Today VMware officially announces VMware View 4.0 with a marketing launch and a new rebranded website. http://www.vmware.com/products/view/

So what’s so special about this new version of VMware’s Virtual Desktop Solution?

The main focus is on user experience and therefore in the new software version Teradici’s PC over IP (PCOIP) protocol is included.

With VMware View 4 PCOIP the solution now delivers:

• Rich Media & Graphics (new)
• Multimedia Redirection (improved feature)
• Progressive build of Graphics (new)
• Multi monitor support (max 4)
• Support for PCOIP hardware (Teradici chips & host cards)
• Better WAN support claimed (up to 250 ms Latency)
• Audio redirection
• ClearType font

Other improvements

• Support for vSPhere (View 3 not supported on vSphere (due to composer))
• Support for Windows 7 (experimental) at least the OS is now recognized
• Improved Single Sign On
• Support for Windows Server 2008 AD
• VPN Tunneling – Support for Cisco VPN Soft client
• RDP virtual channel compatibility for USB redirection
• VMware VMsafe now also available for desktops (vSphere feature in combination with 3rd party vendor products)
• Thin Provisioning available (with vSphere)

VMware also announced that the product will be Generally Available (GA) next week (November 16, 2009), so no downloading yet…

But enough reading to do, see link at the top.

The software offer’s virtual accounts and thus provides seperate security contexts to those accounts.

more about icore and about the latest release in this link (don’t forget to take a look at the blog page)

On November 16th the Dutch System Center User Group organizes a SCUG special event together with INOVATIV & HP.

Leading presenters of Microsoft USA System Center product teams will host sessions about SCCM, SCOM and the upcoming System Center Service Manager (SvcMgr).

The presenters are:

HP: View on Dynamic Datacenters

SCCM: Wally Mead

SCOM: Daniel Savage

SvcMgr: Nigel Cain

More info on SystemCenterCentral.com (in Dutch)

It’s now official, on the Dutch VMUG site (www.vmug.nl) you can now read that the VMUG meeting will take place on December 11th in Nieuwegein (NL) (NBC).

This year a lot about vSphere 4 and all products involved of course.

Start at 9:30 am with keynote

10:30 – 17:30 Parallel sessions

Closing at 17:30 with drinks

The full Agenda will show here also when available.

The session-slot time is now increased from 45 minutes to 60 minutes.

The VMUG site contains a “call for papers” request and you can be noticed when the registration page is live, for more details see the VMUG NL website (see link above).

A post on the Dutch VMUG-site got my attention. It is the announcement of the Belgian VMUG event, one of the members (Bonsj) got an invitation mail stating :

We would like to invite you to attend the 9th VMware User Group meeting on October 26, 2009 – Wemmel
Driving Directions and location info : The Bowling Stones : Wemmel – Steenweg op Brussel 397 – 1780 Wemmel (Brussel)
The agenda of this meeting: (subject to change)
13u15: Welcome (Reinoud Reynders – UZLeuven)
13u20: VMWorld Summary (Nicolas van Wijnsberghe – VMware)
14u00 Installation and Configuration ESX Vsphere – best practices (Gabrie – http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/)
14u45: Break offered by Symantec
15u00 : Protection in a virtual environment (Paul Murgatroyd & Kim Apers – Symantec)
15u30: Upgrade your environment (Jan Tiri – VMWare)
16u15: Microsoft Licensing in a VDI environment (Patrick Viaene-Microsoft)
17u00: Vmug Drink offered by Symantec
To attend this FREE meeting you need to be logged in first (if you are not a member yet, please do so. It’s free!)
http://www.vmug.be
Once logged in you’ll see a question above ‘I will attend’. Then you’ll thick yes or no.
The VMware User Group (VMUG) program is designed to encourage and support communities of VMware users who want to hold regular meetings in their local area. The purpose of these gatherings is to provide a forum in which VMware users can share best practices and expertise, and VMware can in turn obtain feedback from the user community.
VMware User Groups are made up of independent communities of VMware users who get together to exchange ideas and information. There are many benefits to participating in a VMware User Group:
- Learn best practices and optimal use of VMware products
- Get answers, advice, tips, and suggestions from experts
- Discover new ideas and gain insight about Virtual Infrastructure
- Receive special information about new VMware products
- Network with other technical professionals in your area
- Be part of the leading edge of VMware users
Are you interested in helping to organize these meetings in the future? Please send an email to: info@vmug.be for more information.
We look forward to meet with you on the next VMUG meeting in Belgium.
Best Regards,
The VMUG.be team

Yesterday we had a meeting with Danny Claproth and Jan-Willem Koppers from Quest/Vizioncore about their products. I intended to do a short wrap-up here about it until I saw the blog post of fellow bloggers at VMguru_NL. They apparently had the same meeting in the morning and gave a good summary in their post which more or less also summarizes the highlights of our meeting in the afternoon.

Some additional highlights from our session:

• More and more products from Vizioncore are becoming powershell enabled
• vRanger (pro) 4.1 DPP now RTM and GA shortly (Tyler Jewel)
  vRanger Pro (backup/restore/disaster recovery) contains a new scheduler (no windows scheduler anymore)that optimizes scheduling and reduces your backup window. Because it is now a direct-to-target architecture there is no need to move data from a source to a proxy and then on to a target anymore. Now instant-file-level-restore, which means that there is no need to mount the archive or to restore a complete VM. You can now browse archives as easy as network shares.
• vFoglight 6 (monitoring) available soon (also as virtual appliance) and with SCOM integration (cartridge)
• vControl: a nice product to create workflows and automate common tasks
  for example:
  >Update/remediate hosts and automatically discovers vm’s with snapshots/cd-drives connected and apply/disconnect them through the use of powershell.<
  This is all free! Another feature which requires a license is the self service provisioning module that enables your users to automatically provision VMs
• vConverter is now free, cool feature:
  “Synchronized cutover”
  A preplanned cutover allows P2V conversion, test the process and then synchronize source and target systems before the final cutover, while continuing to run the source system.
  The feature “Incremental Replication for Disaster Recovery (Continuous Protection)” is a licensed feature (not free).
• vReplicator version 2.5.4.0 (bugfix) was released a couple of days ago

Here is the snap from VMGuru_NL post:

This morning we had a meeting with Vizioncore/Quest. Danny Claproth and Jan-Willem Koppers informed us on their complete range of vProducts.

Vizioncore offers a wide range of products which add additional features or deliver VMware-like features. I’ve not had very much time to test their products yet but I knew most of them by name and function. After attending Danny’s presentation I will definitely make time to check out their neat products.

The ones I will definitely check out are vFoglight, vOptimizer, vConverter and of course Virtualization EcoShell.

Read more

The solution was a solution called Vinca CO Standby Server. Years went by and in the meantime I switched from OS/2 to Windows NT/2000 and Virtualization with VMware workstation 4 and gsx. I even tried ESX 1.0 at the time, but because of SCSI dependencies and the planned use for it (home lab) I put that on hold.

Later on I took the turn to virtualization and started working with VI3. This was the time I bumped into high availability solutions again (VMware High Availability). What a surprise, VMware HA seemed to be “Legato Co-StandbyServer” formerly known as Vinca!

Just took a minute to google on these companies, guess what. Both domain names redirect to EMC (mother of VMware, still).

Vinca now refers to EMC AutoStart and www.legato.com has some links to the new locations of the different Legato products.

Looking at the concept of High Availability not much changed in the years. You’ll still need two servers a network connection (heartbeat) and some sort of online/real time replication between them or shared storage. Back in the early days a setup of such a system was definitely something you wanted to be prepared for. And getting a buzz from the beeper at night stating the cluster failed over and did not come up well was not something to be looking forward to.

The focus of availability shifted a little, it used to be at application level (replication of data and still can be with solutions like Microsoft Clustering with use of central storage which is a common good nowadays), now it’s focus is on (virtual) server level.

If I told you back then that in the future the only thing you had to do is mark a select box in a property of a server and that one is running in fault tolerance mode, you would declare me insane. But hear hear, Technology with a capital T did it again and automated the setup of a fault tolerance cluster environment at hardware level- virtual hardware in this case. VMware introduced VMware Fault Tolerance.

VMware Fault Tolerance or FT in short, completely duplicates a virtual machine by cloning it (asynchronously) and by duplicating instructions (synchronously), so that they will be processed by two VM’s (one invisible running on another host) at the same time. The result is two completely identical machines that are protected against (physical) hardware failures. It is important to know that there is no application awareness. If the first vm runs in a windows blue screen or gets a system halt, the second one – it’s counterpart in the FT-team – also suffers from that.

Haven’t been able to test it in real life yet because of the lack of (compatible)hardware in my home lab. The environments I currently work with also do not meet the requirements of FT. So I will have to be creative…

More on this later…

The First announcement was on September 2nd:

Mark your agenda’s VMUG NL Event 2009 takes place on the 11th of December in Nieuwegein’s Business Center.

Today a press release tells us some developments in the VMware View area.

VMware and RTO Software signed an agreement on licensing and co-development of RTO Virtual Profiles to be OEM’d in VMware View.

RTO Virtual Profiles accesses and synchronizes user data, settings and policies which speeds up the logon times. Also it instantly records any changes in registry and profiles which supports multiple logons at the same time without corrupting registry or profiles.

In short:  faster logon and prevention of corrupt profiles.

Here’s video (from DABCC-TV) with a technical overview of RTO Virtual Profiles: