There was annoucement the other day that CISCO have bought a stake in VMware (along with Intel Capital). If this kind of industry news that interests you – then techtarget.com has a bit sized take on the whole deal…
It is quite easy to reconfigure the UDA to patch your ESX host after the build process. All we need is NFS export on the UDA to act as repository for the patches, a free-patching script and call statement in the kickstart script. Here’s how I do it (of course, everyone has their own preferred script/method):
I’m moving my hardware to co-location venue near where I live, so soon I won’t have physical access to my equipment except by Citrix and ILOs. Whilst my system will be connected to the internet by a high-speed redundent link – downloading large files from the internet such as DVD isos is not going to be very quick. So I intend to occasionally load-up a removable USB hard-drive with files and pop round to the co-location and copy them disk to disk. It’s not far away and it will be worth it for a few files that a very big. I found initially I had some problems…
Firstly, NTFS drives don’t appear to be mountable at Service Console. Despite the fact that normally Redhat Linux has a R/O driver for NTFS no matter what I did I couldn’t get the Service Console to recognise the partition. The alternative is to use FAT32. Unfortunately, M$ does not support with their tools a partition size larger than 32GB – and my removable drive is 60GB. Fortunately, there is an easy work around – that allows me to use ALL of the 60GB as single FAT32 drive – and use it both on my Windows XP laptop and at the Service Console. Here’s how its done…
Over there in the Netherlands they have some quite clever people 
An unoffical contest has sprung up to create with the VirtualCenter SDK a “MKS Client”. For those not in the know, MKS stands for a Mouse, Screen and Keyboard (you probably know it better as KVM). It’s a process that runs on an ESX host which allows for the redirection of inputs and outputs to the VM’s Remote Console – put simply it allow you interact with the VM using VMware’s client. The contests aim to produce a kind of stripped down client which only allows for this kind of interaction with the need for a full Vi Client. I blogged about Eric Sloof’s creation earlier this week. Anyway, it looks like Bouke Groenescheij and Richard Garsthagen (of VMware EMEA) have joined into this informal contest too…
Link:
http://www.jume.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=1
Yesterday VMware released an update to VirtualCenter 2. This is a maintenance release which will not include many if any new features.
Update: At the time of first writing this post it appeared as if the “Release Notes” was unavailable. This has now been fixed.
Download:
http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches.html#c4310
Release Notes:
http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/releasenotes_vc202.html
This week I seem to be assailed by developers who have created some cool new tool for VMware written with the VirtualCenter SDK. One interesting one is Eric Sloof’s “Virtual Machine MKS Client”. This tool prompts you for you VC username and password – and lists in the menu the VMs you have rights to. All it does it allow to open a “Remote Console” session on the VM and login, and interact with it.
I just installed it on my laptop and it worked straight away – which is good sign. Its a pretty cute tool, which might make me move away from using RDP to manage my Windows VMs. I’m not sure yet…
You can find the “Virtual Machine MKS Client” here:
Link:
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/170-The-games-have-begun.html
and
Download:
Well, in the end I didn’t get approval for my “VMware is esxy” blooper. It probably doesn’t add much to the competition. Is it me – but there doesn’t seem to be that many submissions – I mean a handful of videos are on the virtually famous website. Come on guys, lets make this a real competition rather than a cake-walk for those who have made very little effort so far! 
Anyway, here’s the blooper:
Well, as nod to VMware’s Virtually Famous campaign my girlfriend and I knocked this video together last night. It’s certainly not as fancy as some of the videos in the competition – but it was a bit of a laugh!
It’s called “VMware is esxy”. There’s the main video and also a “blooper” trail where we both just cracked up whilst trying to record it… I’m just waiting for the “blooper” trail to get approval from VMware
My Video:
http://video.vmware.com/mikelaverick
Virtually Famous Website:
The other day Maxim Ivanov of Veeam sent me a complementary copy of new application – Veeam Configurator. The tools consolidates a number of features into a wizard like interface. Typical tasks include:
From their website:
“Veeam Configurator helps you manage and control the configuration of your entire Virtual Infrastructure from a single Windows interface freeing you from reliance on the service console…”
Link:
Well, I don’t really “do” Citrix anymore – as now I’m kinda of a pure VMware guy now. But as a nod to my previous existance a Citrix Certified Instructor I thought I would blog about this one. Anyway, in the process of building my VDC (on a old release of Citrix MetaFrame) I found the Citrix client version 10 didn’t like my old web-interface. As it try to download the ICA file to make the connection I got this error:
“Error number 2314
“The ICA Client received a corrupt ICA File. ICA File section WFClient contains duplication keys named (ProxyType)”
Fortunately, the Citrix KB system came up trumps. Apparently, the 10.x client checks for duplicate enteries in the ICA file. All I had to do was modify the templates.ica file and remove the duplicates – and the new client works (and seems very fast too!). Quite how those duplicate enteries got in my ICA file is another question!
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