The Washington, D.C. Metro VMUG is pleased to announce that VMTraining.NET is now our official Virtualization Training Partner.

VMTraining.NET will be providing the VMUG a lab for our use. At the next meeting, I'm going to kick off our latest concept, an ongoing case study.

Please welcome Andy Murphy, our newest staff contributor here at Systems ArchiTECH. Andy has a long history of providing Microsoft and PKI technical services, and has more recently delved into the virtualization arena.

Andy is a current VCP and has experience designing and implementing VMware VI3.5; he is also our resident expert on Distributed Power Management. Andy can be found at our regular D.C. VMUG meetings and will be offering his technical views and gems here on this website.

With about two months to go until VMWorld 2008 officially begins, I wanted to remind everyone that I will once again be LiveBlogging from the event.

I did some LiveBlogging from VMWorld 2007 where I was ecstatic to have won the Vanguard Award for Best DR Solution.

VMware is rounding third with their application virtualization solution, Project North Star, which comes through their acquisition of Thinstall earlier this year. I signed up for the beta program, received my beta serial number (08490-J0K4K-07J09-02114-02X2H) and proceeded with the straightforward install.

This morning I was in the very first hands-on lab for VMware's new product, Site Recovery Manager (SRM). The lab consisted of an Xtreme PC from Chip PC Technology providing an RDP connection to the Protected Site's Virtual Center server and the Recovery Site's Virtual Center server. It also provided a connection to the Lab Manual in electronic format.

Today was the VMware Authorized Consulting (VAC) Partner Day at the 2008 VMware Partner Exchange. I bumped into several long time virtualization colleagues including Peter Heigis from Lighthouse Computer Services.

There were some interesting tidbits learned in the afternoon discussions, highlighted below:

VCDX

UPDATED 15 May 2009
This installation procedure also works for vCenter Orchestrator, so hopefully this helps as people move forward with VMware vSphere/vCenter 4.

For vCenter Orchestrator, first start the vCenter Orchestrator services via services.msc from your vCenter server.

Then browse to http://:8282

Default username/password: vmware/vmware

Mary Conly from VMware can be a very persuading individual. She sent an email out last week stating that some key players from the DC Metro area within VMware will be out in San Diego, CA for the 2008 VMware Partner Exchange, and I'm seizing the opportunity to brainstorm with these individuals.

My Schedule is as follows:
_MONDAY_

• VMware Experience Opening Reception

I'm now publishing two separate RSS feeds on this site,

Solution Feed

DC Metro VMUG Feed

I've been meaning to do this for awhile, but just recently got a chance to implement the code.

Also, I'll be implementing a mail-list for those that don't use RSS. It should be live in a week or so and will allow people to subscribe to a newsletter-type email for this website.

Belgian, Koen Warson has created another GUI for the Storage VMotion capability in VI3.5. Similar to the original Storage VMotion GUI by Alexander Gaiswinkler, posted back on 10 February 2008, Koen's GUI removes the scary darkness of the command-line interface and brings it to everyday admins who prefer point-and-click versus commands-and-syntax.

For some in-car navigation systems, a Samsung Blackjack running (primarily) WM5 may not sync properly.

This is displayed through an inability to remain connected via Bluetooth (connects, 5 seconds later refuses to connect). _This is not a fix for downloading the phone's address book._

To make the fix, use a mobile phone registry editor, like Mobile Registry Editor and then delete

Fiber Channel Round Robin Load Balancing

Fiber channel round robin load balancing (FCRR) is a method of utilizing all fiber channel paths available from a given host to a given logical unit number (LUN). In a typical fiber channel environment VI3 hosts will see multiple (generally eight) paths to each LUN. The eight paths travel over two separate host bus adapters (HBAs) which are physically cabled into two separate SAN fabrics. At the storage array, four host ports are cabled into one fabric and four host ports are cabled into the other fabric.

The Netherlands has been an apparent mecca of virtualization over the past few years, with extremely active forums and participation in the development community. Furthermore, a good percentage of visitors to this site live in the Netherlands.

Thankfully, the Dutch community has shared one of their recent solutions, a GUI for Storage VMotion.

Now why might this be useful?

As more and more people start to test the latest experimental features in VMware VI3.5, glitches are bound to be uncovered. Here's a post recently made at Yellow Bricks about a potentially disastrous DPM bug.

For those that are deploying (virtual) machines from templates and may be experiencing an issue with WSUS registration, take notice of the following registry keys as it's likely these entries are not unique between the template and the recently deployed machine.

net stop wuauserv
REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Wi ndowsUpdate" /v AccountDomainSid /f
REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Wi ndowsUpdate" /v PingID /f
REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Wi ndowsUpdate" /v SusClientId /f
net start wuauserv