So my morning starting by stepping on my Route 5 bus headed into Cannes for the first open-to-the-public day of VMWorld Europe 2009. As I walked up the steps of the bus, "Billie Jean" was on the radio. One of the greatest albums of all time was doing its best to inspire me on another beautiful day in Cannes.

Since I keep receiving messages on what sessions I'm attending, I thought I'd make it public.

Before I post that, I'd also like to request that anyone going to:

• TA12: VMware Converter 4: What's New and Different
• TA24: Fault Tolerance Performance Preview
• LAB02: Securing with VMware vShield Zones
• LAB07: VMware vCenter App Speed
• LAB12: Cisco Nexus 1000V

So I learned a few things thus far:

• Madelieu is not the same as Cannes. For reasons beyond my control my travel details were made just days prior to me departing D.C. This was apparently the last one left.

From outside my window it didn't seem that far. It took about 70 minutes in my confy New Bals. No way I'm walking it again tomorrow.

The winds are hinting that Citrix will make a large announcement at VMWorld Europe next week - that full-blown XenServer will be now FREE. The problem is, you still unlikely want Citrix XenServer in the first place.

VMware is the obvious market leader in this arena and have beat the competition in benchmarks, functionality and consolidation ratios time and time again. With Microsoft gaining steam with Hyper-V (but still with a large chasm to span to VMware), Citrix XenServer could become the hypervisor that time forgot.

Thanks to Microsoft for releasing a tool to allow your Dynamics CRM site to be internet-facing.

However, please keep in mind that the application must be run from the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\tools directory or it will throw an exception.

Happy fixing.

I just got the word from Alessandro Perilli that I will be speaking at Virtualization Congress 2009.

My session abstract can be found here.

Virtual Building Blocks: A Modular Approach to a Comprehensive Solution

Well I submitted a last minute session for the Virtualization Congress 2009 conference occurring this May in Las Vegas.

Feel free to vote for my session, "Cloud Computing in a Virtualized Atmospher[e]" by upticking it here:
http://cfp.virtualizationcongress.com/

While there are some interesting topics, I wanted to make sure that mine used real world examples as opposed to discussing academic and esoteric topics.

Since I often get asked, "what other blogs do you read?" I wanted to share a few new ones that I've recently (or not so recently) started following:

Rantings of an IT Pirate

While I've yet to find the time to post one of my solutions to the new VIOPS site ,there's a great new whitepaper out on how to simulate a VMware Site Recovery Manager failover on a single laptop.

A quick overview of the solution:

• Laptop running VMware workstation
• (2) VMware ESX virtual machines running on VMware Workstation

I recently ordered up a pair of Dell PE1950 refurbs for a lab buildout. While the servers were ordered within days of each other, one server was capable of advanced SSE3 while the other was not.

vCenter complained when trying to build out a two-node DRS cluster. How do you get around this? Mask it.

In between the _vpxd_ section add...

Secret sauce starts here:

<code>
<guestOSDescriptor>
       <esx-3-x-x>
         <all-versions>
           <all-guests>
             <cpuFeatureMask>
		<default-vendor>

Original Link is here.

Frequently Asked Questions
Help, I forgot my password!
Q.How do I reset the administrator password?

A.A publisher can reset any user’s password. Provided there’s at least one publisher who can log in, ask them to reset your password for you.

I'm now officially registered. I've been getting a lot more consulting requests from colleagues and clients outside of the US so it will be a great chance to network and meet those that weren't able to come to VMWorld 2008 in Las Vegas, USA.

Just as I did at VMWorld 2006 (Los Angeles, CA), VMWorld 2007 (San Francisco, CA[my favorite city this far]) and VMWorld 2008 (Las Vegas, NV), I will be LiveBlogging from the event (assuming internet connectivity at the Palais des Festival.

For those already familiar with VMware's virtual desktop solution, vmView is leaps and bounds beyond what you already know. For those new to virtual desktops, VMware has put together a solution that can leverage the high availability of the computing resources in your data center, and provide secure and robust virtual desktop environments to an organization, through thin clients, thick clients or over the web.

The installation for vmView is 90% identical to the previous version, VDM 2.x which I covered in this thread.

As alluded to in previous posts , I am in the process of actively reviewing some of the major and minor cloud service providers (CSP - a term I'll be using for this sector) and decided to start with one of the oldest CSPs to date - Amazon's Elastic Cloud 2.

Here's a little visual on how Amazon envision's this service for a photo processing solution: