I was looking to install VMware Server on my beat-up old PC that is running Ubuntu 8.0.4 and found that VMware had updated the feature list for VMware Server 2.0:

What’s New

• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS): Properly backup the state of the Windows virtual machines when using the snapshot feature to maintain data integrity of the applications running inside the virtual machine.
• Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI): Support for fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host.
• Support for SCSI pass-through (generic) devices: Allows for SCSI devices such as tape backup devices to be connected to virtual machines.
• Expand disk capacity on the fly: Allows for adding new SCSI hard disks and controllers to a running virtual machine.
• Firefox 3 as a supported browser for the management interface.
• Remote Client Devices: Access devices such as CD-ROMs that are not physically connected to the host via VMware Remote Console

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One of my favourtite Blogs is ICT-Freak there is a wealth of information to be found here, some of it in Dutch, some of it English, but all of it awesome.

One of the author’s contacts sent him a mass of recommendations for running Citrix in a VMware environment. Covering some of the following:

• Technical Recommendations
• Deployment
• Disaster recovery
• Stability
• Application Deployment

Some are more comprehensive than others, but it makes essential reading for anyone deploying Citrix in a VMware environment. Check out the article here.

I recently came across a problem whereby a Rescan SAN was taking an absolute age, like 15 minutes from the VI Client. Now I love the VI Client, but sometimes it just doesn’t give you enough information when it is doing things. To be fair most of the time the verbose information is simply not needed, but when things go wrong it is a god send.

In comes the Service Console command line, more specifically the esxcfg-rescan and esxcfg-mpath commands.

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Here’s an interesting little piece comparing Microsoft’s PowerShell to good old Bash.

It is as non-biased as I have seen these comparisons be and it does a good job of pointing out the major difference, PowerShell is object-oriented and Bash isn’t. I don’t think that this in itself is reason enough to consider one better than the other, but it does mean that PowerShell can have a very steep learning curve whilst overall being more powerful.

It is an interesting PDF so have a look if you get chance.