The VMguy

My apologies to my readers as I tried to put out a quick blog on the final 3.0.2 patch rollup on Saturday morning.  I posted an article on 3.0.3 as I scanned the downloads quickly without reading slowly.  3.0.3 has been out a year.  Nice one.

What I wanted to post was that 3.0.2 had it’s final patch rollup released.  You can find all of the details here.  You can also find the 713MB download here.

You can find the support matrix for End of Life here.  If you are still on 3.0.2 on any of your hosts, now is the time to plan on getting to 3.0.3 , 3.5 or 4.0.  The patches are now done for 3.0.2.  Minor releases (like 3.0.2) are supported for 1 year after the next minor release (3.0.3 was released 8/8/08).

If you would like to join us, we’d love to have you.  I’m not one to advertise what I do (other than this blog of course).  However if you are interested, register for BC2704 – SRM, a real customer experience.  Jerry and I are going to tell his story of everything he did to setup his SRM environment running in production.  All the things he considered and learned from his experience.  If you do get the chance to please catch me afterwards, I love to meet readers of the site and “talk shop”.

If you haven’t done so already, head on over to the scheduler builder and get the sessions you want.  We’d love to have you in BC2704 and I hope to see you there.

-Dave

I read an article last night and felt the need to make the virtualization community aware of it.  It does not directly affect virtualization but it does affect our users and certainly our desktop admins.

Microsoft provided a chart to Walt Mossburg, a writer for the Wall Street Journal.  It was a chart showing the upgrade options for users of XP and Vista and what options then had when upgrading.  Walt felt the need to blog on the topic due to the complexity of the chart and limited options for some users.
You can read his entire article here or just take a quick look at the chart he posted here.

What amazes me (and Walt) is that there are 66 cells on this chart and only 14 of them are “in-place” upgrades.  52 of the cells are “custom install”  Now I will be the first to concede that the majority of the users will fall into the 14 cells.  However, if you were considering changing edition or moving to 64-bit when you went to Windows 7 the upgrade may not be very friendly.  That means the users (or admins) must move their data off, install from scratch, and reinstall all their apps and copy their data back.  Yikes.

Seeing an opportunity to poke a little fun, the guys over at cultofmac.com posted some similar charts for OSX.  Pretty funny for a Monday morning.

After 17 years in the PC industry I have finished my conversion to my first Mac.  I can remember my days at Limited Brands when the design department used them religiously.  11 PC people with me on staff at Victoria’s Secret back in those days and we had to outsource the support of the Macs.  Surely none of us wanted to touch them.  Now, 10 years later, I find myself on one.

My decision to go to a Macbook was not based on “the cool factor”.  It was 3 things for me: battery life, reliability, and sturdyness (I’m a bit rough on laptops). Read the rest of this entry »

By now you’ve probably heard of the Virtual Iron Safe Passage program from VMware (which has been very successful so far).  A request was emailed to me (thanks Alan!) for more information on how to actually convert those VM’s from Virtual Iron once you purchase the VMware software.  As luck would have it, there’s a KB article for that.

You can use standalone converter or converter in vCenter.  There are two main points to remember:

1. The source VM cannot be para-virtualized.
2. You must disable the VS Tools Installed setting on the configuration tab within the source VM before starting.

At this point you can do cold cloning or hot cloning (depending on your software versions).  The conversion works about the same as a standard physical machine at this point.  Please make sure to review the KB article fully, it will allow you Safe Passage from Virtual Iron.