Everything-Virtual

Author: Simon

  • VMworld 2012 – So close but not close enough.

    Well I nearly fulfilled my dream of attending VMworld this year, arriving into the office I discovered that one of the attendees had called in sick and I was being asked if I was able to go (I carry my passport with me so could leave there and then Surprised smile) but decided to wait and see if the hotel and event reservations could be swapped over.

    All I can say is a big thanks to VMware for bending over backwards in accommodating a change in attendee at this late stage, not so much a big thanks but a disgruntled growl to the hotel who were totally un-prepared to allow for a change in guest thereby scuppering my chance of going to VMworld 2012.

    Disappointed doesn’t even come close Sad smile

  • Comments Issue

    All, it was recently brought to my attention that there was an issue with comments and my captcha program not displaying correctly.

    I have now resolved the comments issue by de-activating the captcha program until I can get a working addin.

     

    Apologies for this.

  • VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS – Free Kindle Download

    Duncan and Frank have announced the availability of the Kindle edition of the vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS book for free, if you missed it the first time around please take the time to download it now.

    vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Kindle Book

  • VMware Announces General Availability of VMware vCloud Suite 5.1

    Recently at VMworld in San Francisco VMware announced the vCloud 5.1 Suite and yesterday brought about its general availability.

    The vCloud 5.1 Suite is a complete integrated cloud infrastructure solution and was definitely one of the primary discussion points at of VMworld among partners and end users.

    From the VMware Press Release some of the highlights of the vCloud 5.1 Suite are:

     

    • VMware vSphere® 5.1 – With more than 100 enhancements and new features, VMware’s virtualization platform is the proven foundation for the software-defined datacentre, delivering the highest service levels for all applications, including business-critical workloads and low-latency, I/O-sensitive applications.
    • VMware vCloud Director® 5.1 – With scalability improvements that support “elastic” virtual datacenters spanning multiple VMware vSphere clusters and up to 30,000 VMs, VMware vCloud Director 5.1 allows customers to provision complete virtual datacenter services in minutes.
    • VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 –Providing a full set of software-defined networking capabilities, the new VMware vCloud Networking and Security enables the dynamic creation of virtual networks and services that are completely decoupled and independent from the physical network hardware.
    • VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager™ 5.1– To enhance the availability and rapid recovery of applications running in the software-defined datacentre, vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1 simplifies and automates disaster recovery planning, testing and execution.

    Check out the VMware press release for full details – VMware press release – VMware Announces General Availability of VMware vCloud Suite 5.1

  • vSphere Web Client – What does it mean for the third party management app suppliers? – Update

    Earlier this week I asked what it would mean for the mobile app publishers now that VMware had introduced a decent Web Client for vSphere 5, the reason for the post was because it looked like the web client would be all that was needed for the mobile user to manage their vSphere infrastructure, it turns out that I was a tad hasty in my view of the mobile app’s imminent demise.

    Why I hear you ask? Well, the new vSphere Web Client is Flash driven and as such won’t work on a number of mobile platforms (especially now that Adobe have also removed it from the Google Marketplace as well). Now don’t panic too much because for all intents and purposes it appears that VMware have implemented this well, yes it sucks that this is on Flash and not something like Java but as most Enterprise desktops already have a flavour of Flash installed so it does mean one less application being installed on the desktop (and let’s be fair, the vSphere client does have a large-ish footprint).

    I can’t comment personally on the usability of the new Web Client but come back soon for an updated view on it.

  • vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive Book Now Available

    Clustering5.1

    Frank and Duncan have managed to keep this quiet but over the last couple of months they have been working to get their boot updated to cover 5.1 material and get it published in time for VMworld and the launch of vSphere 5.1.

    Head over to Amazon to pick up either a paper or virtual copy of the book priced at £14.95 or £4.62 respectively.

    Well done Frank and Duncan.

  • New VMware Certification Tracks

    VMware today announced a complete update to the VMware Certification Track.

    There are now four certification tracks for people to go for, they are :-

    • Cloud
    • Datacenter Virtualization
    • End User Computing
    • Cloud Application Platform

    The tracks stack up like this.

    Selection_001

    What this essentially means for the exam taker is this, the original VCP 5 now becomes the Datacenter Virtualisation track, the recently announced VCP-IaaS now falls into the Cloud track (along with what looks like a new VCP-Cloud exam), the VMware View based VCP now falls under the VCP EUC track and there is now a new Developer certification track.

  • Installing VMware Player 5.0.0 on Ubuntu 12.04

    Just to give everyone a heads up that installing and running VMware Player 5 on Ubuntu 12.04 works perfectly and doesn’t require any additional steps to install apart from making the bundle executable (unlike previous versions which required manual patching, so a big thanks to VMware for finally fixing the issue Smile)

    chmod +x VMware-Player-5.0.0-812388.x86_64.bundle

    and then installing VMware Player, type in

    sudo ./VMware-Player-5.0.0-812388.x86_64.bundle

    Then just launch the application as usual 🙂

    Oh and to make life easier for those people wanting to download VMware Player, VMware have now removed the requirement to have an account to download Player so another thumbs up to VMware for that Smile

  • VMware Workstation 9 Launched

    image

    Well I wasn’t too far out, in the last week I posted a question asking if we would see VMware Workstation launched at VMworld this coming weekend, I was out by a couple of days because VMware launched it today 🙂

    What’s New in Workstation 9?

    image

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  • VMware Workstation 9 – Will we see it at VMworld 2012?

    I recently downloaded a trial of VMware Workstation 8 from the VMware website and discovered that VMware may well have jumped the gun a little.

    image

    So either it really is just a typo or we can expect Workstation 9 to be released in the not too distant future, knowing previous VMworld announcements it really wouldn’t surprise me to see this getting announced the week after next.