Over at PlanetVM Wil van Antwerpen posted The Future of VMware Server back in May 2010. Wil makes the argument that it seems like VMware is indeed abandoning VMware Server as a product, leaving us with VMware Workstation and VMware Player as the two Windows installable virtualization solutions from the company.

This has caused some reactions, including my own comment, where I question the smartness of abandoning what might just be one of the best virtualization “gateway drugs” VMware has to offer.

Read more →

Finally USB pass-through is possible on ESX hosts with the new vSphere 4.1 release! This feature ha been available in VMware Workstation/Fusion and Player for quite a while. The freshly added feature in vSphere 4.1 even works if you vMotion the guest from one host to another, which is in itself pretty amazing functionality!

In this post, I’ll show how to setup and use the new USB pass-through feature in vSphere 4.1.

Read more →

If you run your vCenter on SQL Server Express 2005, you are missing the ability to set up scheduled backup jobs with SQL Maintenance Plans, a feature available in the full version of SQL Server.

This might not be a problem if your backup software has SQL Server agents that you use to backup your vCenter databaser, but in smaller environments or even in your lab, you might not have that kind of backup scheme available to you, so what do you do? Thankfully there are ways of setting up the same kind of scheduled backups in SQL Server Express, without being a SQL Server Guru.

Read more →

As you may or may not know, the new vCenter 4.1 requires that the host it runs on is 64 bit. As 4.0 and previous versions weren’t supported on 64 bit at all, this probably means that when you upgrade you will need to move your existing database to a new host.

There are several ways of doing the migration, but one way is to backup your existing database, and restore it on a new host and point the new vCenter 4.1 installation to the existing database and have it upgrade it for you during install.

Read more →

Welcome to my new playground. I used to post quite a lot over at my old site, h0bbel.p0ggel.org but given it’s weird domain name and it’s long history I’ve decided to start fresh.

This new site will be dedicated to all things virtualization, PowerShell, Windows Server management and possibly even some Citrix products thrown in here and there. I might even go on about APP-V, but that remains to be seen.

My main focus will be solutions for SMB users. There is a lot of information out there, but lots of it are focused on large corporations that have large IT teams. Sadly that’s not the reality for many of us, and we have to fill lots of different roles (e.g server admin, network admin, storage admin, etc).

Read more →