The VMguy

I was going over the KB digest this morning and saw a few KB articles that hit home with a couple issues that customers have been asking me about regarding View.

The first is wondering how an admin can do more advanced things with the View Manager Server.  For instance: assign a default desktop out of a pool to a specific user or  listing orphaned desktops (users that no longer exist or have changed permissions and no longer have access to a desktop in a pool but still have one assigned to them) or cleaning up after removing a secondary View Manager server.  All of these items can be performed by a little-known command line utility included in View called vdmadmin.exe. Read the rest of this entry »

The first update to Site Recovery Manager has been released.

Here’s the What’s new section from the release notes: Read the rest of this entry »

This one has been going around the blog sites today.  I have to share it as well.  The doc created by Tomas over at tendam.info.  It’s a great enviornment to setup for testing purposes and to learn Site Recovery Manager.  I plan on using it to demo SRM for my customers.  You do need a little bit of hardware (6GB of RAM) and some software (NetApp Simulator – available only to customers and partners).

You can find a link to the post and documentation here .

I plan on trying to set this up entirely in ESX in my lab.  I will report back on my results.

One of my favorite things in talking to people is when they tell me how well the software I teach them about works.  Even better is when someone will take the time to blog about their experiences.  I have had a few customers become early adopters of Site Recovery Manager.  One of the most memorable was a customer (let’s call him Virtual_JTW) whom I worked with in September.  On a Friday afternoon we ran thru configuring and setting up SRM in his environment.  We worked thru the configuration and integration with his Celerra storage.  In the end, we passed with flying colors and his Disaster Recovery test was 100% successful.  It was fun and exciting for me to watch Virtual_JTW’s reaction to the success of the test.  He felt so impressed by the results and his subsequent demonstration for his Disaster Recovery team, he felt the need to blog on the whole experience.  You can read his account of what happened as well as the test results here .