News
Released: vCenter 2.5 Update 6
Feb 1st
vCenter 2.5 Update 6 was released on Friday. Whilst I’m not working with any 3.5 / 2.5 environments at the moment this is good news because Windows Server 2008 R2 guest customisations have been added. Also added is support for Firefox 3.x using vCenter Web Access. The full release notes are here.
I’m going to stick my neck out a bit and suggest that this may be the final update to vCenter 2.5 before it reaches the end of General Support in May.
London VMUG February 25th
Jan 15th
The next date for the London VMUG was announced this morning. It is on Thursday 25th February 2010.
The proposed agenda (shamelessly pinched from the announcement page on VMware Communities) is:
1100 – 1200 (Optional) PowerCLI / Powershell workshop – Alan Renouf. Please bring your own curly brackets.
12:30 – 13:00 Arrive & Refreshments
13:00 – 13:20 Welcome & News – Alaric Davies
13:20 – 14:00 Sponsor Presentation – Chris Hammans, Pano Logic
Real world vSphere deployment experiences – Stuart Thompson
(Mostly) Zero downtime DC migration for Dummies – Jonathan Medd
15:00 – 15:20 Refreshment break
ESX home lab update, virtualizing Terminal Server workloads – Simon Gallagher
Thin provisioning and capacity planning in a virtual world – Chris Evans, ‘The Storage Architect’
16:45 – 17:00 Close
17:00 – Pub
I plan to be there.
London VMUG (November 2009)
Nov 25th
I had the pleasure of attending my first VMUG yesterday. I’ve wanted to join in for quite some time but there always seemed to be a reason why I missed it. This time though I was forewarned of the date by several blogs that I read and booked the day off straight away. More >
VCDX4
Nov 18th
I was very interested by the VCDX certification when VMware first announced it and it’s been something that I have wanted to do for quite some time. But when vSphere came on my radar I lost my motivation a little bit. I learned today though that VMware plan to make the VCDX4 certification available sometime in Q1 2010. Consider me re-motivated 
SIDs in Windows VMs
Nov 3rd
Today sysinternals retired the NewSID tool from their suite of utilities. Mark Russinovich (one of the writers of NewSID – the other being Bryce Cogswell) explains in his blog how the decision to retire the utility came about and it’s probably a surprise to many.
It has been a long held belief by man in IT that all Windows Servers and Desktops must have a unique SID. Certainly I recall having SID duplication issues back in the heady days of Windows NT but it’s not something that I have encountered as an issue since. Like many I just assumed that Windows uses SIDs still and so they must be unique still. But, as Mark explains, the way that Windows operating systems use SIDs is not the way that most people think it is and it is ok to have machines with identical SIDs.
From a VM perspective this is good news as it means that cloning VMs just got a tad bit easier. Although deploying a Windows VM from a template will require customisation and the use of sysprep (there is more than just the SID changed by sysprep) the process will probably only get easier. I hope.
Read Mark’s full blog post here.
