Think of a question about VMware and there will be a link here from Scaling your Virtual Infrastructure to Pricing, Packaging & Licensing…

Truly amazing link page

Not in the slightest bit techie, but in the UK we’ve been on reasonably high alert for the last few years against the threat of terrorism.

Recently the Metropolitan Police in London have released a series of posters; one of them alerts us to the dangers of “odd” people taking photos – http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/magazine_enl_1208430127/img/1.jpg

It’s an idea with some merit, although it has had an unfortunate side effect – keen amateur photographers are being relieved of their cameras by well meaning police, park wardens and security guards who spot them taking photos. Whilst taking photos of government buildings is possibly not to be recommended at the present time, taking pictures of people in a park is a different matter entirely! Thankfully neither are actually illegal at the moment, but who knows what our wonderful government might do in the future….

More here – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7351252.stm

Microsoft have released a number of Step By Step guides on how to configure many of the new features within Windows Server 2008 – from server core to clustering, there’s a wealth of information. Shame you can’t download them all at once, but hey, you can’t have everything.

Available here – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=518d870c-fa3e-4f6a-97f5-acaf31de6dce&displaylang=en#filelist

A friend of mine once had the idea that he could create a portable server environment, almost like domino’s pizza where he would turn up at your office with the thin (HP) or thick (Dell) base and add the toppings of your choice, a little bit of MS, a little bit of VMware and a sprinkle of Linux.

This would all be enclosed in a container and be a self sufficient server room that you plug in and go, the following cabinets reminded me of him…..

Portable Server Environments

In all seriousness I think these are great for the small companies.

Discover a New Perspective with 8.9 Inch Eee PC 900: This new generation of the ever popular PC packs in a whole range of hardware that includes a 8.9 inch widescreen, a 1.3M pixels webcam, the new innovative FingerGlide and 12GB and 20GB storage capacities for Windows and Linux platforms respectively.

Mobility is one of the major factors attributed to the Eee PC’s success; and this is in part due to the use of the built-in Solid State Disk (SSD) technology – which offers a quiet, energy saving and shock proof design for stable computing on-the-go.

Through extensive R&D, the inclusion of the 8.9″ display screen does not affect the overall weight of the Eee PC 900, which remains below 1kg and maintains the ultra portable theme that has become synonymous with the Eee PC. With this large screen size of 8.9″, a resolution of 1024 x 600 is achieved – allowing users to view a single A4 page without the need to scroll left or right and making it much easier and more effective when reading or working on documents.

MCS Storageview 1.0.3

A great tool from Mightycare to display the logical partitions of all virtual machines on VMware ESX 3.x or Virtual Center 2.x . The tool can display how many Gigabytes the Customer can save when they decrease the logical partition to a size the VM’s really need.

Download it here

VMware has a couple of free video training sites that have been brought to my attention…

• VMware Official YouTube E-Learning channel
• VMware Official Blip.TV E-Learning Site

These videos have some good tips in them. There are about 13 videos at the YouTube site and at least that many over on Blip.tv. … Well done to VMware for posting these free videos and I hope to see more soon!

One of the main issues in Virtualisation is finding out where the capacity bottleneck’s are, or just to be happy that there aren’t any.

I have found the following Virtual Appliance (fully configured virtual machine) which says it will do that for you, I have not had a chance to test it yet but from the on-line demo it looks pretty good.

Check out the flash demo and download the beta from here…

http://www.vkernel.com/downloads/all/

Just to break the Virtualisation theme that we seam to have gained take a look at these, not sure you would be able to get them for work purposes but they look fun !

PS3 Laptop

Wii Laptop

Xbox 360 Laptop

Check out the release notes, there are a lot of fixes in this update! There’s also an update to the Update Manager and the Converter plug-in.

Download link
Releasenotes link