must honestly say that I’d never expect that so many of you would follow the comments and postings from VMworld 2009. I hope we can keep you hooked to our site, now VMworld 2009 Europe has ended.

Stay tuned for new postings and news from the world of virtualisation as there is much more to see!

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!

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!

You know we encourage feedback on posts made here and we love to hear from all of you out there. Unfortunately we had quite some fake registrations in the last few weeks so I changed the registration procedure. New users will need to be activated by an admin after registering.

We hope to see a lot of new entries to keep the community growing as well es get to know our readers.

Cheers from a rainy Holland.

Hello Folks!

Alex Brown was so kind to provide us with a kick-ass new image we could use as our logo.

TAZZ fiddled it into the website already and I will try to fix the favourite icon later this weekend. We hope you like the new logo, we most certainly do!

Cheers,

Froos

Because I had nothing to do (:P) I picked today to finally upgrade the site to the latest Wordpress version. In fact, this should not affect anything for all of you but it does for us since administration is changed and some bugs have been solved. The upgrade went fine as far as I can tell. If you experience any trouble that you didn’t have before, drop us a mail (info@vmguru.nl) and we will look into it.

Cheers!