Now that Microsoft has finally announced pricing for the Azure platform, I thought I would take a look at comparing the pricing model against the most popular and mature cloud on the market to date, Amazon Web Services (AWS). My initial reaction is that Microsoft took Amazon’s price structure and met their cost point, or shaved off half a cent.

Acronyms

AWS = Amazon Web Services
AMI = Amazon Machine Image

Legend

I've just received confirmation that I will be attending VMWorld. As always, I'll be involved in both public and private discussions around virtualization and cloud computing. I'm happy to meet to discuss the industry, and as of right now, do not have a full schedule.

Also, keep an eye out for me in the labs.

See you in San Francisco (a city I much prefer to Las Vegas).

I will also be liveblogging as I have been since 2006, complete with grainy pictures from my Blackberry.

Cheers.

The most recently and widely publicized world health concern, is known as A/H1N1, or “swine flu” to the masses. A/H1N1 was given the, “swine flu” moniker because it resembles a strain found in pigs. The latest strain has affected ~13,000 people globally thus far, according to the Center for Disease Control.

I was recently working with an SMB to provide a secure offsite storage solution for some of their data.

After signing up for Amazon S3 I went hunting for a FileZilla like interface for my S3 storage.

First I tried, S3 Browser. It tempted with me with a Free version, but the free version couldn't change permissions on the bucket. Uninstalled.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Import/Export is a feature few people know about that can quickly expedite moving your data into the cloud.

Some of you may already be familiar with the strategic and financial advantages from leveraging Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as your storage platform. However, there are a few different solutions to actually migrate your data to S3.

If you have a Microsoft Sharepoint site and you are trying to publish slides to a Slide Library, but receive the following error, "This feature requires microsoft office powerpoint professional," here is the fix:

Upgrade to Office Enterprise 2007.

Strange, I know, but the error message from Microsoft is wrong.

You may then need this Link..

I found the fix here.

I've been doing a lot of various virtual desktop testing lately, from thin clients to various solutions from major/minor vendors to testing Desktop-as-a-Service with a few cloud providers.

My latest test put VMware View against Citrix XenDesktop with HDX in a comparison of Adobe Flash performance only.

Disclaimer:
My testing was performed using the same underyling hardware but is not a hardcore scientific test (as I don't have the free time for that at the moment). Having said that, similar effort was made to optimize both solutions.

Disclaimer #2:

Do you want to unleash the full power of your smartphone and reduce or eliminate the need to carry a laptop? The REDFLY Mobile Companion links to your smartphone via a USB cable or wireless Bluetooth connection and extends the Windows Mobile interface to a more convenient and capable environment. The REDFLY Mobile Companion comes in two models, the C7 and C8N.

I had an immediate need to deploy scores of virtual machines based off the same template and customization, which lead me to my first foray with Powershell. For those that follow this site, you'll know that PHP or Perl are much more comfortable for me, but alas, it's time to try what everyone is talking about.

For those installing the latest VMware View Agent in a Windows 7 virtual machine, you will likely come to the point where the View Agent installation will fail at:

Error 1920 VMware View 3.1 View Composer Guest Agent Server (vmware-svi-ga.exe) service fails to start.

The first part of the fix is the well known part of changing the account used to start the service to a domain account with appropriate permissions on the Windows 7 VM.

I'm heading back to DC after a very engaging, Virtualization Congress and as I connected to McCarran Wifi, I sat by as time after time the redirect to http://192.168.1.3/upload/McCarran-modified.htm?cmd=login&mac=00:1f:3c:9.... failed.

Upon initially connecting I received an IP of 10.0.1.246/255.255.240.0 with a DG of 10.0.0.2.

I followed this guide with no avail.

The key for me (I'm in NA), was changing:
https://red001.mail.microsoftonline.com

to:

https://red001.mail.microsoftonline.com/owa

Hope that helps some of the Blackberry users out there.

Cheers.

As additional companies close their doors to prevent additional exposure to Swine Flu (H1N1), Cloud-Cast, a company delivering cloud based solutions, has ramped up its swat team to design, implement and manage desktop environments in a matter of hours or days.

By implementing a private on-premise cloud hosting virtual desktops coupled with VMware View, remote users can connect to both their virtual and physical desktops.

For those that have been following my love affair with Microsoft Live Mesh (Beta) be warned that my fondness is now a bit less pristine.

I'm even using Live Mesh to save my Internet Explorer favorites to the cloud.

Well, I'm at a site today that requires me to connect behind an Authenticated Proxy server. I decide to install the client on the laptop I'm sitting at and low and behold:

"please verify your network settings and retry (80072EFD)"