Planet vSphere-land

In the summer of 2010 Erik wrote an article about “How to: Optimize guests for VMware View” in which he describes all sorts of changes he makes for a Windows XP or Windows 7 virtual desktop in a VDI environment. The changes that are suggested in the article are still valid, but after reading them [...] Leave A Commentposted in How To by Sander Martijn

The recent rumors of Microsoft working on a hosted virtual desktop (DaaS) solution to add to their cloud services offering may actually end up being one of the most viable options for organizations who already rely heavily on Microsoft infrastructure to run their business. Having all of your core services being delivered from a single location and provider could ease the operational concerns ...

Recently I was lucky enough to attend the PowerShell Summit at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, this was an awesome event which was focused on PowerShell, it included not only people who are using PowerShell but also some of the people who wrote and designed it. There were a bunch of great sessions, all of which can be reviewed and slides downloaded here.  I was also asked to present two sessions....

Those who manage VMware View currently or have used it in the past may be familiar with desktop customization which is required to provide a unique identity on the network for each View Composer VDI session in a pool.  If you’ve got a pretty good Microsoft background, you’re probably already familiar with Sysprep – Microsoft’s tool for customizing Windows server and desk...

Host deployments in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC): How do you deploy the hypervisors in your company? There are several different choices from installing from a CD, network install and/or PXE, to name a few methods currently available. When there are not a lot of physical hypervisors to worry about the CD installation works just fine and the need for automated installation gets strong...

In 2008 I wrote an article named “Hyper-V, not in my datacenter!” which was based on Hyper-V version 1. In 2009 I wrote an article named “Hyper-V, the laughter continues” and “ESX vs Hyper-V mythbusting myth” which was based on Hyper-V version 2. Microsoft promised/warned us that with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V version 3 this [...] Leave A Commentposted in Hy...

During a performance optimizing session this week, with a customer, we found some interesting things to boost specific parts of the environment. While playing a high resolution video with clipping where the whole screen turns black and shows a new screen a split second later. When we started, we saw the video bump and freeze [...] Leave A Commentposted in Microsoft by Edwin Weijdema

Microsoft has announced that it will offer System Center Advisor for free to its customers in supporting countries. System Center Advisor is a cloud service that enables IT Professionals to proactively avoid problems resulting from server configuration issues. It can help you resolve issues faster by providing access to current and historical configuration data for a deployment. System Center ...

EMC and VMware (who is majority owned by EMC) have announced a new joint initiative called Pivotal (read more here and here) as part of their software defined data center strategies and architecture. Is this a pivotal moment for both EMC and VMware signaling that they will be going head to head (via their new initiative based company) with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, HP Cl...

EMC and VMware (who is majority owned by EMC) have announced a new joint initiative called Pivotal (read more here and here) as part of their software defined data center strategies and architecture. Is this a pivotal moment for both EMC and VMware signaling that they will be going head to head (via their new initiative based company) with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, HP Cl...

I really enjoyed reading this latest FUD piece out of Redmond, which is a response to the recent VMware Hybrid Cloud announcement — although it does have a sort of desperate, blown-gasket feel to it. TL;DR takeaway: As of yesterday, innovators are forbidden to release new products or services for their customers.  Sorry.  Too late. And that’s very convenient for Microsoft, es...

As we enter the last month of the first quarter of 2013, it’s clear that some of the stalwarts of the IT industry are struggling with a rapidly changing market and rapidly changing technological trends. Today’s IT landscape looks far different than the one we saw just a few short years ago and the biggest fish in the IT sea appear to be having issues adjusting to the constantly shifting mark...

Looks like it’s end of the line for The Cloud appliances.  Always seemed puzzling that such a complex undertaking would be called an appliance.  Well, at least there is an industry dedicated to handling these situations. Related posts:Microsoft seeks to stem Azure exodus with huge appliance Unboxing the Cloud Missing: “Private Clouds” at the MMS 2012 Hosted Cloud Pavili...

Before you even get to the entertaining "Citrix vs VMware vs Other" quasi-religious debate, there will be a VDI vs RDSH altercation. It can altercate for days. Ultimately, no business question gets asked, nor decision made, as technical stags lock antlers. Related Posts:AppSense Live in the Now: DesktopNow Now More Than Just a…Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 – VDI Game Changer?Un...

Do you love storage? Are you in the Seattle area? Join us for Storagebeers tonight at Joey Bellevue! Storagebeers is an informal gathering of folks in the storage industry – end users, vendors, and people like me who just talk a lot. We’ll get together and talk storage, tech, and anything else that strikes our fancy! Because the Microsoft MVP Summit is here in Bellevue/Redmond this ...

VMware is in an enviable but tricky situation: The company must work closely with hardware partners, keeping these prime sales and promotional channels happy and supportive. But VMware must also innovate around proprietary OEMs, subverting their products with integrated software before a rival steps up with an integrated alternative. This two-prong “coopetition” strategy has worked m...

New email from Microsoft promoting the upcoming Management Summit may have inadvertently revealed roadmap information for a future release of the Surface tablet.  Perhaps in response to the poor battery life highlighted by critics, we may soon see a resurrected version of Windows NT running on this tardy entry into the competitive tablet market. What do you think — is Windows NT an iPad ...

Welcome to Technology Short Take #29! This is another installation in my irregularly-published series of links, thoughts, rants, and raves across various data center-related fields of technology. As always, I hope you find something useful here. Networking Who out there has played around with Mininet yet? Looks like this is another tool I need to add to my toolbox as I continue to explore netwo...

This week Teradici, creator of the PCoIP protocol, released a technology preview of their new product named Teradici Arch. Teradici Arch is asoftware-based solution that enables the use of the PCoIP protocol for Microsoft  RDS as an alternative to Microsoft RDP. This should provide better user experience and access to the entire PCoIP ecosystem, PCoIP thin clients, [...]

Project Virtual Reality Check (ProjectVRC) have finally released their 'Phase V' white paper which provides an independent insight into the impact and best practices of various antivirus (AV) solutions on VDI performance.Related Posts:Is Running Terminal Services on a Hypervisor Viable?News: latest Login VSI 3.7 gets Windows 8, Windows 2012 and…Evaluator Group Launches New VDI Performance...

This is a follow-up companion post to the larger industry trends and perspectives series from earlier today (Part I, Part II and Part III) pertaining to today’s VMAX 10K enhancement and other announcements by EMC, and the industry myth of if large storage arrays or systems are dead. The enhanced VMAX 10K scales from a couple of dozen up to 1,560 HDDs (or mix of HDD...

Welcome to Technology Short Take #28, the first Technology Short Take for 2013. As always, I hope that you find something useful or informative here. Enjoy! Networking Ivan Pepelnjak recently wrote a piece titled “Edge and Core OpenFlow (and why MPLS is not NAT)”. It’s an informative piece—Ivan’s stuff is always informative—but what really drew my attention ...

Is it time to plan for the virtual future in our virtual designs? Happy New Year and welcome to 2013!! What a year 2012 turned out to be for virtualization and/or cloud computing in general. Microsoft Hyper-V, RedHat and VMware have all made quite a few enhancements with the hypervisor and we have finally gotten to a point where we really have some good competition between hypervisors, but a...

This is the second in a two-part industry trends and perspective looking at learning from cloud incidents, view part I here. There is good information, insight and lessons to be learned from cloud outages and other incidents. Sorry cynics no that does not mean an end to clouds, as they are here to stay. However when and where to use them, along with what best practices, how to be ready...

This is the first of a two-part industry trends and perspectives series looking at how to learn from cloud outages (read part II here). In case you missed it, there were some public cloud outages during the recent Christmas 2012-holiday season. One incident involved Microsoft Xbox (view the Microsoft Azure status dashboard here) users were impacted, and the other was another Amazon Web Ser...