Archive for April, 2009

Well, there is continuing fall out over this so-called myth busting video from Microsoft. I wonder what the best way of dealing with this must be from VMware. To rise to the bait, and counter act the Microsoft FUD or simply ignore it. At the end of the day, FUD is about creating a smoke-screen for customers, and making the competition (in this case VMware) loose site of its mission…

Anyway, I think Stu over at vinternals.com has an excellent take on this – taken from Microsoft document. The emporer truely has no clothes.

http://vinternals.com/2009/04/microsoft-myths-and-realities/#more-222

and that original document. Get before MS pulls or changes it!

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/B/6/8B6BB81E-BAD4-45D1-8E1E-FEFFB6084A7D/0616HyperVHostInfrastructureTCS.doc

[3.45am GMT]

Every so often the folks at VMware and Microsoft get into one of those slanging matches we all adore. Somewhat ironic for the fact that the pressure to virtualize (which made VMware one of the fastest growning companies of all time) came from all those underutilized Windows boxes in racks – and that the clickety-clickety easy of creating new Windows VMs hasn’t harmed volumes license sales at Redmond.

So what’s the big row about this time. Well, there was this rather clumsy format:

Brad: “Well, Todd tell me how VMware is way to expensive?”
Todd: “Gee, Todd I’m so glad you asked me that”

You can see the clunky video here. You also see my comments as Mr RTFM. What irks me is being described as stodge of VMware Marketing – when its Microsoft that creates this marketing crap in the first place. A case of the pot call the kettle black, methinks!

VMware’s less multimedia response is here:

http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualreality/2009/04/why-choose-vmware-and-microsofts-supposed-mythbusting.html

Anyway, I’m thinking of doing my own video in the same style. You know generally taking the piss as best I can. Because quite frankly I find this a huge yawn fest. In fact I promised NOT get sucked into this sort thing – and here am again. But heck I couldn’t sleep (see date & time of post) and nothing better to do…

This was the message that greated me this morning when I tried to open one of my word .docx files in Microsoft 2007. And this is a blogpost about what to do if this happens to – it suggests a number of different approaches in effort to get your damaged (by Microsoft) files.

IF you hit the details button – the dialog box will proceed will say something like “Location: Part /word/document.xml, Line 2, Column: 984619″

1. Check your backup – how recent is it and is it worth going back to it
2. Try the Open and Repair in the Word open dialog box
3. Try copying the corrupted file, rename to have the .zip extension. Extract damaged file, try to edit out the bad part of the file. Save corrected file back to the .zip file – and then rename back to .docx. If it still won’t open, try number 2 on this modified file
4. Download and install OpenOffice – open the damaged file and your last good backup – and play “spot the difference” by cutting and pasting the data back. Memory will serve you well – and if you have broken the original document up in sections – you can save time by splicing good versions of the document together from previous backups.You will have to re-impose your formatting and styles if you want the new stuff to match your old stuff. There’s no reason in this process. Sometime when click a sentence and hit the style option – it will strip the text of ALL the manual formatting you might have done – forcing you to reformat it again. Other times when you apply number styles you will find your numbering begins at 51 rather than 1. You will have to fix that manually too – by right-clicking and restart at one. The cut and paste will from OpenOffice to MS Word will NOT take any embedded graphics – you will have to copy and paste each on individual. All in all this is soul destroying process – dependent on the length of document, density of images. So sit back get a beer and remind yourself that at least you not having to type it all in again, and remember what it was you typed  - 1hr, 2hr, 1day, 2day, 1week ago….
    
5. Jump on your girlfriends laptop – because you recall giving her a copy to proof-read – and you think that might be more recent than your backup is

There are number of ways to aviod this happening to you again.

1. Microsoft products by their design cannot be relied on, and will inevitably corrupt data. This is given fact with Microsoft products. Grow-up and accept this fact. Therefore you MUST backup your most important files every day at least or hourly. A simple Save-As every 1hr is the ONLY way really. So the next time you watch some video extoling why there products are better than someone elses – remember the day you read this blogpost.
2. Do not use the XML docx format – it can’t be relied on, and isn’t recognised by any previous version of Word anyway. Your printer or publisher is probably using Word 2! Instead use the old Word6/97 format. This is an older format which is more mature and can be recognised by many different wordprocessors other than MS Word.
3. Never ever create very long documents in Word. It simply can’t cope. Not least because you will get increasingly annoyed by the auto-save feature which interupts your work – additionally repagination happens every 5 seconds for even simple operations such as cut & paste or hitting the undo button. One large flat .docx file has to be regarded as a high risk strategy. Instead resolve to save your large word files as series of files – so that if one does get corrupted you only have lost that section – not the entire file. Oh, and remember to save those every 1hr as well. By the end of this process you will have many, many files. So it goes. Remember that before your document was corrupted seeing the words “Not Responding” in Word was an hourly event – when you hoped it wasn’t going to crash – and offer you an auto-recovery file. Any word-processor that needs an auto-recovery feature must be by definition not very reliable.
4. Never embed graphics into word files – because if you do have file corruption they will be lost – and probably none retrivable. You much better of putting saving the file as an independent graphic file – and make referrence to it in the document like [chapter21-this-is-my-image-file.jpg]. If your working for a big publisher they will demand this anyway….
5. Where possible resolve never to use a Microsoft Product again. Go out and buy a Mac even though it has huge “tax” on it – and use OpenOffice. OpenOffice can open damaged Microsoft Word files even when Microsoft Word cannot.

Ken Cline is the grand-master-flash-melly-mel of VMware and was already an experienced VMware person before I even opened an account on the VMware Forums. Anyway, Ken is already outputting quality content on his blog. I mean real quality, with diagrams – the full monty. At this rate he will be putting me out of a job! He has a great series of posts about virtual switches in Vi3 that are well worth a perusal

http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/the-great-vswitch-debate-part-1
http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/the-great-vswitch-debate-part-2
http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/the-great-vswitch-debate-part-3

Well, the webcast is the 21st (not the 24th as some reported last week) for VMware’s big announcement. It will be on at 9:00 AM – 10:45 PST via live SimulcastYou. You can register for the event here:

http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/nextgen.html

Fingers crossed I’m gonna hear something different from Vegas and Canne!

Here’s the blurb:

“Join us for an exclusive peek at how VMware is bringing cloud computing to businesses of all sizes.

VMware is once again leading the virtualization industry by bringing cloud computing to the datacenter. Transform your IT infrastructure into a private cloud—a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds—delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service. 

On April 21, 2009, we’ll be unveiling how VMware is taking IT to new heights of efficiency, choice and control through service-level automation—dramatically reducing capital and operating costs and maximizing IT efficiency—with the freedom to choose any application, OS, or hardware. 

Join Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware, as he and other VMware leaders officially unveil the next generation of virtualization technology from VMware. 

Don’t miss your chance to participate in one of the most groundbreaking events this year.”

Well, he’s finally done it. Hal’s book on PowersHELL and vmWARe is out and about – and ready to pre-order.

VMware released Update 4 for ESX 3.5 after a week or so ago releasing U4 for vCenter 2.5. Normally, I would be quick to blog about these releases, and even try them out as upgrades. But I haven’t done an upgrade of VMware since ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 were released many moons ago. To be honest I can’t keep up with VMware’s dizzying releases of U1, U2, U3 and U4. 

Anyway, this peaked my interest because there’s a gapping hole in my new book about vSphere4 – upgrading. So this week I rebuilt my environment so works on ESX 3.5 U4 and vCenter 2.5 U4 – and I’m trying my first ever upgrade. Yikes!

[It also means I have time blog as I watch status bars go by]

http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx35u4_rel_notes.html

As you probably (don’t) know there’s been a rumour going around that April 24th (or is that the 21st – there seems to be some confusion…!!!) will be big day for VMware. 

http://vmwaretips.com/wp/2009/04/01/vmware-launch-event-on-april-21st-sponsorship-opportunities-available/

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1352538,00.html

http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/04/01/is-vmware-releasing-vsphere-on-april-24th.aspx

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/04/01/vmware_esx_v4/

http://www.virtualization.info/2009/04/vmware-may-release-vsphere-40-on-april.html

It’s hard to get an handle on these things – will it be an annoucement of a cloud offering – or will it be an annoucement about vSphere4 (the new name for Virtual Infrastructure). There was a rumour in Canne this year of a big announcement in April, and some people to this to mean that no big announcements were to be expected in Canne. At the moment vSphere4 is on a release candidate – and the Beta Program has not been made public. Personally, I would be VERY suprised if this was GA announcement. So I’m expecting some more cloudiness OR the possiblity that the Beta Program will be made public. Something I wrongly predicted would happen in Canne. Just goes to show how much can trust a bloggers opinons!

Anyway, I’m hoping that as a vExpert (John?) that we will be given some embargo about the annoucement – so we (the bloggers) can be ready to click submit at the alotted time….

OK, yet another shameless plug for Chad and his blog. EMC have release a new version of the EMC Celerra VSA… If you don’t know the physical Celerra puts a iSCSI/NFS head on top of EMC Clarrion. You can use this VSA (Virtual SAN Appliance) to an connect anything to it – including ESX – for perhaps things like VMware Site Recovery Manager. That’s what I will be doing in future. More work with EMC storage intergration with VMware. More about that another time…

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/04/new-celerra-vsa.html

I’ve been working all this week in finally RTFM-ing all the VMware PDF’s – looking for errors or simply things I’ve missed in my book. Again on Chad’s blog there’s some interesting EMC integration which isn’t mentioned in my book or those PDFs (no disrespect VMware but the PDFs are hard-work!)

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/03/incoming-treat-for-emc-clariioncelerravmware-customers.html

There’s a also a video of the plug-in for Vi3.5