Virtualization, Windows, Infrastructure and all that “stuff” in-between

…I haven’t applied mine yet, but the Lone sysadmin has reported some problems with VMotion on their system since applying. details here might be co-incidence but always worth keeping this kind of thing on your radar.

Hilights the fact that automated tools do not a good patching process make.

…and it’s free! - get it here http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=476

Thanks to Mike Laverick - an excellent doc I like the look of the new update manager and the dynamic power saving stuff… have to wonder how well suspend/wake on LAN will really work in a switched environment.. I’ve never had much success with it in the past.

No, not another post about floating data centres, A whole bunch of ESX patches just released here; thanks to Yellow Bricks for pointing that out.. will give the new 3.5 update manager a whirl and report back on what happened! fingers crossed.

See - one advantage of having your own test/cheap ESX home server is you can try these things out

Handy article here at VM/ETC

Microsoft OneNote is my favorite Microsoft product - I’ve used it for a couple of years now and it’s almost totally replaced my need to lug around hardback notepads.

I say almost as sometimes I still need to scribble down some diagrams, something that doesn’t work well with OneNote unless you have a Tablet PC, that said it’s easy to scan diagrams into OneNote with a scanner and keep a record and takes away all the concerns with loosing a paper notebook or not having it with you.

I work disconnected from our corporate network for most of the day but OneNote allows me to host a shared notebook on a SharePoint site which is accessible over SSL I can work on a local sync’d copy and I can make it sync with the server held copy.

It’s useful for sharing notes with my co-workers on a project - it’s essentially a Wiki like tool with good off-line capability.

I would like to see better support for drawing with a non-tablet PC and having it properly anchor scribbles over bits of text - but maybe that’s just me not working it correctly as when I move the text block my scribble over the top doesn’t move.

Anyways - the team have posted some useful Power Toys for OneNote which I will definitley be looking into..

Available from http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2008/01/17/a-summary-of-the-onenote-powertoys-from-the-test-team-for-2007.aspx

More OneNote goodness here http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/default.aspx 

and  http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2008/01/04/blog-roundup-for-dec-2007.aspx

and http://stevepietrekweblog.wordpress.com/2008/01/17/links-1172008/

Microsoft really don’t push/promote this product enough.. it’s great, everyone I show it to ends up using it; as Chris point’s out here it spreads virally between you show it to!

You can even use it to manage cooking Christmas dinner (…maybe I’ll blog about how I did that one day…:))

This looks interesting, uses p2p storage syncing to allow live workloads to be moved between VM Hosts.

Would be a very interesting tech, you could build a large VM compute farm with cheap DAS storage without having to invest in “proper” shared storage such as a fibre channel SAN or iSCSI.

Considering even a DL360/380g5 can take about 800Gb of SCSI/SAS disk these days that’s a lot of storage for replicated/sync’d VMs.

Wonder if VMWare have something in the pipleline to compete, We often see the cost of the shared storage as a big blocker to building VM farms, servers can be obtained relatively cheaply and allow you to easily scale out horizontally, SAN’s not so much as you need to invest upfront in the fibre switching/shelves to allow you to scale out, it’s not so easy to do it incrementally - if you can just buy cheap incremental servers with DAS and just add them into a farm that’s quite appealing; to me anyway.

Interesting Blog to keep an eye on here http://shippingseven.blogspot.com/ allegedly from an engineer working on the new Windows OS, be good to see what comes out - MS haven’t said very much at all about it.