Jason Conger

Free Tool: HotLink EC2 plug-in for Microsoft SCVMM

HotLink has released a free tool that can extend on-premise virtualization management infrastructure to public cloud resources like Amazon EC2. Hotlink Hybrid Express abstracts public cloud platforms and workloads so on-premise management consoles treat them just like on-premise hosts and virtual machines — fully integrated and managed as a unified pool of resources without the need for a separate management console.

Whitepaper: Virtualized Hadoop Performance with VMware vSphere 5.1

Apache Hadoop is an interesting platform for building distributed system for big data. It uses data replication across hosts and racks of hosts to protect against individual disk, host, and even rack failures. Given the built-in reliability and workload consolidation features of Hadoop it might appear there is little need to virtualize it. However, there are several use-cases that make virtualization of this workload compelling.

Microsoft Annouces Windows Azure Infrastructure Services

Microsoft is entering the hypbrid cloud space by making Azure Infrastructure Services available to the public. With Azure Infrastructure Services, you can connect your on-premise enterprise environment with Microsoft public cloud (Azure) to spin up virtual machines, SQL instances, SharePoint instances, development instances and more. All while keeping everything tied together with your existing Active Directory infrastructure.

Application Virtualization Solutions Compared

There are a lot of application virtualization technologies out there, and they all differ slightly in the way they work.  So, the question comes up all the time of which application virtualization solution is the best one?  Well, with all the types of application virtulization and the various vendors like Cameyo, Citrix, Evalaze, InstallFree, Numecent, Novell, Microsoft, Roozz, Spoon, Symantec and VMWare offing solutions, answering the question as to which one is best greatly depends on your situation.  Luckily, Ruben Spruijt has put together a whitepaper detailing a lot of the solutions and where each fits.  The title of the white paper is "Application Virtualization Smackdown" and it covers topics such as VDI, virtualization characteristics, manageability, usability, application characteristics, architecture, and more.
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Learn VMware with Free Videos

Do you want to learn more about VMware products without reading through a bunch of manuals?  VMware has put together a library of videos on the various VMware products that will step you through installation and configuration.  Some of the products covered by these videos are:

vSphere
Site Recovery Manager
vCenter Operations
vCenter Orchestrator
vCenter Protect
vCloud Director
vFabric/Spring
View
vSphere Storage Appliance
Zimbra

I watched a few of these videos myself and they are easy to follow.  The ones I watched were all around the 15 – 16 minute mark, so there isn't a lot of fluff and they get straight to the point.
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Tags: VMware, videos

Remote Desktop Smart Sizing

A feature that has been around in Windows desktop operating systems for a while, but may not be widely known about, is something called "smart sizing".  Basically, smart sizing is a feature used when connecting to a Windows desktop OS remotely via RDP that scales the contents of the desktop to fit the boundary of the window as you drag the borders around.  The reason this features isn't well known is because you had to edit the .rdp file to turn it on.  Now, Microsoft has exposed this via a GUI (although it is still somewhat hidden).
Once you have connected to a Remote Desktop, you can click the Icon in the Title Bar and you will discover a new option: Smart sizing. Clicking that will flip between a “static resolution” and dynamically fit to the window, on-the-fly!

This is useful for VDI environments such a Microsoft RDS or other environments that use RDP for the remoting protocol.
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Tags: Microsoft, RDS, VDI

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