Mark of Technology

The evolving story of VMWare (and friends)

Mark Lomas — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:05:22 +0000

Ok, yes I know; not posted in a while! What's been happening? Well, plenty. I've been expanding my knowledge of VMWare, including View and Lab manager, both of which I'd like to talk about in future posts. Also, been getting increasingly involved in storage (specifically Netapp), a subject intimately realted to virtualisation. I think I finally get the whole 'cloud' idea, as VMWare present it, at least from the point of view of how the concept is presented. Smart technology like that of...

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The evolving ecosystem of Hyper-V

Mark Lomas — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:31:08 +0000

I'm writing this on SquareSpace's new iPhone app, let's see how well it works. As outlined in my previous post, there's a war on between Microsoft and market leaders VMWare to claim virtualisation market (and mind) share. So far VMWare clearly have the superior technology, but that's not all they have, they have an ecosystem of additional products that work with the core vSphere offering, provided by themselves, and third parties. When it comes to VMWare's own portfolio, products like Lab...

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Virtual War!

Mark Lomas — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:21:11 +0000

Well, allot has happened since my last update – which admittedly was some time ago. In the arena of virtualisation, we’ve had Microsoft launch Windows Server 2008 R2 – which of course brings a host of improvements. Microsoft are shouting about these improvements, either claiming parity with VMWare, or claiming to be at least ‘right behind them’. It seems Microsoft are effectively claiming their solution is now ‘Version 2’ – and therefore mature and proven. However, this is...

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VMWare to the rescue!

Mark Lomas — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:46:59 +0000

Recently we had a support customer with a problem server - in fact, it was their only server (a small business customer) - and their server was in real trouble! Originally reported to us as problems accessing certain services (database, email) on the server, with others (files) being painfully slow, we attended site and discovered a problem with the server RAID array - in fact, two of the drives in their RAID 5 array were failing - the only reason why such a problem had not yet knocked out the...

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New Article - Activating Guided Consolidation

Mark Lomas — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:20:12 +0000

I've posted up a new article 'Activating VMWare Guided Consolidation' Guided Consolidation is a feature of VMWare vCenter that assesses the physical servers in your environment to see which ones are good candidates for a Physical to Virtual (P2V) conversion - however many users will find that the feature is not present following the installation of vCenter. It doesn't appear as either a plugin, or an optional feature during installation. Follow the instructions in my article to get...

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Vnoticing Virtualisation

Mark Lomas — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:27:17 +0000

I’ve been doing allot of work with virtualisation products lately – primarily VMWare. I’ve trained up as a VCP, and been doing allot of work talking to customers about Virtualisation. In my area of work, I have to span across mainly small and medium sized business, with the occasional large business thrown in. Virtualisation has been coming up allot from our more ‘plugged in’ customers, who keep their fingers on the pulse. Why now though? Well, there’s clearly allot of...

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iPhone 3.0

Mark Lomas — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:37:43 +0000

So yes, the iPhone 3.0 launched last week - and rather than post a huge splurge aping what everyone else is doing (analysing and re-analysing both the 3GS and the new 3.0 software) I thought I'd try to look at things from the point of view of a more 'ordinary' take. Firstly, all the changes in the 3.0 software are very welcome, but if we let the hype die for a moment - there's nothing super revolutionary about adding cut n paste, search, and MMS. Quite a few of the 'talked about'...

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The Internet Tax .. reborn

Mark Lomas — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:56:22 +0000

Here in the UK, Net Neutrality has never been much of a hot topic, but one global issue that has come up on the radar here has been piracy. For a long time a battle between music & film companies, the ISPs and the government has been quietly simmering away, with salvos fired from all sides designed to stir the others into action. The media companies insist that the ISPs must act, almost acusing them of being complicit in piracy through their inaction, and urging the government to...

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OS X Snow Leopard; some features not for you

Mark Lomas — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:58:22 +0000

Quick link: Technical Specs and basic requirements for OS X Snow Leopard – note that some features like OpenCL and Quicktime H.264 hardware acceleration only work with certain hardware.

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Ie out in EU

Mark Lomas — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:55:57 +0000

Confirmation today came that Windows 7 will ship in Europe without Internet Explorer installed. Note that this won’t be a simple case of alternative versions that exclude the browser as with the ‘N’ editions that included no media player – no, the only versions of Windows 7 to be sold in Europe will be the sans-IE editions. Microsoft say they will make it easy for users to get the browser if they wish – which will be required really – how else are...

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