blog.scottlowe.org

No, this posting isn’t about me; I switched to the Mac years ago. Instead, this posting is about a story that I’d seen quite a while ago, but just hadn’t gotten around to discussing here on the blog.

Quite some time ago, Computerworld ran some articles about an enterprise company that was switching entirely to Macs. The articles are here:

Mac Attack! An enterprise PC shop switches to Apple
Mac switch revisited: An enterprise PC shop’s move to Apple isn’t as easy as expected

It’s an interesting pair of articles that help to highlight the attention that Apple and Mac OS X are getting these days. In this particular case, I found this statement particularly compelling:

Frantz says AWC had calculated “significant savings” associated with migrating to Apple software during the proof-of-concept testing last summer. “We knew we would have sufficient ROI for the change based on some broad generalizations, and the savings were enough to green-light the project,” he says.

Everyone likes to talk about how expensive Macs are, and yet here is a company that has found “significant savings” upon switching to Apple hardware running Mac OS X. Interesting.

To be fair, the company in the article—AWC—isn’t going completely Mac; they are keeping SQL Server on Windows and a few other applications as well. That’s fine; I’ve long advocated to use the best tool for the job. If SQL Server is the best tool for the job for them, then they should use it. I’m just glad to see that companies are increasingly recognizing that Windows on the desktop isn’t always the best tool for the job anymore.

Well, it’s official—I’m headed to Tech-Ed 2008 in Orlando, Florida, in early June! Microsoft was kind enough to offer me a complimentary “Press Pass” to attend, and since I was going to be in Orlando around that time anyway on vacation, I shuffled some things around to make it happen. I plan on using the time to gather as much information as possible about Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008, and related technologies. Rest assured that as much of that information as possible will find its way here.

The free “Press Pass” from Microsoft must mean a couple of things:

1. Prominent bloggers are apparently considered members of the press.
2. I must be a prominent blogger. (Woo hoo!)

This will mark my second conference of the year; the first was VMware Partner Exchange 2008 in San Diego last week (my summary of the event is found here). Of course, then we have the “big daddy” of virtualization events later in the year in Las Vegas: VMworld 2008. I haven’t registered yet—I know, I really should register. But since Microsoft was kind enough to provide a free Press Pass to their event, I was kind of hoping VMware would offer a free Press Pass to VMworld as well. So, VMware, what do you think?

I came across this great article on the HP Fibre Channel VirtualConnect module tonight. Excellent work! Combine this with my TechTarget article on Ethernet networking with HP VirtualConnect and you have some good resources for using VirtualConnect in your environment.

Today is my ninth wedding anniversary. Let me tell you, I have a great wife. How many of you guys out there can say that your wife hates shopping and loves football? I can! I won’t say my wife is perfect, because she’s not—neither am I, of course, we’re all human—but I will say that she’s perfect for me.

So, to my wife on our anniversary:

Honey, the last nine years have been great. Sure, we’ve had our ups and our downs. We’ve experienced happiness and joy that we could not contain—the birth of Cameron, or Summer’s wedding, for example. We’ve also suffered heartbreak and sadness; I won’t go into any details because there’s no need—we remember. We’ve faced challenges that we never dreamed we’d face. Together, we’ve made life-changing decisions. And every step of the way, you’ve been there to support me and to support our family. Your loyalty and your dedication have been steadfast and complete. Your love and your compassion have been unwavering. You have strengthened me when my faith was weak, and you have allowed me to minister to you when yours was weak.

As a token of appreciation for your love, your loyalty, and your support, I want to publicly tell you: Thank You. Thank you for being who you are, and thank you for sharing these last nine years with me. Thank you for your tireless efforts on my behalf and on the behalf of our children, even when they don’t recognize or don’t want your support (we do have teenagers, after all). Thank you for being a godly woman. Thank you for loving God and, most especially, for loving me. After the last nine years, I can’t wait for the next ninety years, or however long God blesses me to be with you.

Happy anniversary, sweetheart!

I just finished the last session of Partner Exchange 2008 here in San Diego, CA, and wanted to post some thoughts and information from the event. There is quite a bit of information that I can’t discuss because it is under NDA, but I wanted to at least share what information I could.

First, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) looks to be a very interesting product. I had the opportunity to participate in a hands-on lab with SRM, as well as to participate in a business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) design workshop that incorporated SRM as well. SRM will definitely have an impact on VI architectural designs (more on that in a moment), so VMware architects need to be sure to consider the possible addition of SRM at a later date when designing solutions for customers. I’m looking forward to the final release of SRM and I hope to have more to say about that product after its final release.

As a side note, I’m glad to see VMware using the VI client plug-in architecture to support SRM, something I’d wish they’d do for products like Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager.

I also had the opportuntity to spend some time with VDM 2.0, VMware’s desktop broker for VDI solutions. I haven’t yet decided whether I like VDM better than Leostream’s broker; VDM is definitely more focused around pool provisioning and pool management but seems—upon initial review, at least—to lack some of the flexibility that Leostream offers with regards to managing desktop sessions. I need more time with VDM to make sure that I fully understand the product before I can make any calls as to which desktop broker I really prefer.

The design workshops, one for BC/DR and one for VI architecture, were very entertaining and rather helpful. My team didn’t win for BC/DR, but did win for VI architecture (sweet!). I did not, unfortunately, have time to participate in the VDI design workshop. It was helpful getting into a huddle with some other senior engineers and solutions architects, sharing information, hammering out a design, and then presenting that design to a panel and to our peers. This was also a great way to get people thinking about VCDX and the requirements for that advanced certification, which include presenting and defending a design. I’m thinking that I’d like to adapt that format into some internal workshops within our own company and I’m hoping that I can get approval to do so.

Overall, the conference was pretty good. The choice of venue wasn’t the greatest in the world; having to walk back and forth constantly from one tower to the other was a bit tedious. I’m sure that it’s difficult to find the right venue for events given all the criteria involved, but I’d recommend to VMware that a slightly larger venue would be very beneficial next year.

That’s it from my end. If you happened to be at Partner Exchange this year, feel free to add your thoughts and impressions in the comments.

While at VMware Partner Exchange 2008 in San Diego this week, a few virtualization- or VMware-related headlines have popped in and caught my attention:

• Via Eric, I learned that vimsh has morphed into vmware-vim-cmd in version 3.5. Xtravirt’s updated document can be found here.
• Via Duncan, it looks as if a number of patches for ESX/ESXi 3.5 have been released. Time to put Update Manager through its paces…
• As several other bloggers have mentioned, VMware is now discussing in much greater detail the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification. I suspect that the BC/DR and VI architectural workshops that are taking place at Partner Exchange this week—which incorporate a fairly intensive review and presentation process—are prepping professionals for the rigors they will have to endure to achieve VCDX. Bring it on!
• Sys-Con Media—which has republished a couple of my articles—published this interesting article from a KVM developer regarding the placement and architecture of I/O and I/O drivers in various virtualization solutions. Of course, he feels that KVM is the best, but that’s not necessarily surprising.
• Author David Davis has published a brief blog entry at SearchVMware.com that summarizes the use of NIC teaming and load balancing with VMware ESX Server. This blog post is particularly useful since it references some of my own content.

In a future post, I’ll probably delve into more detail an interesting and thought-provoking article from DCS titled “Microsoft Unveils GSNW 2.0″. It’s an interesting take on the (possible) repetition of history. In the meantime, I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this article—go read it, then come back here and add your thoughts in the comments below.

Via Eric Sloof, I learned that VMware has released a minor update to VMware Converter, bringing it up to version 3.0.3.

This updates bring a number of fixes and some new features. One of the most notable new features is support for the creation of Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) version 0.9. This means that you can create a VM in VMware Infrastructure, then use VMware Converter to export it into an OVF virtual appliance bundle for distribution. This might be distribution to other organizations or individuals, or it might simply be distribution to a different location within your organization.

For more details, have a look at the release notes for this latest update.

A new print magazine focused on the various BSD operating systems—FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD—has started up. You can get more information about the magazine at http://www.bsdmag.org.

I’ve written about OpenBSD several times here, and while I’m lightyears from being any sort of BSD expert I have a great deal of respect for the BSDs. (After all, Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD.) If I weren’t so incredibly overloaded on technologies as it is, I’d probably be interested in learning more about all the BSDs. Unfortunately, there’s only 24 hours in a day, and other technologies—like virtualization, VMware, storage, SANs, etc.—already keep me busy enough as it is.

Best of luck to the new BSD Magazine editors! I hope the new magazine is successful.

VMware has released Beta 1 of VMware Fusion 2.0, the next major upgrade to VMware’s desktop virtualization product for Mac OS X. Even more exciting, VMware has announced that version 2.0 of VMware Fusion will be a free upgrade for existing Fusion 1.x owners, as a “thank you” to their early adopters. Sweet!

The list of new features is far too long to reproduce here, but a few stick out as notable:

• Multi-monitor support: Guest operating systems will see multiple monitors attached to the Mac, and when in Unity mode you’ll be able to drag Unity windows between monitors.
• Improved 3D support: Fusion 2.0 now supports DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2, allowing even more 3D applications to run as a VM under Fusion.
• Easier Windows printing: Windows VMs will pick up printers attached to your Mac without any additional setup.
• Various networking improvements: Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 also includes a number of networking improvements, such as the ability for bridged VMs to detect changes to the Mac’s network connection and refresh their network address automatically.

Be sure to visit the Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 landing page for the complete list of features and more complete information.

Personally, it’s interesting to me to see how the VMware Fusion team has really capitalized and focused on the user interaction side of desktop virtualization. Much more so than with VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion is really bringing to life the idea of application agnosticism (great idea, not so great name, but I coined it so I guess I’m stuck with it) or personal computing as a collection of VMs. As virtualization becomes more pervasive, it also needs to become more transparent, and as its transparency increases its adoption—at least among consumers—will also increase.

I’m in San Diego this week for VMware Partner Exchange 2008. I’m signed up for mostly “Advanced Technical Track” sessions, so I’m hoping to gain a lot of knowledge and value out of the sessions. I don’t know how much information, if any, I’ll be able to share here; I suspect that a great deal of information will be covered by NDA and can’t be shared publicly.

If you happen to be at Partner Exchange, feel free to catch up with me.