Blog Posts

We last saw our intrepid Web 2.0 adventurer about to delve back into the depths of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is old school, one of the oldest business social networks, and it's not about virtual martinis or superwalls or how many movies you have in common -- it's all about the networking.

I will admit it's been a while since I've been there -- probably since the last time I was looking for a job, which seems to be one of the major use cases for LinkedIn. The principle activity of LinkedIn, aside from the meta-activity of increasing the size of your personal network, is the Introduction -- asking your network to hand your referral from person to person until you reach the object of your affections -- Bill Clinton, a hiring manager, a prospect. I've never sent or received one of these invitations, but I do know folks that have gotten plenty of job inquiries from the site. My profile on LinkedIn is here, and no, I'm not looking for a job.

Spurred on by the current social networking frenzy, they are adding features like a Q&A section and beefier profiles. Here's Bernard Lunn of Read/Write Web on how he recently used LinkedIn and his perception of its business value vs Facebook's.

After logging in and taking care of some pending connection requests, I joined Alessandro Perilli's virtualization.info Vanguards Group (not to be confused with VMware's Virtual Vanguard Awards).

After only a month and with a single announcement, Alessandro has assembled 383 virtualization professionals from across the globe. Not bad! So why do you want to be there, even if you're not looking for a job?

A wide cross-section of the virtualization industry. There are vendors (from VMware and Microsoft on out), consultants of all stripes, very experienced sysadmins and IT experts, and quite a few names you may recognize from communities.vmware.com.

You can see and contact everybody in the Group. The contact piece is configurable on a per-group and per-person basis, but Vanguards is set up by default so that we can all contact each other. Interested in finding a virtualization consultant in Norway? Looking for a contact at a vendor -- either the executive or the engineering kind? Want to compare notes with someone else in your industry? You can probably make that happen here with a quick search.

You won't be spammed. Now, since this is a business network, many people have something to pitch, so LinkedIn groups are not built for spam. In a LinkedIn Group you can contact individuals, but nobody in the Group can globally spam everybody in the group with a pitch for their latest virtualization management appliance.

LinkedIn is still very much a business-to-business network, and so what a Group can do there is still very buttoned-down and oriented at making business contacts -- LinkedIn doesn't actually offer much more to do with Groups yet. I suspect that we'll see other functionality soon: for instance, you can ask a Question to your network and the LinkedIn community at large, but I'd love to see questions just from the virtualization.info Vanguards Group. Although the Groups feature on LinkedIn is at least two years old, they've only recently opened up and become easier to create.

So you can't go wrong adding the virtualization.info Vanguards Group on LinkedIn to your professional online presence. I think since we have such a vibrant community here, I'm not going to start up a LinkedIn group specifically for VMware, but let me know if you have other good ideas.

Did you know that VMware is now offering email patch notifications for all of its products? From that page:

With this service, you will immediately be sent an email alert as soon as a patch or maintenance release becomes available on the VMware products you’ve purchased.

How does this work? You can initiate this activity by selecting the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link from our Support home page, providing your email address, and then, after verifying that we’ve got the right contact, you can select the product/s you would like notification on by selecting “Confirm Subscription” from within the email confirmation we will send you.

So click on the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link. From there, you put in your email address. You'll soon get an email from vmwareteam@connect.vmware.com sent to your email where you click through to a form. There you can select different VMware products like so:

Note that you won't get announcements about major releases, only about patch releases and maintenance releases. (We send out major release announcements to large swaths of our ecosystem. Let me know if it would be convenient to get major release announcements coming out through these patch mailing lists as well.)

Anyway, when there is a patch release, you'll get another nice email from vmwareteam like this:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Subject: ESX Server 2.5.4/ 2.5.5 New Patches Available Release Date: 01/31/08 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New patches are available for ESX Server 2.5.4 and 2.5.5. Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.

VMware ESX Server 2.5.4 Patch Download Page [http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 15 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

VMware ESX Server 2.5.5 Patch Download Page [http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 4 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

We expect the next patch release in late February 2008. If you have any questions, please contact support at 877-4-VMWARE.

Regards,
The VMware Team

More later on Communities Email Notifications and VMware marketing email subscription management.

Work is currently underway to make some improvements and fixes to the user experience on VMware Communities following the recently launched new site design. Most of these improvements are in response to requests made at Communities Website Feedback, and based on those requests, we've prioritized the following list (highest priority first):

1. Errors when editing documents: Can no longer edit documents?
2. Display avatars on threads:
   1. Avatars (status level, vExpert, moderator, VMware employee) will display in threads; currently they display only on community pages
3. Display helpful / correct answers in threads: Cannot tell what replies are marked correct or helpful.
   1. Answers marked helpful / correct will display in the threads; currently they only display on community pages
4. IE6 errors on "All Communities" dropdowns: in IE 6 "all communities" dropdown is not clickable
5. Make new private messages easier to find: Notification of PMs
   1. The username menu title will be bold when the user has unread private messages.
6. Wider view area for threads: Please make the thread posting area wider!
   1. We are working on some JavaScript so that you can expand the thread view to cover the right column. This gives 30% more area to view threads while allowing us to keep the fixed width, which allows us to provide more consistency for the site across browsers and display sizes.
7. Truncated names: Shortened logins on forum
   1. Names will still be truncated on community pages, but they will not be truncated in places where there's plenty of space to show the whole name, e.g. on user profile pages.

In addition to this, we are also working on bringing back the "My Communities" dropdown. This requires a bit more work than the other improvements above, so we will work on it after we have completed the bulk of the above list.

I'll update here as we deploy the fixes.

Thanks, Robert

My ESXi system is running a W2K8 server that acts as fileserver. As I found the datatransfer speed to this server too slow (approx 40MB/sec) I decided to blame ESXi for capping transferspeed to and from my Dell Perc 5/i card. I thereforce decided to get myself a new motherboard with Intel vt-d so I could do a passthrough of the raid controller to the VM. So I got myself a nice Intel DQ45CB motherboard. One sunday, I swapped all hardware and fired it up with good hopes. Configured VmDirectPath, rebooted and tried to use the raid card. Windows detected the card correctly. I started restoring my backup but noticed the data written by the VM was corrupted. No matter what I tried it would not work. I then reverted to my previous setting, using the raid card in ESXi directly. This led to another problem: after creating a VMFS volume, the storage adapter was randomly removed from ESXi and could only be recovered by rescanning the storage adapters. So this was not workable either.

In the end, I found out that disabling vt-d in the bios solved things. The raid card is now correctly detected by ESXi, the VMFS volumes stay up all the time. I also re-installed the w2k8 fileserver. There must have been something wrong in the previous VM, as datatransfer speeds now get up to 100MB/sec read and 80MB/sec write

I also added some disks to the raid setup. The current setup now is: 5 x 1TB WD Green, resulting in 4TB of storage. As ESXi cannot handle LUN's or disks larger than 2TB, I split the storage into two 2TB volumes.

Just starting.. come back soon

Overview

The concept of server based computing is nothing new to businesses. Beginning with the days of green screen terminals and massive IBM mainframes the benefits of server based computing have been well understood. Traditionally those benefits have been defined as: Management, Access, Performance and Security. It wasn’t until 1997 with the release of “Hydra”, Microsoft’s codename for the Terminal Server Edition of Windows NT 4.0, that server based computing was readily available in a Windows environments. Hydra of course has been superseded by the built in Terminal Services functionality of more recent Windows operating systems.

Terminal Services, or the ability to have multiple users simultaneously logged in to a single operating system, has been the De facto standard for windows server based computing to date. Although the advantages of server based computing have been well understood by businesses around the globe, resulting in nearly eighty million users utilizing some form of Terminal Services, server based computing is not without its challenges. The terminal services concept has done little in the last decade to overcome some of the inherent challenges we face as an industry with server based computing. Although the Windows Terminal Server has been refined over the last decade, the basic concept and framework has changed very little.

It wasn’t until the mass adoption of virtualization technology that a feasible alternative began to present itself, ergo VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. VDI is a relative new comer to SBC (Server Based Computing) but has made tremendous strides to solve some of the inherent technological issues with SBC. Many companies are developing their own flavors of VDI which has resulted in tremendous competitive innovation, where as terminal server solutions have been relatively stagnant the last few years.

Although each solution (VDI / Terminal Server), being unique, is not without its own advantages and disadvantages. I believe the industry as a whole has accepted VDI as the natural progression of SBC. This fact being reflected by the number of manufactures that are developing, or have already developed, solutions around the concept of VDI. Not to mention the industry leaders in Terminal Services, Citrix and Microsoft, focusing a great deal of resources on producing competitive VDI solutions (Citrix’s XenDesktop and Microsoft's App-V).

Advantages / Disadvantages:

Primary Terminal Server Advantages Compared To VDI
1) Increased User Density (20 - 40 users per core vs 10 – 20 per core))
2) Stable / Proven Track Record
3) Administration and Supporting resources are more readily available.

Primary VDI Advantages Compared to Terminal Services
1) Isolated User Environments
2) Increased Software Compatibility
3) Better User Device Support (USB Redirection, etc.)
4) Ability to allow users administrator rights per vm (if required)
5) Industry R&D Focus on VDI
6) Doesn't require dramatic changes to software and management practices (still just a desktop)

In general, if a business isn't already a terminal server shop they should avoid the trials and tribulations of what can be a rocky transition when moving from desktop based computing to server based computing by using a VDI solution. A VDI solution will allow all the benefits of SBC by changing where data and processing is physically done without changing the logical framework of an organization. Including software standards and support practices.