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.

A quick overview of the Zimbra features: (more…)

Hello Folks!

In the past we had several major and minor issues regarding the website performance. As we have also moved to new hardware a few months ago, we had to reconfigured the complete backend construction. Last weekend I spend some time rounding up the last details on this and on the website’s configuration.

When I compare it to our old server, the performance in the backend is significantly better and after the last tuning activities last weekend, I think the website is performing very nicely. However, speed is always subjective. I think it’s fast, but you may think it could be better.

So, let us know what you think! Are we slow where you are? Tell us about it. We like to know!

Last sunday I took our Zimbra appliance into productionmode. About one week has passed and I must say, I still don’t regret the choice. Even with my 2 gigs of mail, Zimbra seems to be coping fine. I did notice a few things that could be improved though. But hey, which product is perfect? There’s always something to be done or someone with a brand new idea. (more…)

A ‘bit’ of history

Some of you might know me as a dedicated MS Exchange junkie. Ever since Microsoft launched version 5.0 of Exchange, I’ve been working with it and I must admit I never found a collaboration suite quite like it. I’ve had numerous discussions with Lotus Notes or Novell  Groupwise folks but they never conviced me (believe me, I tried all suites hands-on). And yes, I am aware of all the problems Exchange had in the past, including being a spamrelaying nuisance, a memory hog, a disk killer and so on (most errors were caused by faulty configurations, btw).

About 8 years ago some folks in, I think it was Germany, started a project with opensource software to create an Exchange equivalent with nothing but opensource software. Actually, it is pretty logical. If you strip down everything around Exchange, you are left with a (pretty ancient) database system (Jet), a webserver (IIS) and an SMTP engine. So, why can this not be done with MySQL, Apache and Sendmail or Postfix? It should be possible.

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Hello folks,

Yesterday we noticed a huge increase in the amount of traffic. After some in-depth investigation, we discovered that some ‘friends’ in China found a loophole which quadrupled our traffic within a few hours.  Fortunately no real harm was done. Our systems were not compromised.

During this investigation, we also noticed several attempts that were made from within China to ‘probe’ our security. Although China is one of the biggest upcoming markets in the world (if not the biggest), this apparently comes at a price. So, we here at VMGuru.nl decided that we will be avoiding China for the moment. We therefore blocked all known IP ranges appointed to China from accessing our site.

We’re sorry for any genuine followers of VMGuru.nl in China, but the amount of attempts was too big to ignore.

Since Microsoft introduced Windows 2008 back in 2007, there is the opportunity to install a Core Server. It was the first time Microsoft introduced a lean-and-mean server, where a lot of the Linux and Unix admins always complained that the GUI on a server eats so many resources where nobody ever really uses it.

Core server installations have a big advantage above the full installation of windows: it uses up less resources on your (virtual) infrastructure. (more…)

Hello Folks!

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

It is always nice to see how Citrix fan-boys reacts on publications about VMware View. Especially when it comes to an comparison or XenApp for View trade in. It is often said that Citrix listens to their customers but they are seldom heard! People need simple solutions in a complex IT world. Why pay for a very high end piece of engineering like a Ferrari if I can get the job done with a Volkswagen! OK, it is nice to have a car that nobody else has and can do 320 km/h but in times were budgets are under pressure, I have a hard time defending expensive, complex and high-end solutions.

The fact that VDI is putting a significant load on the storage is true, but that counts for every VDI solutions including XenDesktop, so no differences there. Also the new upcoming version of View includes a basic profile management solution “Persona Management”. Which makes the use of linked clones a very workable solution.

When you compare installing View and XenDesktop you will see the following diagram.

When it comes down to management consoles the two solutions also look very different.

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As a reaction on the Citrix program to trade in your VMware View licenses for XenDesktop, VMware comes with a program to trade in your XenApp licenses for VMware View.

The trade in program is quite simple: For the price of 3 years XenApp SA (€ 182,-) you will get View Premier and 3 years SnS.

VMware’s offer differs from the one from Citrix in a few way’s.

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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…)

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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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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