Mike D’s Blog

Got this in an email today. Actually, everyone that went to VMworld last year should be getting it.

	Save the Date for VMworld 2009 Mark your calendar for the industry’s leading virtualization event – VMworld 2009, August 31 – September 3, 2009 at The Moscone Center, San Francisco. Today’s economy demands we do more with less—a key value proposition of virtualization. Attend VMworld 2009 to hear about the latest industry trends and learn how virtualization can help maximize your organization’s current and future IT investments. Sign up to be notified when registration goes live. Sincerely, The VMworld 2009 Team

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The new and greatly improved VI Toolkit for Windows has been updated to version 1.5. Below are some videos showing off the new features.

I must say that I really love PowerShell and the VI Toolkit. This thing is so powerful it’s awesome! I got the privilege of doing an informal video interview with Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for the VI Toolkit, when I was out at corporate last week. I’m working on getting that video up on the blog real soon. Carter talks more about the plans for the VI Toolkit and shows off some really nice scripts. I actually shot about 8 hours of video with different people while out there so keep watching the blog for those behind the scenes interviews coming soon.

For the full list of VI Toolkit videos go here.

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Brief and to the point.

VMware announces a stellar 42% year over year growth in revenue. Everyone keeps their jobs.

Microsoft announces a flat 2% year over year growth in revenue. 5,000 people lose their jobs.

Citrix announces a marginal 4% year over year growth in revenue. 10% of the company loses their jobs.

Enough said.

Recently I wrote about the new vExpert program at VMware. As a follow-up I’ve learned that vinternals has launched the first ever vIdiot awards to recognize the other side of the coin so to speak. You can nominate someone for vIdiot straight on the vinternals site.

For those of you wondering what kings of things will get you a vIdiot award here’s just a few sample quotes.

Can anyone tell me how VMware keep saying that they are using Para metal Virtualization and overcommiting at the
same time?!!!
- Mohamed Fawzi

We know you don’t get it. That’s fine. Chin up, and do please keep writing.
- Simon Crosby (directed at me)

If you’re really interested in seeing a true idiot at work then you must read this Google finance forum thread. It’s long but worth the read. I just hope one day I get to meet kyungmo one day. What a fool!

So, if you know someone up for a vIdiot award make sure to stop by vinternals (unless of course you’re voting for me).

The earnings call is going on right now. Interesting facts. The replay will be available later here. The press release for earnings can be found here.

Overall the company crushed analyst expectations during a hard economic time. That speaks volumes about the quality of the products and the demand for virtualization worldwide.

Looking forward to Q1 2009.

I was reading through some of my daily Google Alerts that I have setup and came across an article on SQL Solutions talking about how it’s a bad idea to run SQL in a VM because you could loose transactions in a power failure. Now normally I would comment directly on the website but this site (like all of the search* sites) doesn’t provide a mechanism for comments. That’s just stupid in my opinion. I then tried to contact the author 3 times but no response. So here I am on my blog trying to do some education and set the author straight. If you’re reading this, Alex, then please contact me so we can talk about your setup. Now on to the corrections.

Continue reading »

Any Windows 7 fans out there? Ready for Vista with a pretty wrapper? Well, if you want to try it out to see what all the fuss is about then there’s no better way than running it in a VM on your Mac with VMware Fusion.

Peter Kazanjy did a great job writing up a how-to that walks you through getting Windows 7 up and running. Just check out the beautiful screen shot below. So what are you waiting for? Go over to the Team Fusion blog and walk through getting Microsoft’s latest operating system release up and running. It will remind you why you love your Mac.

I’m just getting around to catch up on a lot of stuff in my inbox and have now realized that VMware officially launched the vExpert program. For those familiar with Microsoft’s MVP program it’s somewhat similar. This is a recognition program for those that have really done a lot on behalf of VMware without VMware asking them to do so. I’m pretty sure you get a nice plastic trophy or fake gold coin or something with this (probably more towards the “something” category).

To read more about this see John Troyer’s post on Planet v12n. You can also just go straight to the Nomination Form. Please note this isn’t a popularity contest. This is only a public nomination. There will be an internal VMware committee that actually decides who gets the award. That prevents people from voting up Simon Crosby or something else comical.

To those that do end up winning I’ll congratulate you ahead of time. You definitely deserve it!

P.S. I’m not eligible since I work for VMware so no plastic trophies for me.

As has been reported by Andrew Dugdell and James O’Neill, Microsoft has updated their licensing policy so you don’t need Windows Server 2008 CALs if you’re just running a bunch of Windows 2003 or other non-Windows Server 2008 based VMs.

The issue of needing Windows Server 2008 CALs was first brought to light by the VMware competition team back in mid-December. I also reported on it the next day.

Microsoft has now updated their policy. In a nutshell you no longer need Windows Server 2008 CALs if you’re accessing non-Windows Server 2008 VMs on a host that’s only used for virtualization. Full documents outlining the changes can be found here.

I have to applaud Microsoft for changing things around so quickly. They continue to do a good job changing their licensing to work better with virtualization technologies. Now if we can just get the to concentrate on the desktop side a little and change VECD to be much more economical and allow you to assign VECD and Microsoft Office to users instead of devices.

UPDATE (January 23, 2008) – The VMware competitive team just weighed in with their thoughts on this subject. They pretty much wrote what everyone else did – why this makes sense, this was a good move, etc. However they also wrote about things they’d like to see changed. I’ve pasted that short list below because I’ve heard many customers asking for the same things. Maybe if we all ask together Microsoft might get this message as well.

1) Provide customers an option for all Microsoft OS and application licenses to be assigned to the virtual instance (instead of physical hosts) so customers can take full advantage of VM mobility.
2) Allow third parties (ex. ISVs) to have an ability to distribute demo and production VMDK-based Windows virtual appliances so customers can deploy them in their virtual datacenters.
3) Lift restrictions in VECD where customers must pay a significant premium for virtualized desktops in exchange for “expanded license grants” that they do not necessarily need (or want). Currently, VECD works for a limited number of sophisticated customers, but makes the use of Microsoft products in virtual desktops very expensive for customers seeking simple, uniform deployment of consistent desktop environments.

One of my favorite new sites is change.gov. It’s the website for President-Elect (soon to be just President) Obama. Whether you support(ed) Obama or not you have to respect a leader reaching out to the people to get ideas. As part of that outreach Obama’s team created the Citizen’s Briefing Book.

Basically you come up with an idea and you login and stick it in the book. Other people can then see your idea, comment on it, and vote it up or down. The top selections get put into a real book and delivered to Obama to act on. I think this type of thing should go on in every organization and company – not just with the President of the United States.

Anyhow, a co-worker of mine put in the idea to use virtualization to help move towards Green IT as the US moves to a centralized health records system. I think we can all agree this is a good idea.

The good news behind all of this is a lot of the federal government already uses VMware today. Heck, most companies in the health care industry and health care providers use VMware (or some form of virtualization) today as well. Pushing it further to help with the medical records system won’t be that hard.

This is actually a good transition into federated clouds. The government could build a cloud to house all of these medical records. That cloud could be distributed for redundancy and ease of access to the health care providers and insurance people that need access to the information or services it provides. By building a cloud strictly for medical records you could concentrate on compliance issues such as HIPAA.

So open your browser (if you’re in the US) and go vote up the idea to use virtualization for the planned digital health records system.

Aaron Sweemer over at Virtual Insanity had an interesting post from a couple of weeks ago about the disk storage savings from using the new VMware View Composer. Prior to Composer if you wanted to create 100 VMs and the individual VM was Windows XP with a 10 GB disk then you’d use up (100 * 10 = 1,000 GB) of disk space. Now with VMware View Composer you’d only use up 10 GB for the original VM and a small differential of space for each additional VM. How big is the differential? Well, it will vary depending on how much is changing. For a good look at a real use case finish reading the article at the source.

Keith Ward over at Virtualization Review is reporting on the growing numbers of VMware related jobs available. According to Dice.com:

…the total job count for [the] site was down 12% from January 2008 through the first week of November. But for those with virtualization experience, including both VMware and general skills, available jobs increased by 43% and 37% respectively.

This is great news if you’re in IT. It shows that VMware certification is something that will help you become more valuable to your own organization and make you a hot commodity if you should decide to move on.

Already a VMware VCP? Why not go and start studying for the more advanced VCDX certification? Then you can really demand top pay from the organization. And if pay is something you’re after then just check out this recent post from vCrticial that shows how much more you can make with a VCP certification versus a MCSE certification.

In the end, virtualization is here to stay – like it or not. It’s probably better to start getting certified and adopting it inside your company today.

Join VMware, EMC, Cisco, and Emerson for a full day in Atlanta on the datacenter of the future. There’s breakout sessions, keynotes, and panel talks. It promises to be a great day. I’ll be there and talking on the panel. More details can be found here.

The event is from 8:30 am – 3:00 pm at:

Hyatt Regency Atlanta
265 Peachtree Street NE
Atlanta, Georgia

I’m sure whoever is reading my blog also reads Jason Boche’s blog. If not, then go subscribe now. Jason is a customer and writes a lot of great stuff from his point of view. He’s also very active in the VMware Communities. One of his recent posts was about how to get more VMs to VMotion at one time. This comes in really handy when you want to do maintenance on a host that’s running a ton of VMs. So click on to read all about how to increase the number of VMs that can migrate at a time.

OK. I know I post a lot about how awesome VMware Fusion is, but here’s one more. Ars Technica is reporting on the latest NPD retail numbers. NPD is an organization that tracks unit shipments for software. They track the numbers as they go through distribution which means pretty much every retail location that you as an end user would purchase from is counted for since the retailer gets their software from distribution.

The new numbers show that VMware Fusion holds 59% as of October 2008 compared to Parallels at 39% in the same timeframe. What’s even more impressive is that VMware Fusion was released in August of 2007 so for the year (August 2007 to October 2008) VMware Fusion went from 0% marketshare to 59% marketshare and firmly unseated the incumbent (Parallels).

You can find more great news, details, and background on this great feat from John Troyer over at Planet v12n. Also make sure to read the comments in the Ars Technica post for some great feedback from users on why they use VMware Fusion.