latoga labs

VMware is holding a pair of Virtualization Forums, one day mini-conference designed to bring together virtualization experts and clients from within a region of the United States.  There are two Forums happening in December:

• December 3, 2008: San Diego
• December 11, 2008: Boston

A customer of mine attending one last year in Atlanta and indicated it was an excellent networking and learning event.  If you happen to be in one of these two cities, look into attending the Virtualization Forum.

VMware recently announced the Public Beta of VMware Converter 4.0.  Converter 4.0 will support physical to virtual (p2v) conversion of Linux and W2k8 system.  For more information and to sign up for the Beta, see the full announcment on the VMware Converter Community Forum.

Another release today from VMware: Lab Manager 3.0.1 was recenty released.  While this is a maintenance release, some of the items inlcuded in this release are:

• Support for running Lab Manager on English (US, UK, AUS), French, German, Italian, and Japanese versions of Microsoft Windows 2003
• Optimization for higher scalability and lower response time
• Support for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Update 3
• Ability to transfer ownership of Lab Manager objects such as network templates, virtual machine templates, configurations, and media files between different organizations.

Full details about this release can be found in the Release Notes.

(Unfortunately, this announcement comes a day late for my customer who was upgrading his LM2.x installation to 3.0 last night…  :-O ).

VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 was released yesterday.  Update 3 has a number of additions including:

• Increase in vCPU per Core Limit
• HP BL495c support
• Newly Supported NICs, SATA controllers and Guest OS’

And a number of additional items, see the Release Notes for the full details.

VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant (VIMA) was released recently.

VIMA allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESX and ESXi systems. VIMA is a VM that includes prepackaged software, a logging component, and an authentication component that supports non-interactive login.  VIMA can be used to perform most of the tasks commonly performed in the ESX service console.

VIMA 1.0 is available for downloaded immediately on the VMware website.