Only a few days left before the big VMware Cloud Infrastructure launch event! Are you signed up?
This past week many of the top bloggers and VMware evangelists received an e-mail notice if they earned the vExpert status for their 2010 efforts. The vExpert award is a special award given to those individuals who go above and beyond and to publically help spread the word of the benefits of VMware and virtualization in general. This could be helping coordinate VMUG events, speaking at VMUG events, blogging, writing a book, or participating in the VMware community forums.
If you didn’t earn the vExpert award for your 2010 efforts, I encourage you to get yourself inserted into the efforts for the remaining part of 2011! There are lots of different ways to help out, and it’s a great way to meet new people and get your name out there.
On with the top 5 for the week…
Duncan Epping – Migrating your 32-bit vCenter Server to 64-bit – I am working on a whitepaper about vCenter Server migrations and stumbled upon this great tool which is hidden away on the vCenter install media called “datamigration”. The data migration tool allows you to backup a vCenter Server configuration which is hosted by the MS SQL Express databases that is packaged with vCenter. Now this might seem like a limited scenario but I bet many people start out using the Express database that comes with vCenter using a 32-bit OS and found yourself more or less locked in.
Jason Boche – The time for ESXi is now. The Susan Gudenkauf interview – I suspect VMware is going to orchestrate the release of the next generation of vSphere with VMworld 2011 or perhaps even sooner. There is a big media event coming up on Tuesday July 12th called Raising the Bar, Part V. I’m guessing announcements and details will be showcased at this event. At any rate, most people have known for quite some time that VMware ESX is being retired in favor of ESXi as VMware’s flagship type 1, enterprise, scalable, datacenter hypervisor going forward.
Scott Drummonds – Wireless vMotion Using Laptops – In June of 2011 I visited China as EMC’s vSpecialists kicked off a program of technical workshops for VMware enthusiasts. We invited pre-sales teams from VMware, Cisco, and EMC to gather for presentations, discussions, and labs all focused on EMC and VMware products and how they work together. We call this group the vAmbassadors. And we are building communities like this throughout the Asia Pacific region.
Christopher Wells – Basic Zimbra Cloud – I was having some issues around my Zimbra implementation just before lunch and I got to thinking… why not do a Zimbra post. Most of my peers in the virtualization and cloud industry at this point either are using Exchange by choice (or by force) or are just starting to investigate the use of Zimbra, since the VMware acquisition. I would like to talk a little bit about how I use Zimbra to help out those looking at deploying it.
Christian Mohn – Setting Up Automated ESXi Deployments – Automating ESXi installs was made much easier after the release of vSphere 4.1 where the Scripted Install feature was added, and by using VMware Auto Deploy from VMware Labs. VMware Auto Deploy requires that you have vCenter and Host Profiles in your environment, and that again requires that you have Enterprise Plus licenses in your environment.
