Week 13 closes out the first quarter for VMware, and we had a lot of exciting product technologies launch in the past 3 months! Remember when I said this year VMware is going to have some huge announcements? Get ready for more as the year unfolds. We have some great things brewing behind the magical curtain. Ok enough teasers, on with the top 5 for week 13, enjoy!
Andre Leibovici – Printing Architectures for VDI – Printing discussions have been a constant during my customer engagements, and generally speaking I noticed that there are misconceptions about printing capabilities delivered with VMware View, ThinPrint and Active Directory Group Policies. In addition to that, there are always those questions from the field about how printing should be handled in a VDI environment. What to do with print queues? Should print drivers be deployed to virtual desktops?
Dave Lawrence – Pause Site Recovery Manager to get the last copy of your data – I was installing Site Recovery Manager in Miami today for a customer who replicates to Atlanta. I’ve been working with them the last few days to setup SRM and get their Protection Groups and Recovery Plans in place. One suggestion that I made was to add a Message to their Recovery Plans to pause after the Shutdown of the Primary Site VMs.
Vladan Seget – Presenting 2 Free Tools from Solarwinds for VMware Infrastructure admins – Solarwinds has got many free tools available on their website. Today I choose two of them, which can be used by VMware admins to monitor and manage their ESX(i) hosts and also by adding vCenter to the VM Console. The first free tool is called VM Monitor.
Massimo Re Ferre – The 93.000 Firewall Rules Problem and Why Cloud is Not Just Orchestration – A few days ago I was in a very interesting meeting with a big Service Provider in Europe and I heard a lot of interesting comments. I’d like to quote the best that I heard which was “Oh a portal? Oh not another one… we have many of them already!” but this will open up a different can of worms so I am not going to talk about this now. What I am going to talk about relates to another comment someone made in the middle of the meeting which was “…there is a firewall with 93.000 rules configured“.
William Lam – How to automatically add ESX(i) host to vCenter in Kickstart – While recently updating my Automating Active Directory Domain Join in ESX(i) Kickstart article, it reminded me an old blog post by Justin Guidroz who initially identified a way to add an ESXi host to vCenter using python and the vSphere MOB. The approach was very neat but was not 100% automated as it required some user interaction with the vSphere MOB to identify certain API properties before one could potentially script it within a kickstart installation.
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Colin Steele – VMware CTO Herrod interviews Chewbacca – If this whole CTO-of-VMware thing doesn’t work out, Stephen Herrod just might have a future in comedy.Fresh off the heels of his Microsoft Hyper-V joke at the VMware Partner Exchange conference, here’s Herrod’s April Fool’s Day interview with “VMware’s newest customer,” Chewbacca:
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