Virtual Architect

Today I was notified via email that a new version of the VMware ROI/TCO Calculator is available:

The new version of VMware ROI/TCO Calculator now analyzes potential savings from VMware Lab Manager (VLM) and VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in addition to VMware Infrastructure (VI). This new calculator was developed jointly by VMware, Inc. and ex-Gartner ROI/TCO experts from Alinean, Inc. to provide a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) analysis for implementing VMware virtualization products and solutions. Try it today at http://www.vmware.com/calculator .  

What does the calculator do?

The calculator is developed based on an expanded ROI/TCO methodology, the experience of thousands of VMware customers and industry research data to quantify TCO savings, investments, and business benefits of implementing VMware virtualization solutions.   The methodology first quantifies the current “Before VMware (As Is)” cost of ownership for server infrastructure, development/test lab and desktop infrastructure management.  Against the current environment, the methodology creates an “After VMware (To Be)” simulation, quantifying the cost savings, productivity improvements, risk reduction and business benefits of VMware Infrastructure (VI), VMware Lab Manager and VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and tallies any incremental investments to setup and deploy the proposed VMware solutions.

What is new in this version?

In addition to additional solution areas, the updated calculator includes the ability to:

- Export the analysis to excel

- Customize your virtualization schedule with a "savings realization factor".  

- Calculate carbon emission reduction

What about previous versions of the calculator?

This updated tool will replace the current VMware Infrastructure TCO Calculator and VMware Lab Manager Business Value Analysis Calculator, which will be available until June 30, 2008. The previous VMware Infrastructure TCO Calculator is now located at http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/calculator_v1.html, and the VMware Lab Manager Business Value Analysis Calculator can still be found at http://www.vmware.com/products/labmanager/calculator_v1.html. Please note that analyses previously saved in either calculator can only be accessed at these links until June 30, 2008.

Quote from www.run-virtual.com

"February 26st, 2008 is the first VMworld Europe in Cannes, France. We are very busy with all the preparations for this event, making sure we can deliver good quality sessions, have a great representation of the Virtualization Industry at the event, etc.

Well today is the opening of the VMworld Europe website (www.vmworld.com/europe) and the opening of the registration for the event.

We will have seats for 3.000 actual attendees, the building will not really allow for much more, so there is a very high change we will sell out completely, so if you want to attend, register as soon as possible.

In Europe we have always been running TSX, a VMware virtualization event mainly targeted at the VCPs (VMware Certified Professionals). TSX ‘died’, but even more technical sessions and Labs will be available at VMworld Europe, so this will be an absolute improvement. Sure all techie people now need to learn to mix with less techie people, but I am sure we will all cope

VMworld Europe will have around 90 unique sessions covering all segments of the virtualization (x86) industry. We have chosen for a bit less sessions then the previous VMworld event in San Francisco (250 sessions) as we will have all sessions repeated at least 2 times. There will be no pre-registration for the sessions you want to attend, all sessions will work on a first-come, first-serve basis, but with the repeats of sessions, you should easily be able to see most (if not all) of the session you are interested in.

Besides sessions, there will of course also be hands-on labs, where you can get hands-on experience with some of the virtualization products/components.

More information about the actual sessions and labs will follow."

Reading this you now know that this is the replacement of the old TSX, with a little extend to let it look like VMworld (I applied to go there and hope my company will let me go, I will let you know)

Links to sources:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2007/11/vmworld-europe.html,

http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=200

I’ve been watching several websites and BLOG’s about powershell lately and see an increasing amount of items published involving the new Powershell cmdlets VMware is working on. I thought it would be nice to post some of the links together so you can find your way as I did.

A new BLOG I have been watching for some time now is Brian Denicola’s BLOG: www.bjd145.org/scripting_blog.html he posted a noticable amount of items about the new VMware cmdlets lately.

Eric Sloof is also reporting about the new cmdlets frequently at www.ntpro.nl/blog.

Of course there is VMware’s own corner on the web about powershell: VI PowerShell Blog – VMware

Others who wrote about Powershell and vmware:

• TechProsaic – http://halr9000.com/
• pshell.info – http://pshell.info/
• Scale The Mind – http://scalethemind.com/
• p2vd.com – http://www.p2vd.com
• Dmitry’s PowerBlog: PowerShell and beyond – http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/
• Scott Lowe’s BLOG – blog.scottlowe.org
• h0bbel p0ggel – http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org/
• The Powershell Guy – http://thepowershellguy.com
• ICT-Freak – http://ictfreak.wordpress.com

There may be some more, look ‘em up through The Virtual Search

Omar, a friend and GPR collegue recently posted an item about Teched ITForum ‘07 in Barcelona where he states the war on vm’s has started. His source www.buit.org, also has a fotolog which holds many more pictures. One of the photo’s shows System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) with Hyper-V, Virtual Server and Vmware Virtual Infrastrure (ESX) hosts:

picture fullsize view

source: Eileen Brown’s Weblog

Jeffrey tells us why he invented Powershell.

Look at Eileen Brown’s Weblog :

http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/11/23/the-inventor-of-powershell.aspx

or watch it directly on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlivNGCkakY

Recently I posted about a script from halr9000 I tested. Browsing on the world wide web I came across another Powershell MVP (Brandon Shell) who altered the script of Hal and added some functionality. Take a look, if I can find some spare time next week I will test I myself.

I won’t be spending too much time on it though, I’d rather wait a bit until VMware’s PSnapin is spreaded more widely. The only sound I heared about it up till now (probably because a NDR agreement) I found at Brian’s brand new BLOG about scripting.

Now you can see the power of cmdlets, just a couple of lines left with powershell – sure you have to count in the time spent on writing the cmdlets, but the nice thing about powershell is the way they are adopted (as trusted code) and that you can consider them as blackboxes if you want.

There has been assorted posts now that SCVMM R2 (aka SCVMM vNext) will be able to manage multiple installations of Viridian/Windows Server virtualization. 

 Chris Stirrat (from the SCVMM team) also made the announcement back in September that SCVMM R2 (or ‘next set of releases‘) will manage VMware and XEN as well.

Anyway, in Jeff Wooley’s presentation today, the roadmap slide shows SCVMM vNext will beta within 45 days of the Windows Server Virtualization Beta.

So if the WSv beta will be released with the RTM of Windows 2008 in ~February, I’m going to guess we should see a beta mid April 2008?

Final SCVMM R2 will be released when Final WSV is released 180 days after Windows Server 2008 RTMs

QUOTED from: BINK.NU

Hal from halr9000.com (TechProsaic) wrote a PowerShell script to query ESX hosts.

I saw an entry on NTPRO.NL about the script and because I recently attended a session about PowerShell I was triggered to give it a try and test it for myself.

The script makes use of PLINK.exe from the PuTTY project. I already had the app in my environment variables loaded. I tried to figure out how to use the object because at that time there was a credential problem at halr9000.com which resulted in the BLOG being not available. The download link to the script on NTPRO.NL was available though, so I decided to give it a try without extra documentation.

At first I had some problems with the syntax of the script (use quotation marks around the ESX hosts helped). Later on I was sure I was using the right syntax but the script still did not work, it kept returning an error about a value being null. Looking closer I found that the password for the ESX host caused the troubles. The password contained a special character "&", which was misinterpretered by Powershell  and this resulted in a wrong password being piped to PLINK.EXE.

Excluding the Host in question from the query solved the issue and the script delivered a nice output with the vm’s registered at the remaining hosts.

Friday november 2, Thomas at http://scalethemind.com launched a custom search engine  (powered by google) which is aimed to deliver VMware related information: http://thevirtualsearch.com.

source: www.ntpro.nl/blog

It looks like powershell is catching up in popularity since it became officially available in november 2006. More and more major players are adopting powershell, not surprisingly if you look at the features. Besides companies like Quest even VMware is adopting powershell and is preparing a technology preview of the PowerShell interfaces for VI, an early version of the software is available upon request.

Microsoft did some research and combined some of the most used and most favourite features around in their new scripting language product. Last week I attented a tech-session covering the basics of Windows Powershell.

The speaker (Marc van Orsouw, Powershell MVP – www.thepowershellguy.com) at this session did a good job in exciting the people present. He even turned out the to be a collegue. It turns out the Powershell community is growing faster than Microsoft could imagine, as Marc said: "At last I can tell my unix/linux friends that I can do the same with Powershell and even better."

He created a very helpfull addon called Powertab, which presents a text-based popup "window" in the the powershell commandline when pressing <TAB>. The "window" lists all the possible commands for TAB-completion, instead of browsing through the options by continiously pressing <TAB> they show up all at the same time and you can browse through them using the cursor keys.