Archive for May, 2010

This week I spent some (not all) of my time playing about with a Panologic Device.

[Oh, and contrary to popular belief - they didn't pay me to do this, and I didn't ask for any money. I all asked for was a the device and software so I could play. Remember, after years of documenting VMware technologies - mainly for free - VMware has never given me a penny. He who pays the piper calls the tune - does NOT apply on RTFM. Got that?]

It’s not a PC and its not a dumb-terminal. It’s something else all together – its what’s called a zero-client. What that means is essentially the device is truly stateless. It boots over the network to what’s called the Pano Manager, which then acts as a broker to your virtual desktops. I’ve been writing a guide to VMware View 4.5 (which is currently in beta), and thought it was about time that I looked at dumb-terminals and zero-clients. If first came across Panologic at the North Carolina User Summit in 2008, and then again when they presented at the London User Group. Panologic is not alone in creating a zero-client, there are others on the market – and I’d be happy to evaluate them if the respective vendors can setup me up with a device and necessary software. It’s important to really understand what zero-client really means – it means literally there is no software or firmware on the device. You plug it, and so long as the appropriate system services are in place (DHCP, the zero-client manager/broker, vCenter and Virtual Desktops) – then the client simply boots, presents a logon screen and the user gets their desktop. I’m going to experiment with my Pano over the next couple of weeks, hopefully using my partner as a guinea-pig (I’m sure she wouldn’t not like being compared to furry rodent, despite her feline qualities!). She’s working in London, and wants to leave her laptop down there, but she will still need to browse the web and stuff when she gets home for the Le Weekend. Rather than letting her “borrow” my Mac Book Pro, and have complain about where the DEL key is – I thought I would take her keyboard, screen and mouse – and plug them into the Pano. She’s always complaining about her old Jurassic Windows XP laptop being to slow – so perhaps she will find the virtual desktop experience a better one.

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My friends in the SRM Team are running a survey to gather valuable information about how customers use and deploy SRM. In effort to reach as many people as possible – here’s the incentive. On completion of the survey, you will be able to download a copy of my new SRM 4.0 book, in return VMware will donate $10 to my chosen charity of UNICEF.

Here’s the blurb from VMware and the forum post is: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/270234

The VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) product team is looking for product feedback on SRM deployments. If you have purchased SRM, we would like to hear from you. Your participation will be very valuable to us and the information you provide will be used to improve the SRM product going forward.

You can provide your feedback by completing the survey

The survey should take no longer than 15 minutes and will expire on June 10, 2010. Please note that this survey is for SRM customers only.

Upon completion of the survey, if you are among the 1st 1000 respondents, VMware will donate $10 per response to charity. You will also receive a link to download the electronic copy of Mike Laverick’s book “Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0″ upon completion of the survey.

We appreciate you taking the time to provide us with your valuable feedback

Welcome to this months vNews, and what with me being holiday during this time – there is lots to report. Did the vendors know I was on my holidays – and release stuff just as I board the plane. Anyway, I’m back from Crete where I took my break – whilst I was there I took out the time walk/hike the Somaria Gorge, which is allegedly the longest gorge in Europe. Somewhere between 16-18km in length – you drop a couple of 1,000m within the first couple of kilometres. So it was it was down hill all the way you say – easy-peasy. Not so my friend. I almost lost both toenails from each of me feets! So this vNews is well earned chance to rest my butt and those toes nails – and work my through all the blogposts and announcements their virtualicentric. I had nearly 300 unread posts in my feed-burner – so it tooks some whittling away to get to this content. Enjoy!

If you want the PowerPoint of this vNews so you can rip it off and present at your User Group – feel free – just give me some credit…

In this months vNews I cover:

IDC Report into the growth of virtualization

The New VMware Certified Advanced Professional tracks

The Alleged End of VMware Server

Change Block Tracking Backup Bug (Plantvm.net)

VMware VUM and HP SIM Woes (vinternals)

VMware ESX Security Hardening Guide

New NFS Best Practices White Paper from VMware

Troubleshooting VMware Snapshots Whitepaper

vSphere 4.1 Feature Leak

Top 10 Free vSphere/ESX Utilities (kendrickcolman.com)

VMware Toolbar

Microsoft Dynamic Memory Primers (Part 1 of 5)

Microsoft Virtualization Profitability Toolkit (Partners Only)

Best Practise Analyser for App-V

Best Practise Analyser for Hyper-V R2

Citrix Client Hypervisor – XenClient

Burton Group – Compare of XenDesktop vs View

EMC vPlex – Long Distance VMotion

New EMC/vCenter Storage Plug-ins

NetApp Long Distance VMotion

NetApp DeDupe Calculations (boche.net)

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Yes, Just like a politician I need you to vote for me – and my VMworld session. I promise to cut the budget decifict, I won’t raise taxes, and I will increase spending on your local infrastructure. Promises Promises...

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/pcbusiness

It’s been brought to my attention that there two typos in my SRM 4.0 book surrounding the Microsoft SQL Configuration.

On page 151 on step 8, I incorrectly state you should select “Windows Authentication” when it should read “SQL Authentication”. It pretty obvious typo as in the book I’d spent a couple of pages explaining the authentication methods available and what VMware supports.

On the same page (151), the screen grab of the System DSN dialog box should not have “corp\srm4dbuser-nyc” in it, it should just read srm4nydb.

The typos was created by me using “Windows Authentication” in SQL in an unsupported configuration during writing the first draft. I was experimenting with whether such an unsupport configuration would work. Unfortunately, when I switched to SQL Authentication I neglected to update the text and graphic.

Sorry about that.

No. The General Election is over – and I’m not seeking a career in politics!

This year, VMworld Sessions are up for the public vote. So imagine that VMworld is like an episode of American Idol or Big Brother. I was actually asked by VMware to deliver a SRM session at this years VMworld. So I knocked together a blurb about what I would be chinwagging about! So this is what I thunk up…

“In the session, Mike Laverick (author of the only two books on VMware SRM) will discuss popular misunderstandings about what is possible for a configuration of SRM, and popular misunderstandings about the product. Drawing from his book, Mike will outline some of the limitations that SRM possess, and how you can work around these with a combination of PowerCLI and SDK. Finally, Mike will discuss what he think future versions of SRM will attempt to deliver, and how thinks the technology will evolve in the next 5 years.”

Really the session will about how people try and make SRM do things it can’t, and how people try to make stuff which isn’t about site recovery into site recovery tools. I will flag up common gotchas and bugs – and then end up with some blue sky (surely cloud?) thinking about where I creatively imagine where the product is going….

So vote for me – if this floats your boat! I’m 3rd from the top “VMware Site Recovery Manager: Misconceptions and Misconfigurations”

http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/pcbusiness

It looks like the agenda for the Charlotte VMUG is firming up.

http://info.vmware.com/content/VMUG_Conference_Agenda?ug=cha

So you know I will be there as will Scott Lowe, Vaughn Stewart, and Chad Sakac…

Well, its been sometime since I featured an excerpt from my favourite music show – Jools Holland. This girl is called Lissie, and it’s called Oh Mississippi. A great great voice…

This week “waggie” is Jason Boche. He’s a self-proclaimed VMware Virtualization Evangelist. Working in the IT field for 13 years, he holds the following certifications: VCDX #34, VCPx3, MCSEx3, MCSAx2, MCP, CCAx2, A+. He also a Senior Systems Engineer, VMware vEXPERT, VMware Communities User Moderator, the Minneapolis Area VMware User Group Leader, frequent VMware/VMTN Communities Roundtable podcaster, and moderator/contributor at the Petri IT Knowledgebase. He’s married to a wonderful and patient wife with whom I he has two children, and two Cavalier King Charles Spaniel dogs. Hobbies include racing motocross, model railroading, and chess!

Jason runs his own blog which is firm favorite on my feedburner!

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link.

In the chinwag Jason tells me about how he runs EMC storage in his home lab (and also NetApp too!), and how he’s been recently doing firmware updates to prepare for the NFS plug-in – Jas shares with us his experiences and opinions of using ESXi – and finally we discuss an issue with using VUM when vCenter is virtual. The whole story of this can be investigated further on Jason’s blog over here:

http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2010/03/04/vmware-update-manager-becomes-self-aware

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I run skype though my Apple MBP – and use the popular “Call Recorder” software to capture my “interviews” or what I call “chinwags”. One annoyance to me was how quiet I seemed on the chinwag compared with my interviewees. This was despite using a professional podcasters microphone from Samson. Anyway, one week whilst chinwagging with Simon Seagrave (of TechHead fame) – Simon pointed out that sometime in Windows, it “helps” you by reducing the sound level on the mic to stop a booming affect. Sure enough, when I opened the System Preferences and Sounds – as we talked I could see the recording level down…!

Intially, I thought I would be able to stop this using the “Sound” option perferrences – but it seems like my flavour of MAC OS X doesn’t have this option, but others do…

It seems like Windows has a similar option – but its name and location varies from one version of Windows to another…

It turned out the culprit was Skype which has “Automatic Audio Gain” feature – which lowers level of the microphone in a call. It also transpires that in previous version of Skype on the Mac,  you had the ability to switch off this feature – in the new versions the GUI option to do this has been “depreciated”. Anyway, after some concerted google-wacking I found this blog post:

http://www.bartbusschots.ie/blog/?p=609

This blogpost explain how you could edit Skype XML file to switch the darn feature off…

Thank you, Bart!

Note, if you are on Windows – you would go to: Tools -> Options -> Audio Setting and uncheck “let the skype adjust my audio settings”