Dugie’s Pensieve

It’s Anzac Day here in Australia tomorrow.  A National holiday of remembrance with Dawn Memorial Services, Anzac Biccies (Biscuits), and Red poppies. 

It’s our Australian way of not celebrating a war, but remembering those who served back when Australia was a very young Commonwealth.

I’ll be spending tomorrow morning with my grandma again, chatting with a cup of tea - and a BBQ with friends and family in the afternoon.  If you’d like to know more about ANZAC Day, you can click any of links above.

I wonder what Google Australia will have as their logo tomorrow?

Ben Armstrong has asked the question “What do you use desktop virtualization for?“.  So please take a moment or two to visit his post, and leave some feedback — go on you know you want to!

A couple of weeks ago, I bought me a new helmet.  Haven’t had time to post a piccy - so here it is.  It matches the bike nicely.  The helmet is a nice fit, doesn’t let too much noise in, I think I’ll still use ear plugs or earbuds for long trips though.

Anyway, I rode out to a friends “weekend shack” at Goomburra (about 130 km from Brisbane). 

Nice trip, lots of open road, pretty scenery.  There’s about 20km of really twisty, bendy country road.  It’s a tough job, but someones gotta do it — oh well guess I’ll volunteer then   :)

Stopped for breakfast at a little sleepy town called Allora.  Had a great meat pie from the bakery.

I am sorry I didn’t get any decent photos.  But I really need to get back on the bike and unwind real soon, so it I’ll have another trip and get some photos this time.

…kid’s wont eat broccoli.  *sigh*

I’ve had a couple of emails in the past few days about Domain Controllers and Virtual Machine, so I guess it’s time for another post :)

Regardless of your choice of Virtualization technology, if you are running Domain Controllers in a Virtual Machine, you should really pay attention to:
KB 888794 Considerations when hosting DC in virtual environments.  naturally, this should align nicely with your Virtualization planning — you have done some palnning right?

The biggest problem is going to be time syncronization with the physical host, and any sort of undo/snap shots, so you should switch these off.  Under Virtual Server you disable time sync by:

• In the Virtual Machines pane, click Configure, and then select the virtual machine that you want to change. 
• In the Configuration pane, click Virtual Machine Additions.
• Click to clear the Host time synchronization check box, and then click OK

I’ve posted some infromation here “Can I run Domain Controller’s (DC) inside a Virtual Machine?”
If you are using VMware, then check out that mighty fine session paper “TAC 9710 - Virtualizing a Windows Active Directory Domain Infrastructure”

I’ve also been getting some questions on P2V of DCs as well.  I guess people are starting to get serious about getting rid of older machines.
Anyway, I’ve never been a fan of using P2V to convert an exisiting DCs.  I always prefer to build a new DC with DC Promo.  You can restore a system state into a Virtual machine, and there are some more details “Can I restore my Domain Controller AD into a Virtual Machine?”

I think that’s it for now, if you want to know more drop me a comment I guess, just thought I share some more of that virtual machine lovin’

Umm, well not a lot more can be said.  See Ben’s post for more details :)

Per the title of this post, the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 RC build can now be downloaded here (note - if you have not signed up for the beta program - you will need to go here instead - and sign up first).  There are no significant new features from the beta 2 released - but there are many bug fixes.

Phwaar, this is going to be a really interesting blog to keep an eye on, and at this point I’m not even sure it has anything to do with Virtualization?!  Aaron over at StealthPuppy.com posted this little gem:

Those zany guys and girls over at PIPE Networks are building a data centre, just down the road in Fortitude Valley, in 60 days and blogging about it.

An empty room,
a signed lease,
a crazy deadline
and the dream to build Brisbane’s newest data Centre…

Get excited - we’ve thrown down the gauntlet, set out the challenge, to complete PIPE Networks’ DC3 in 60 days starting from scratch and building from the ground up.

Stay tuned to this space to watch the creation of this world class facility and get an insight into this exciting project. Our blog will be updated daily with the achievements and milestones of DC3.

Set to be on-line next week, our trusty BB web cam is being installed to watch the every move of our suppliers, workers, PIPE technicians and perhaps the odd cleaner, keeping you up to the moment with photos from the project!

Area: 450 sqm
Planned Capacity: 170 racks (1100mm)
Air Conditioning: Hot Isle/Cold Isle cooling system
Power Supply: 800 watts p/sqm with a+b power,feed by a dedicted substation supplying 3000kva of power

The facility’s resilience will be underpinned by a N+1 standard cooling and power system ensuring a superior operating environment, and once complete will be monitored by the PIPE Networks NOC support team 24×7.

 

 

Bummer, seems like this happens to all the cool stuff 

The page on Microsoft Downloads for the Windows Vista™ Centralized Desktop and Virtual Server Whitepaper was there I tell you.  Now it’s not.

Let’s hope it is a good little whitepaper and finds it’s way back home soon.

Aaron over at StealhPuppy, gave me the heads up on a new Virtualization whitepaper published yesterday. 

I can’t tell you too much as I haven’t been able to download it.   The download URL gives a 404?!  Anyway here is the link to the Windows Vista™ Centralized Desktop and Virtual Server Whitepaper, a snippet fromt overview is below:

This white paper introduces Windows Vista™ Enterprise Centralized Desktop, a way of licensing Windows Vista for deployment in a centralized, virtualized setting. It then examines how Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop may be deployed using Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 R2 along with other Microsoft software and technologies. It examines two common deployment scenarios, followed by considerations and recommendations for deploying Virtual Server in support of such solutions. It concludes by examining the key benefits of implementing Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop on Virtual Server and presenting additional sources of information on the topics discussed in the document.

Once I’ve got a copy, I’ll post back.

Looks like Christian Saborío has been having some fun (and some problems) working on the application dubbed as the Virtual Machine Configuration Assistant.  From what I have seen on his blog, it looks really good!

Check his post for all the juicy information “Virtual Machine Configuration Assistant“, and a snippet is below:

…here, you can pretty much do anything related with VHDs.  After modifying some ISOs,  I have also managed to completely automate the defragmentation-precompaction-compaction phase required to reduce the size of VHDs.  Now I just leave the process running and when I arrive the next day, my VHDs are like 50% smaller.

I had not touched C# in a while, and all I can say is “Wow”.  C# rocks, it is very intuitive and creating efficient GUIs is a bliss.  One can only wish that there was a 2.0 framework to run under OS X. I have also fixed the problem with OCX stats at runtime - actually it was a workaround, not a fix.  Here is a video I made of some of the features of the application, which include:  VHD Attachment, VHD Creation, VM Creation and VMRC in tabs for each of the machines

There is a 3 minute youtube link and an avi download to view.  Christian it looks awesome (I love the tabs), I reckon you will make a lot of people very happy out there in the Virtualization Community!