VM-Aware

Eric Siebert has compiled two more excellent Top Ten lists:

Storage in VMware

Get More Technical with VMware

Not much more to say, just that they are as excellent as I’ve come to expect.

Richard Bramley has written another excellent article that has stoked up some helpful comments as well.

It discusses the very useful RAMCheck tool in ESX that will check for faulty memory.  I have used the utility a few times and it turns out, courtesy of a reader comment, that it has been removed from ESX 3.5.  I usually use MemTest if I’m pretty certain that a machine has faulty memory, but RAMCheck was always quite useful.

Anyway, have a stroll over to Richard’s blog and check out all the useful posts.

Brian Madden has created an article that walks you through using Microsoft’s SoftGrid product to sequence or virtualise Microsoft Office 2007 in 30 easy to follow steps.

It is worth a read even if you don’t own SoftGrid as the concepts can be applied to other Application Virtualisation products. I used the section about tweaking the virtual registry (step 24in ThinApp and it worked a treat.

Read it here. Thanks Brian!!

I don’t get chance to use ThinApp (Thinstall) as much as I used to, but I’ve had a couple of conversations where people have asked me for the real benefits and downsides.

I’m not one for re-inventing the wheel, so here are links to the excellent articles written by 4sysops.

Advantages of Application Virtualisation

Disadvantages of Application Virtualisation

Outlines are below:

Advantages

• Application retirement simplified
• No installation required
• No more application conflicts
• No registry and system bloat
• Multiple runtime environments
• Multiple versions of the same application
• Deploy apps on unmanaged computers
• Simplified OS deployment
• Operating system independent

Disadvantages

• A new complexity layer
• Vendor might deny support
• Problematic apps
• Shell integration
• Bandwidth requirements
• Costs

As you can see valid points for both sides of the argument, I personally believe that the benefits far outweigh the negatives. The main stumbling block I see is that companies may struggle to justify allocating resource to this task alone.

Using a few different articles I managed to add a security banner at the request of a customer recently. The first article discusses which files to customise, the second article is the Message of the Day editor tool how to and finally Jase McCarty’s post that covered the whole process from start to finish.

Nice.

Duncan Epping of yellowbricks has written many excellent articles in his time, but I have recently needed to check the free disk space of VMFS volumes at regular intervals and Duncan came to the rescue.

Check this article for a script that will check the disk space of all VMFS volumes and format the results into a nice table. Then check this post to find out how to email it to yourself every day at 10am.

Really excellent stuff.