Alex Muetstege works as a Solution Architect for Imtech ICT. He currently provide hosting services for VMGuru.nl. In everyday life he usually does a lot of general IT infrastructure stuff. Messaging and collaboration is his main area of expertise. He is a virtualization enthusiast/newbie/probie but not a lot more than that according to himself.
In 2011 VMware awarded him the VMware vExpert status for his community efforts.
Today we received the press release of the new Starwind iSCSI software with the all new VM Backup technology.
Starwind is an innovative company and one of the first to offer an iSCSI initiator on the Microsoft Windows platform without a lot of hassle. Now, this product has come a long way since then and it now is a full blown storage solution, you could call it enterprise grade. The new version incorporates the VM Backup technique
Now, the previous versions already had best VMware support with their own HA technology. This new version also offers this technology for Hyper-V as well. The backup solution performs all operations on host level so no backup agents are needed in virtual machines.
One of the most visited and interesting parts of VMworld is the Solution Exchange. The Solution Exchange is like a trade fair, but better. All exhibitors have some product enhancing your virtual infrastructure, demo’s are all around and technicians with real info are everywhere. Yesterday I made a quick tour over the solution exchange and made a compilation of it to give you an impression of what it looks like.
And, new this year (or at least new to me) is the large relaxation lounge. Here you can sit back, relax, play a game of air hockey, mini golf or table tennis to get your mind off the constant stream of high quality information for a little while.
For a lot of people VMworld starts tomorrow. For the VMGuru.nl crew VMworld started today, with Partner Day. Take a look at the following movie for an impression of Partner Day.
Wednesday, September 14th, 2011, by Alex Muetstege
For all of you out there who use virtualisation on their Windows and Mac laptops, VMware released their new versions today. Both products, VMware Fusion v4 (actually, v4.01) and VMware Workstation v8 are available for download and purchase starting today
The new versions of course offer a list of new features. Here’s what’s new per release, taken from the release notes:
Ever since I’ve been working on a Apple Classic II, many many years ago, I was caught by the way of thinking at Cupertino. Design combined with functionality was actually possible! Well, back then we thought it was beautiful, anyway
Now, many years have gone by, a lot of people in the world seem to have recently discovered Apple. With the consumerization of the IT business, more and more Macs appear in the landscape. And why not? Sleek design combined with a stable OS where you don’t waste performance and money on staying free from virii and other malware (at least, for now), who doesn’t want that? So, it’s logical that wishes and demands for a virtual server or desktop in the Windows world, also be true for OS X. With vSphere 5, this might be possible!
Sometimes a company rethinks its strategy and thinks it has found a new edge. This was, or better, is the case with the new licensing model for vSphere 5, that was announced 12th of July.
Actually, vSphere 5 has a lot of new and exiting features, but all were pushed into the shadows by this new licensing model. Comments varied from ‘it will not hurt us right now’ up to ‘this is opening the door for HyperV and all other competitors!’.
Fortunately, VMware also is a company that quickly learns and as they watched the storm run through virtualization land, they came to the conclusion that a slight adjustment would silence the competition, reinstate lost faith (if that happened at all ) and, most of all, bring peace of mind to their customers.
Of course we all knew that already Paul Venezia posted an in depth article on Infoworld where he compares the four main server virtualization software competitors on a selection of criteria.
Now, you can nit-pick on the measurements he made or the criteria he has chosen, but in general I think it’s a solid test of up-to-date versions.
The best conclusions I can draw from his report are these:
VMware might not always be the cheapest, VMware might not always be the one with the highest speeds.. but VMware is still the one with the most diverse OS support (any x86 OS can be virtualized), the best management toolkit and the most reliable architecture.
VMGuru.nl is going strong! A bit too strong for our current colo. So, we will be moving to a new co-locator this weekend. Moving to a new co-locator also means that we will be moving to new IP addresses. We hope we can make the transition as smooth as possible, but you might experience an outage starting Saturday. This should be limited to Saturday only. If we still can’t be reached beyond that, please notify us via twitter
Stay tuned for more news and insights here at VMGuru.nl!
Last Friday I attended a VDI presentation from an Oracle (formally Sun) reseller on the brand new Oracle VDI solution. First of all, the audience was very different from the ‘usual virtualization’ crowd. A lot of former Sun enthusiasts, who have a very different view on solutions. This article is from my viewpoint. Not all participants of the meeting might agree with me.
The first statement from the Senior VDI manager: ‘ Oracle VDI is here to stay. It’s being heavily invested in. Larry Ellisson wants to be number 1 in the VDI market. Therefore, VDI has been positioned as a separate global business unit within Oracle.‘
Some time ago.. actually, a long time ago, we here at VMGuru.nl received a sample of a training DVD from TrainSignal. I promised to write a review on it, but I honestly didn’t come around to it due to all sorts of personal stuff. But the DVD box made it safely through the move from one house to the next. So, today I sat down and opened the DVD box.
So, first of all, it’s definitely a proper training. This isn’t your average ‘we demo, you watch’ kind of training. It’s aimed to let you pass the Exchange 2010 exam, but it does more. This 3 DVD box set covers all topics you need to understand to successfully implement Exchange 2010 into an organization in 40 lessons. It does not only show you how and where to configure things, but most importantly, it tries to show you why. This is the first time I’ve encountered such an approach in a self-paced training package. It really is pretty extensive.
We here at VMGuru.nl hope you all had a proper start of 2011. We sure did!
But what will 2011 bring us? Some curtains have been lifted a little. We know we can expect a brand new version of vSphere in 2011. But what features will vSphere 5 have. Personally I hope we will finally see a vSphere Client for Linux/OSX with this version.
We will certainly see Citrix and Microsoft push the boundaries more and more in the desktop virtualization area. But do you think we will finally see the major shift to 64 bit in this field too? It has been predicted for years and years (some folks even mention 128 bit systems in the near future).
Some of you might already have been there. I know I have:
You have a large organization with more than 10 remote or branch offices. You have virtualized your entire back-end but those nasty site servers still remain a physical nuisance. Some regional offices have a complete data center with more than 20 servers just to make sure everyone can work locally. You want to virtualize it but you can’t convince your management to purchase 10 or more sets of Advanced of Enterprise (plus) licenses for those sites as that is far to expensive.
Now, what do you do? What I’ve done in the past is use a ‘free’ ESXi license and manage it as a standalone server. It is a possibility, but you lack a lot of enterprise features you really want to have. And what if the site is too big for just one host. And what about fail-over? One is None, we always say. So what’s the solution? (more…)
As you might or might not know, I’m the hosting dude at VMGuru.nl. Our site runs on a Linux VM with Apache and that gives us the performance and stability we need. The combination of Apache on Linux gives us some nice options to run statistics on VMGuru.nl and of course we do. So, without further ado, here are the browser and OS statistics you all help to build. (more…)
This evening I noticed that our Zimbra server wasn’t responding properly. In the end it wasn’t responding at all so I rebooted the VM. Unfortunately that worsened the situation, it now is down and out totally. No luck starting services, error messages making no sense, I scanned the Zimbra forums for a solution but nobody seems to have this issue. So.. let’s hope anyone can help out here. For the moment our mail is out.
It was a huge success as far as us here at VMGuru.nl concerns. We had a fantastic time. Although it was very demanding at times, the team pulled through together. During VMworld, we generated more than 20 posts here at VMGuru.nl. Edwin’s dairy posts gave a bit of an insight in what we did every day. In general, we were on our feet from 7:30 AM up to 01:30 AM. During these long days, we shot a huge amount of photo’s and video’s. Most material has already been posted and we hope we have made a difference with our posts.
Our goal was to give you, our visitor, an idea of what was shown at VMworld 2010, the keynote sessions, the solution exchange and the overall experience. If we did it right, you might even have had the feeling you were there with us at the conference. We tried to interview the interesting people and show new products you might want to hear about and look at. Nevertheless we hope to see more of you in person at VMworld 2011, wherever it may be. Wouldn’t it be great if VMworld Europe got bigger than the US version?
Yesterday we visited the Liquidware Booth. Liquidware is an innovative company with some unique tools that will help you plan, deploy and maintain a user desktop environment. In this video, Thomas of Liquidware demoes the Stratusphere Fit application.
With this tool you can scan your current end user environment, take a close look at desktop and application usage and build an extensive report from this information. With that report in hand, you could go ahead and plan and size your brand new VDI environment without the fear of having missed an application or user.
I’ve written about Zimbra before. Actually, we here at vmguru.nl use Zimbra for all our email and collaboration. So, today we were invited to join the Zimbra Breakfast Meeting at the Scandic Hotel in Copenhagen.
Zimbra, for the ones who don’t know what it does, is a collaboration suite. It’s the open source exchange alternative. Well, it’s getting more than an alternative. It’s getting competitive in a rapid pace. According to Zimbra, it’s the next-generation Exchange.
Today we received the press release of the new Starwind iSCSI software with the all new VM Backup technology.
VMGuru.nl is going strong! A bit too strong for our current colo. So, we will be moving to a new co-locator this weekend. Moving to a new co-locator also means that we will be moving to new IP addresses. We hope we can make the transition as smooth as possible, but you might experience an outage starting Saturday. This should be limited to Saturday only. If we still can’t be reached beyond that, please notify us via twitter 
I’ve written
