Spanish vSphere book

Forbes Guthrie1 Comment

A while ago I mentioned that my friend Jose Maria Gonzalez had released a new vSphere 4 book in Spanish.  Well, he was kind enough to send me a copy of this and I thought I would let everyone know a little more about it.

The book is loosely divided into 12 chapters (although chapter 4 was incognito on my copy – perhaps that’s secret 102), covering a full range of vSphere topics:

    1. VCP4 certification
    2. Installation
    3. Networking
    5. Storage
    6. vCenter Server
    7. Virtual Machines
    8. Permissions
    9. Resource Management
    10. Monitoring and Performance
    11. High Availability
    12. Miscellaneous

This compact guide is further broken down to exactly 101 topics across the chapters.  It provides a good introduction to anyone new to vSphere, easy enough for novices to pickup and get stuck in.  It concentrates on the GUI, with lots of appropriate screenshots and diagrams to supplement the text.

There are a smattering of handy little tips, spread throughout which will give the more seasoned VMware type a reason to read on.  However this book is definitely focused at newcomers.

So, if you know any Spanish speaking IT professionals looking to venture into the vSphere world, this is a great introduction.

101 Secrets in VMware vSphere is available in both electronic and printed book format.

There’s never been a better time to brush up on your Spanish!

ThinApp 4.5: best new feature – Linux support?

Forbes Guthrie5 Comments

ThinApp 4.5 has just been released in the last couple of days, and many of my fellow bloggers have been picking over the new goodies.  Unfortunately most articles I have read just highlighted the “What’s New” section of the Release Notes.

However if you wander over to the What’s new? article on the VMware ThinApp blog site, there are some additional highlights.  The one that grabbed me in particular is the section entitled “Quality improvements & Wine test”:

Additionally the ThinApp engineering team has been working diligently with the Linux Wine team to collaborate on suites of automated test. A significant number of test fixes made by ThinApp engineering were contributed back to the Wine project, especially targeted at reducing the number of test failures on Windows 7. The ThinApp engineering team has also set up ‘WineTestBot’, a service which allows Wine developers to run tests on VMware Virtual Machines which run a large selection of Windows versions. The result of the collaboration is both Wine and ThinApp improve their quality.

For the uninitiated it is worth explaining what Wine is used for.  You could describe Wine as this: software which provides a layer of abstraction between applications and the underling Operating System, resolving required dependencies and enabling greater portability.  Now, if you read that last sentence again, you could easily transpose the term ThinApp for Wine.  Now, don’t get the impression that ThinApp and Wine are much of muchness as they’re not. Wine is set of APIs whose aim is to provide a Win32 compatible environment, allowing Windows applications to run on POSIX systems like Linux and BSD.

Now its no secret that people have been using ThinApp (and Thinstall before it) to improve compatibility with Wine on Linux.  Jonathan Clark of VMware blogged about it over 2 years ago: http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/thinapp/2008/02/26/thinstall-and-wine, and even Brian Madden had a few derisory words about its real-world feasibility at the time: http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2008/05/15/thinstall-wine-windows-apps-without-windows.aspx.

So why should this be any more relevant now; why should enterprises care more now than they did when it was being dismissed as nothing more than a parlour trick.

Several things have changed to make this quite an exciting area.  Firstly, Wine has indeed improved.  When Google bought Picasa, the photo editing application for Windows, they decided they also wanted to support Linux computers.  When they looked at how complex (and expensive) a Linux port would be they decide to instead utilise Wine technologies to make it happen.  If you install Picasa on Linux today, it comes with its own set of Wine binaries.

Today, devices in the workplace are more diverse than ever before.  The lines have blurred, and IT departments are asked to support more and more appliances.  It is not unusual to see Apple Macbooks in corporate offices, whereas only a few years before they were something you might only expect to see in a library or studio.  Smartphones are smarter, with large touch screens, and plenty of  horsepower to run a full stack including Wine and your indispensable Win32 app (and some do).

Within business today, a big change is occurring that will undoubtedly make this particularly pertinent. The enterprise desktop has largely stagnated over the last five years.  Most companies settled on XP, built their “SOE” and figured out how to use Group Policy to manage it.  Very little has changed since then, and there hasn’t been much pressure to upgrade until now.  Companies large and small are looking at ways to upgrade.  Now I’m relatively vocal about my support for Linux as a general purpose OS, and its suitability as a desktop replacement.  However I’m also pragmatic enough to know that migrating an entire workforce to a new platform is something only the most rabidly enthusiastic administrators would attempt.  What will happen over the next eighteen months is that corporations will deploy Windows 7 en-mass, and many of them will hardware refresh and probably switch to 64bit. Their biggest concern is not whether the OS will work, but if their legacy applications will still run, and how to deploy said applications.  This is where application virtualisation comes in to play, and why its going to be front and centre in most company’s biggest IT project for 2010/2011.

Now VMware has a great product offering in this space, and a foot in the door with the Architects who have been pushing IT plans out recently.  However Microsoft is the obvious elephant in the room.  Their App-V product seems to be able to compete on features, and when you couple this with sweet licensing deals and a seamless tie-in to SCCM, then VMware has to look for another angle.

Well, I think this could be it.  And frankly it is something that VMware knows Microsoft won’t try to compete on.  So, would you pick an application virtualisation product to package, test and deploy everything which only works on Windows machines.  Or would you pick one which will happily do this, but might also let you deploy to Linux based desktops, thin clients, kiosks, call-center stations, VM desktop pools, virtual appliances, oh and maybe even the boss’s Apple Mac.  I’m not saying that everyone is going to suddenly ditch their Windows workstations.  I just think that most people can see this profusion and will see Wine compatibility as a genuinely marketable advantage.

VMware’s open relationship with Wine certainly points to their realisation of this fact.  This is significant.  Personally, when I think of this, I dream of a stripped down VM with a minimal Linux install, GNOME desktop, vMA integrated Service Console application and a ThinApp version of a vSphere client.  However that is me just thinking too small and too selfishly.

What about the bigger picture.  It’s not inconceivable to imagine more general purpose Linux based vApps, with the ability to run all the common (and most uncommon) windows applications out there.  Isn’t Novell up for sale at the moment?

Official: Likewise software to be included in next vSphere release

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Back in January I noticed a trail which indicated that VMware would be including Likewise authentication software in their next vSphere software.

Well, Likewise have just released a press release confirming the partnership:

Likewise Software to be Included in VMware vSphere™ for Privileged User Access Management

Software Enables VMware vSphere™ Users to Securely Manage Privileged User Access with Microsoft Active Directory within Windows Environments

BELLEVUE, Wash. – March 15, 2010 – Likewise, the leader in delivering integration and authentication software for mixed networks, today announced a technology licensing agreement with VMware, enabling Likewise software to be directly integrated and included with VMware vSphere™.

The integration will enable VMware vSphere users to manage privileged user access with Microsoft Active Directory, providing large enterprises with a scalable means to improve authentication and access control in virtualized environments to help meet IT security audit requirements. Likewise is a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.

“Virtualization platform vendors have realized the need to architect security capabilities into their platforms instead of relying solely on third-party add-on solutions,” said Neil MacDonald, VP and Gartner Fellow. “As enterprises build out their virtual environments, they should include the security capabilities of the virtualization platforms they consider into their evaluation process.”

“Virtualization is changing the landscape of the enterprise data center, creating new opportunities and considerations for our customers,” said Barry Crist, CEO of Likewise. “By directly integrating Likewise into VMware vSphere™, we can help customers leverage their existing investment in their Windows environments while providing additional security for their virtual environments.”

“As customers continue on the journey to cloud computing, they need to leverage existing security infrastructure for their virtualized environments,” said Patrick Lin, vice president, product management, VMware. “To help meet this demand, we plan to leverage Likewise software to seamlessly integrate this capability in large-scale environments running VMware vSphere™, providing a secure way for customers to manage their access controls.”

Most awesome ESX script known to mankind ever

Forbes Guthrie11 Comments

Here is the most awesome ESX script known to mankind (by mankind I mean me) ever in the history of time (by ever I mean at least this week).

SnapVMX by Mr Ruben Garcia

I’ve being driving myself crazy over the last week trying to manually re-chain some horribly complicated and completely broken snapshots.  This script (under a GPL3 license) analyses the complete snapshot chain and tells you exactly where there are broken links or missing files.  It even reports exactly how much space you’ll need on the home datastore to commit them all.  All automagically.

I was going to follow the link to this script with a detailed explanation of how snapshots work, how they commonly break and of course how to fix up the mess.  However, it seems the author of the SnapVMX script has also written a paper (under a Creative Commons license) explaining the details more effectively than I could.  It’s great read if you want to learn more about the inner workings.

Troubleshooting Virtual Machine snapshot problems by Mr Ruben Garcia

It even explains how to commit the individual disks of a VM, if room is tight on the datastore. And has this nice flowchart to help suppress the inevitable panics when the snapshots go South.

Rubian – if you make it VMworld this year, please make yourself known to me to redeem your free beer token.