For me, the best part of the experience is the accessibility of the community which VMware seems to promote and maintain at such a high level. While I know most of the UK based bloggers and experts, meeting some of the EMEA and US guys has been great and even though most of them are in a different league technically, you can still just turn up and talk to them.

I don’t know any other technology company that has this level of interaction, and it can’t hurt VMware when people can see this publicly on mediums like Twitter and the community forums.

Speaking of Twitter, I commented yesterday after seeing David M Davis and Kendrick Coleman’s session about the free tools for VMware, that in its own way Twitter has become a free support tool of its own. You only have to search #VMware as a hashtag to see people stating problems, mentioning blog posts and answering each others questions – all you need is Twitter and who to follow. Eric Siebert’s list gives any newcomer a great head start here.

I think the main disappointment I had was the lack of a working View client running on the iPad – especially as it was demo’d in SF you would hope the same systems would be available at both events.

All in all, a great few days where you have the opportunity to learn as much as you can from the leaders in their field. I now return to redouble my efforts to design a View architecture for the next quarter.

In our case this means both the internal end users within the company, and our external customer base. The last three years have seen a massive jump in the products we are delivering externally – with it came a massive expansion of servers that underpinned it. This was possible due to a significant investment in VMware that allowed us to grow out eight development environments.

This flexibility has meant the company is hungry to keep innovating, with a degree of confidence that it can be supported. The risk however is that maintaining, and growing the infrastructure with the agility required becomes more and more complicated.

VMware deem the management of this as four key factors:

• Efficient Pooling
• Elastic Resource Scheduling
• Automation through Policy
• Open and Interoperable

Up until now, Enterprise Plus has not been a requirement for us but if we want to employ vCloud Director as the umbrella app for the estate we will need to evaluate the up-shift in licence costs and the overhead of deploying Oracle and Linux in a mostly Windows house.

The end user experience was also of interest in the speech – the comment about the CEO turning up with his iPad had already happened to us and the flow of devices are ramping up to the point we are having to look at appliances that can secure any device within the corporate workforce. Coupled with a recent wireless implementation, portable access to Windows machines is going to accelerate device adoption even faster, but at a rate controlled by us. Project Horizon looks to extend this with a centrally maintained and distributable ‘app store’ whereby the user experience drives the access and its consumption.

So some good messages coming from VMware – and they are attacking on a lot of new fronts across what they called the ‘New Stack’.

Although already over halfway through our migration to ESXi I will be looking forward to various sessions on managing this better – and hope to share any revelations I learn in the next few days.

My other main focus will be VDI – the arrival of View 4.5, and my company’s impending migration to Windows 7 means I have a keen interest in trying to use VMware wherever possible. As an iPad owner I can’t wait to get my hands on the View Client app – it looks like a solid product from the teaser video in SF.

I will hopefully be frequenting the bloggers lounge to post some interesting updates, but as a reminder for those not attending, the Community section of the VMworld website will be an indispensible central source of all social media coming from the event. You can get to it here:

http://www.vmworld.com/community/vmworld-bloggers/

And for those of you lucky enought to make it, don’t forget to bookmark the VMworld app for your mobile devices while at the conference.

http://vmworld.com/mobile

See you there!

I was therefore intrigued when I saw mention of a new stylus called the Touch-Pen for iPad – the main difference here was the tip was more like a semi-sphere than a disc meaning it would have a better chance of contact which ever angle I chose to write with.

Having used one now for a few days, it is a great addition to iPad – the tip design as I had hoped provides a very fluid contact with the screen allowing a natural style of writing.

It is essentially a multifunction pen with a light, laser pointer and pen and a stylus attachment – the attachment is just pushed on when needed, which to be honest means it is easy to lose. It would have been nice to have seen a threaded fitting to secure it.

That aside I have been able to use it to doodle diagrams etc. effectively and my four year old is able to use it to practice writing letters and numbers in his various apps. It also has the added benefit of reducing the inevitable smearing from using a finger. So happily it does exactly what I bought it for – I would recommend it if you are looking out for a decent stylus.

There are several demo videos here – http://touchpen.us.com/pages/demonstrations

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/servers/4x-servers.html

I have to admit I do not always check the VMware HCL when moving from version to version of ESX. Normally I would check when there was a major release from say ESX3 to ESX4 as it would be a natural point to retire old hardware.

As part of our move to ESXi I was refreshing one of the environments and suffered some issues while trying to PXE build a blade. After trying various fixes and reading up on suggestions I came across a post stating that the BL685G1 (the blade I was trying to rebuild with ESXi 4.1) was no longer supported as of the release of 4.1.

I was somewhat surprised to read this, so off to the HCL I went and sure enough it would appear that HP have taken 4.1 as the opportunity to ditch the BL685 G1 from support.

So painfully in mid-version ESX4 it looks like we have to source new kit to keep up with VMware releases – which is a shame as other HP and Dell models with the same AMD Opteron 82xx processors seem to remain on the HCL for 4.1 .. and the blade seems to run 4.1 absolutely fine.

And every budget squeezed

How do keep your VMs in shape

And report on them with ease?

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You will need to run IIS

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It also runs the free edition

And comes with it included

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The reports get even better

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Once it’s up and running

You’ll need to get some data

So point it at your vcentre

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On your return the screen should show

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Now while there are restrictions

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You can check out Veeam Reporter Free edition by downloading it here.

This post is part of Veeam’s Blogger Contest to get the word out about Veeam Free Reporter 4. I have used the product for about a week now and it is really useful for all kinds of reports on your VM environment. Fellow bloggers have more conventional posts on their impressions of the product so check them out as well. All proceeds of the competition go to charity.

I am not going to write a mammoth report on it, as people with more time than I have already done so, but in terms of functionality and usability it does not disappoint. The fact my four year old is able to pick it up and use it from scratch is a testament to this.

I didn’t bother with the 3G version as like many others I have a MiFi unit which works very well.

If you are looking at one I would heartily recommend them.

Matt
(Written on an iPad using the WordPress app)

I was trying out Safari for Windows the other day and it reminded me of the font difference so I had a quick search for how the rendering was done to see if it could be reproduced. Google soon offered up various suggestions, but the main one was for a little app called GDI++

On the developer’s website is a brief history of the app stating that development had actually ceased but describing its core function:

‘gdi++.dll is a replacement for the Windows default font rasteriser, which gives you a better font smoothing capability, just like Mac OS X. It hacks one of the most important core dlls for graphics, gdi32.dll.’

Now fortunately others have continued the app so various improvements have been made – the last version I could find was gdi0870 which I have found to be stable.

Once you have extracted the zip file run the gditray.exe and it will start the app. In the system tray, you will see a little G icon – right click and select Enable. The rendering starts immediately but you may find you have to restart applications or move your mouse over certain areas. If you do want to use the program all the time you can add the program to the Start Menu.

The difference is pretty cool:

Before:

After:

If you use Chrome you need to tweak the exe to include the –no-sandbox at the end of the shortcut to allow it to render with GDI++

So for those Windows users who fancy a different looking UI, or Mac users who have to spend their working day in front of a PC this may be a nice looking extra for you.

With that in mind, I took to having a look at ESX4i in more depth to fathom where it would fit into our environment. We are very much an HP house, housing both standard and blade servers, so one of the core management systems we use is HP Systems Insight Manager. Its primary purpose is hardware monitoring – knowing when the hardware is either failing or failed being a must for our service assurance.

It was therefore a surprise when I first managed to add my test ESXi server to our existing SIM server (version 5.3), that certain components were not showing up. Most concerning was the lack of a disk subsystem. No array information, no disk breakdown – nothing.

Now I don’t know about other companies, but by far the most common failure in a server for us tends to be a disk. Therefore for SIM not to see it appeared somewhat dangerous. Puzzled by this, I investigated further – my first thought was that perhaps it was a GUI issue and that the underlying monitor was present but not displayed.

So I wandered up to the test server in the CER and disengaged one of the drives to see what happened. The HP SIM display did not change – no email alert, no status change on the GUI – even after ten minutes. By contrast the default alerts inside my test vCenter server, which was seeing the entire disk array inside the Hardware Status tab, immediately started sending alerts and changing status on screen.

This was supremely confusing – obviously for the vCenter to be able to detect the disk and any alerts the correct CIM information was being produced on the ESXi host (I was using the correct HP flavour of ESXi) yet SIM was oblivious to a problem.

Sorry to say after some more fiddling with authentication on SIM, trawling through numerous HP forums and even starting a Google Wave on the subject, I had to call it a day and put the ESXi question on ice.

Then back in late March, I saw something on Twitter announcing the release of SIM version 6 – there were various references made to improved support for ESX4 so I was anxious to see if the monitoring components had been upgraded.

So a swift guest build later (SIM 6 supports 64 bit so a Windows 2008 R2 was my choice) I was busy installing the new version. Now SIM is still not that intuitive when it comes to ESXi – it uses WBEM as a method to query the system so the authentication needs to be set there.

Before setting up a discovery job, a change needed to be made to the event filtering. Under Options > Events > Event Filter Options the ‘Accept unregistered events’ needs to be enabled. Don’t ask me why but the HP document suggests it needs to be there for ESXi.

I then set up a discovery job to look for the server (note the port used for access below – you will need to add this under the Advanced protocols credentials > WBEM/WMI tab:

Once this had been saved the job was started– the feedback is vastly improved in version 6, and you see each type of discovery it is trying and whether it is good or bad. The one you are looking for is the WBEM entry.

Once complete I switched to the All Systems view to see if the server had appeared. It had and I was greeted with the following extra display window.

NB. The auto-discovery is also much improved in SIM 6 – if you discover a host it automatically works out what is hosted on it and adds it as well if required. Very nice.

On clicking any of these categories I was pushed to a status window for the host where I was delighted to see the following – noting the comparison between v6 and 5.3 …

SIM 6	SIM 5.3

Success! Full access to the complete hardware layer in ESXi through SIM … looks like we can put ESXi back on the upgrade table

I was upgrading the memory in a Windows 2000 VM to 8GB, and had to alter the boot.ini to use more than 4GB. Unfortunately I was doing this remotely and during the save process my VPN died. When I rebooted the server I was faced with the dreaded ‘NTBTLDR.EXE is missing’. Now I knew that the problem must lie with the boot.ini, but how to get at it?

Because I was remote I did not have a Windows 2000 disk to get a recovery console up and I needed to get the server up and running again. I then realised that I did not need to boot from a CD to get to the VM’s hard drive.

I shut the VM off again, and jumped on to another server on the same host. In Edit Settings, I simply added the vmdk of the troubled host to the other machine and rescanned for the disk in Disk Management. Lo and behold the disk appeared and I could access the boot.ini file – I had managed to add a space at the beginning of the file during the save process which was causing the problem.

I rectified the file, removed the disk from the spare server and then the vmdk from the client. I crossed my fingers and restarted the VM … and gratefully saw the windows splash screen appear.

If this had been a physical box I would not have had a chance of fixing this remotely, and even on site there would have been much more time expended on finding a chassis with spare slots, array controller configurations etc. so it goes to show even the most basic functions of VMware are worth the effort of putting it in in the first place