I work for Triangle Computer Services who are an IT services company here in the UK. Triangle are a VMware VAC partner which meant I was able to attend a VMware Partner Solution Track last week.

I must say it was one of the best business partner related days I’ve ever been on and VMware really tried to make everyone have a good time.

There was some fun, but mostly a lot of learning and the area that interested me most was Site Recovery Manager. We have customers that are buying into VMware and more specifically ESX 3.5 on the back of the release of SRM alone, that’s how useful this tool is perceived to be.

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Dominic Rivera of vmprofessional.com posted a great article about updates to the kickstart scripts used for unattended installs of ESX. ESX 3.5 brought a few changes and I needed to find out what they were, this article helped me no end.

Thanks also goes to Clay Kohl for working out how to get all the vmnics into an active state, which was the bit I was after.

Every now and again a super sweet little application comes along that makes life so much easier. RVTools, written by Rob de Veij, is a great little tool that can mass upgrade VMware tools running on an ESX hosts controlled by a given VirtualCenter server.
Upgrading VMware Tools every time a significant update to ESX brings with it the Tools upgrade requirement can be a bind, this tool helps a lot to take some of the pain away.

The best thing about it is it just works!

I stumbled across this interesting article over at the c1tr1xguru blog that talks about VMware’s fairly recent Thinstall acquisition undergoing a name change.

Thinstall has been in beta since VMware purchased Thinstall back in January this year under the guise of the Project North Star beta project.