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

VMware really wants to get a piece of the desktop market. After acquiring and/or releasing products for desktop management (VMware View and ThinApp)

VMware announced at VMworld ‘09 that they had an OEM agreement with RTO for Virtual Profiles. VMware wanted to integrate the product into VMware View, it’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure product. Now, almost a year later, VMware announced the acquisition of RTO Software.

Here’s a quote from the VMware View-Point blog:

We’ve been talking about provisioning users, not devices, and the importance of composition or layering in a desktop virtual machine – that a desktop VM is comprised of independent virtualized component parts that are dynamically brought together on demand into an encapsulated VM. One of those critical parts is the user persona, a user’s profile, data files and settings. Clean, efficient user persona virtualization is vital to our vision and that is precisely what RTO’s industry-leading Virtual Profiles will deliver for VMware View. With persona management, end-user specific information such as user data files, settings and application access is separated from the desktop image and centrally stored, enabling increased flexible access, greater portability and seamless file management and backup.

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It was Valentine’s Day, February 14th, the day the boys and girls at Partner Exchange exchange business cards with their business partners.  They draw hearts and flowers and write funny poems.  VMware awoke early and looked over at the stack of cards ready and waiting to be given to friends, including one very special card for Cisco and NetApp, VMware’s best friends.

At the Partner Exchange, VMware was surprised to see that lots of other partners were already there and every desk was piled high with Valentines.  VMware went to work right away, hurrying to leave a Valentine at each desk before the bell rang for the keynote.

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The Cisco Nexus 1000V is the first switch that can be placed in your vSphere virtual infrastructure, giving back network control back to the people that know the most about networking: The network admins. The Nexus 1000V is built on the distributed vSwitch technology in vSphere and can be managed by the same tools that network admins already use for manging their physical switches.

Cisco is organizing a series of free seminars aimed at sales professionals as well as admins.

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Have you ever wondered what the world of work would look like in 2020? I have. With the huge technological progress, it’s hard to imagine what we will be doing and how the world around will look.

If you look at the way we do our jobs today, it seems to be a lot like factory, blue collar labour. It is somewhat cleaner, but the way we do our work today is just like in the early 1900’s in the Ford factory at the treadmill. The industrial revolution made it possible to automate almost everything with machines. Only the parts that could not be automated, were filled by people. Still we treat them as if they are just a mechanical part of a larger machine.

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Apple finally annoumced their tablet officially,dubbed the  iPad. The last months more and more rumors appeared on the internet. You probably wonder why this is interesting for the virtualization community.

Although a lot of people over at Gizmodo complain that it’s just an iPhone on steroids. I can see some real world applications for it.

Since I’m a real gadgetfreak, together with a lot of you I guess, I wonder how I could use the iPad in the daily operation. I see visions how the daily operation would look like.

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This week I got the question if I could draw up a short lists of pro’s and cons for MED-V. Since I’m doing virtualization in the widest possible way, this fits well in my job description.

But heck, what a question! Before I could even try to  answer the question I really had to dive into the Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization solution (hence MED-V) which is part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). Sure, I already seen some comments on the internet about MED-V and I already was somewhat biased. Still I tried to make it an objective report.

Let’s start with what it is not in my opinion. Although it enables management of virtualized desktops it is not a full blown desktop virtualization solution like XenDesktop and VMware View.

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Almost every week I listen to the podcast from the Communities Round-table, just to make sure that I didn’t miss anything important.

What is this Communities Round-table? Well, who better than John Troyer, Sr Mgr VMware Communities, can explain what it is.

Each week, we’ll bring together experts and leaders from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs to discuss the interesting topics in virtualization. Think of this as if it were a group meeting up at VMworld over a pint to chat about the latest news. We record the call and make it available for your pod cast listening pleasure. Listen with the player over on the right, download directly, or use the pod cast feed from TalkShoe.

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The VMGuru.nl crew wishes you a merry Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago I talked to a co-worker who is responsible for selling VMware licenses and other VMware related stuff. As a VMware partner it isn’t always easy to manage the licenses for customers nor selling or upgrading their licenses if they bought them from another partner in the past.

A lot of the times multiple people register VMware licenses. For example, if I am the person that has to request or register licenses I probably will do it with my own VMware account. If I leave the company the licenses still are connected to me as a person. I know you can use a general account and register your licenses with that, but that goes against anything I ever learnt about security and identity management.

If you already have licenses there is also no easy way to ‘push’ them to another account, for example a general account. You can do this through the support desk, but takes all kinds of effort.

From a viewpoint of the license admininstrator it’s hard to keep track of all licenses that a company has for VMware products.

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

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Gerben Kloosterman put up a video of Eric Sloof while demoing Virtualization EcoShell at http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl

For all the folks that didn’t hear about the EcoShell yet: The Virtualization EcoShell makes it possible to create scripts to automate management tasks for your virtual infrastructure, all from a user friendly user interface.

These scripts can be saved for later use.

This is not only good news for the lazy or time driven admin, but also from the point of making less mistakes. Actions can be run time after time at the same way.

The Virtualization EcoShell divides everything into the following actions:

• gather
• filter
• remediate
• report
• integrate

One of the items that is very interesting is vDiagram. vDiagram automagically creates a diagram of the items you want to report, for example which virtual machines are connected to what vSwitch.

Best Practice Filters are a great addition to the Virtualization EcoShell. For example: Give me all virtual machines with a connected CD-ROM drive that prevent VMotions. ESX hosts with NICs slower than 1GBit/s or VM’s with snapshots older than 7 days are part of the best practice filters.

Alan Renouf has put a lot of his PowerShell scripts he posted earlier on virtu-al.net in a PowerPack for the Virtualization EcoShell. vCheck is one of those things.

Eric has given a demo on his laptop. ESXi in a VMware Workstation 7 installation with a couple of virtual machines in it.

Without a line of programming or scripting he connects to the ESX host. Just by clicking he changes the connection of a couple of VMs to a different vSwitch.

If you want to change the code behind actions, no worry. Since everything is based on PowerShell commandlets you can change the code yourself.

Even creating your own PowerPack is very easy. As a demo Eric created a vmug PowerPack with a script he copied from the site from Alan. Sounds good, a vmug PowerPack.

Checkout  http://www.thevesi.org and ofcourse the site of Eric Sloof, ntpro.nl

Books that Eric mentioned in his presentation:

• vSphere Quick Start Guide
• Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell
• VMware VI and vSphere SDK

Twitter aliases to follow:

• carter shanklin @cshanklin
• alan renouf @alanrenouf
• hal rottenberg @halr9000
• luc dekens @LucD22
• Dmitry Sotnikov @DSotnikov
• hugo peeters @hugopeeters
• Arne Fokkema @afokkema
• Eric Sloof @esloof
• Scott Herold @vmguru

Scott Herold took the stage after Eric. He showed vRangerPro and the integration with the Virtualization EcoShell. From within the Virtualization EcoShell you are able to make charts from your backup times for example and use this in a monthly report.Even integration with vControl, a workflow application, is very easy from within the Virtualization EcoShell.

Scott is out in the exhibition hall to give more info and demo of the Virtualization EcoShell.

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

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

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I do like advertising from time to time. I think advertising gives away a lot about how companies operate and what their internal values are. You also find out if the company understands their market and their potential users.

When looking for VMware View articles with Google I came across an ad for Citrix, look at the picture to the right. The ad is somewhat funny actually. Citrix says that their solution with HDX is faster than VMware View. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, I don’t know. It all depends on workloads, hypervisor, storage and so on.

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

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

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

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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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