As Mr. Simon Seagrave has pointed out, there is a fix available to enable OSX Lion Time Machine support for Iomega IX2 and IX4 NAS storage devices.
I decided to take this a little step further, and try to upgrade my old (and discontinued) Iomega IX2-200 to the new IX2-200 Cloud Edition firmware.
Initially this was a big failure, as I seemingly managed to brick my device. It was only responding to pings (so the TCP/IP stack was loaded and working), but I could not bring up the web based management tool nor connect via telnet or SSH.
My new colleague Olav Tvedt asked me if I could test his method of enabling Bitlocker in a VM, on VMware vSphere. Of course, I was happy to oblige.
I followed the same steps as he did in his Running Bitlocker on a Virtual computer post, and it worked perfectly.
The only real difference between doing this in Hyper-V and on ESXi, is that the virtual floppy drive on ESXi by default doesn’t emulate an empty floppy. So, in order to mount a virtual floppy you need to create a new floppy image. Thankfully the vSphere Client can do this for you!
Sammy Bogaert has posted a 12 part series called “Building The Ultimate vSphere Lab”, which knocks the socks of my previous vSphere 4.x series.
In reality this means that my planned series for vSphere 5.x is now cancelled, as there is no need to duplicate Sammy’s efforts. Be sure to check the series out!
Yes, this is YAEotYP, so if you’ve already read tons of them I apologize.
2011 - My personal view #
2011 has been a steamroller of a year.The vSoup Virtualization Podcast got aired the first time, and we’ve recorded and published 19 full episodes in the inaugural year. I was awarded the vExpert title for the first time, and even got invited to Tech Field Day #6 in Boston.
In addition to this, I wrote a white paper for Veeam, was included in the Server Virtualization Advisory Board, joined Rick Vanover for a Veeam Community Podcast, and appeared in two video interviews.
Auto Installation and Configuring of vSphere ESXi 5
automation ESXi fun Ops PowerCLI Powershell realworld Virtualization VMware
One of the last projects I’ve been involved with at Seatrans, is to automate the installation and configuration of vSphere ESXi 5 hosts for deployment on vessels. I’ve talked a bit about this before, both on vSoup and in Setting Up Automated ESXi Deployments where I outlined my PXE and PowerCLI based installation and configuration scheme. Not much has changed since then, except updating the PXE server to offer ESXi 5, instead of ESXi 4 and a lot of work has been put into the scripting, including a front-end GUI for the PowerCLI script itself. The end “product” is now in place for mass deployments for internal use.
While using ThinApp to create a standalone version of TweetDeck 0.38.2, since the newly announced 1.0 version looks, acts and feels like a 0.1 version, I posed the following question on Twitter:
["Hrm, what other apps should i #ThinApp while I'm at it?"](https://twitter.com/#!/h0bbel/status/145249562490179585).
Kevin Kelling immediately responded with “Doom”.
Naturally, I decided to give it a go. A quick download of ZDoom later, and a quick run through the ThinApp Setup Capture later, the following was born (view in full screen for better viewing):
As the title says, it’s been one of my more “public” weeks ever. Besides my “normal” vSoup engagement, this week I’ve also been involved with Mike Laverick’s VMTN Subscription Movement Miniwags to voice some of my views about the #VMTNSubscriptionMovement.
Fair warning: This is video, and please to remember that during recording Movember was nearing its final phase. VMTN Subscription Movement Miniwags – Christian Mohn
Secondly, I was a guest on the Veeam Community Podcast Episode 45 – vSphere 5 Storage Potpourri.
A little while ago I fitted a small 64GB SSD disk to my HP MicroServer just to have a quick look at the new vSphere 5 feature Swap to Host Cache, where vSphere 5 reclaims memory by storing the swapped out pages in the host cache on a solid-state drive. Naturally, this is a lot faster than swapping to non-SSD storage, but you will still see a performance hit when this happens. For more details on Swap to Host Cache, have a look at Swap to host cache aka swap to SSD? by Duncan Epping.
VMware has announced Horizon Application Manager 1.2, and together with the new ThinApp 4.7 release it promises “end users access to Windows, SaaS and enterprise web applications across different devices while retaining control and visibility via policy-driven management”.
VMware Horizon Application Manager now manages your ThinApp applications making it easier and faster to provide virtualized Windows applications to end users. From Horizon Administration, you can deploy ThinApp packages, entitle users and groups, track user licenses, and manage application updates.
The coupling of the Horizon Application Manager with ThinApp is a great idea, and when I saw today’s announcement I got pretty excited. The possibility to have your own internal application portal providing your end users with self-service installs of virtualized applications is great news and could potentially be really useful in a great number of organizations.
Mike Laverick has started something of a petition to bring back the VMTN Subscription option, and I could not agree more!
The VMTN Subscription was a way for interested parties to pay for a years subscription to VMware products, akin to the Microsoft Technet subscription program. It’s not intended for production use, but as a means to get hold of products for lab work, testing and development.
I don’t understand why VMware pulled the plug on that option back in 2007, but I do understand why it’s time to bring it back to life. As is the case with Mike, as a vExpert I can probably get hold of all the bits and pieces on my own, but not everyone has the same opportunities and I’m sure that’s actually stifling community knowledge.
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