The VMware community is a unique social community with lots of collaboration, and people consistently trying to help each other out. I think this makes this social circle more unique than some other social media circles out there. For example check out the first blog post by Jason Boche, he has offered up his own lab infrastructure and bandwidth for anyone to test the VMware View iPad client. Very cool!
A couple of people have asked me how do I select the 5 blog posts for the week. Giving back to the community is one of the qualities I try to highlight each week when I review the blogs for the past week. How can this help other members of the VMware community and what is the quality of the post? This doesn’t mean the post has to be a novel or dissertation but it should show enough detail that an end user walks away with a clear concept of what was covered.
I would like to take this opportunity to state that this selection process continues to get more challenging as each week there continues to be more and more great content to review. Keep up the great work, happy blogging!
Jason Boche – Test Drive the VMware View App for iPad – Nearly two months ago, the VMware View app was released by VMware for the iPad and I wrote about it here. Since then, many in the community have been curious as to what the end user computing experience was like. They have iPads and of course they have free access to the View app but they lacked a VMware View environment to connect to, particularly a remote over-the-internet scenario using View 4.6 and PCoIP.
Forbes Guthrie – How to PXE boot from your trunked vmnic0 – Using trunked connections on ESXi hosts is very much common place. It’s likely that your ESXi’s Management Network connection, which by default will be your first onboard NIC (vmnic0), is connected to a trunked uplink switch port. Probably the most popular configuration is bonding your Management Network with your vMotion vmknic on a vSwitch with two trunk uplinks which includes vmnic0. The drive towards 10GbE and cable consolidation only increases the likelihood that your vmnic0 will patched into a trunked port.
Kendrick Coleman – A List of FREE VMware vSphere Tools – I wanted to create a list of free tools that you can use with vSphere. Not just 30-day trial tools, but actually *free* tools. I will be testing out all these applications in the next 2 months in preparation for a Top 5 or 10 blog and presentation at the Kentuckiana Virtualization Users Group meeting May21st.
Paul Richards – FastNFS: Mounting a NFS Datastore to Several vSphere Hosts with PowerCLI – I’ve mentioned before about how I really do not like repeating the same task over and over and over – ESPECIALLY when working in a GUI. One of those tasks is manually mounting a NFS datastore to dozens of ESX hosts. I wrote a powershell script (with some assistance from my friend Jason) to do all of the work – fast-like.
Jeff Szastak – VMware Clarifies Support for Microsoft Clustering – VMware published KB Article 1037959 ( http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1037959 ) on April 18, 2011 in an effort to clarify VMware’s position on running Microsoft Clustering technologies on vSphere. Below is a snapshot of the support matrix published by VMware in the KB (always refer to KB 1037959 for the most current information). For those familiar with VMware’s previous position on Microsoft Clustering, you will notice a couple changes. First, VMware has made a distinction in Microsoft Clustering technologies by segmenting them into Shared disk and Non-shared Disk.
