When visiting the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day in Boston, half the delegates in the bus had already bought an iPad and after seeing what a great device it was, I couldn’t resist and on the last day I bought one myself. I did get some free playtime in the bus with the iPad from David Davis before I could hold my own and he had the Wyse PocketCloud for iPad application on it. I gave it a try and was really impressed.

So, what is the Wyse PocketCloud app? From the website: “Need complete access to a cloud, your PC, Remote Desktop Services, a Terminal Server, VMware View or virtual machine from the palm of your hand? With Wyse PocketCloudâ„¢, it’s no problem! Wyse PocketCloud allows you to securely access your desktop anytime and anywhere on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.” (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

On Friday the Field Tech Day delegates of the Gestalt IT event paid a visit to Cisco where they were treated on a very good session on the VCE Vblock. This session was brought to us by “the other” Scott Lowe and Ed Saipetch. Apart from doing a very good presentation they also showed they could fight like lions against the comments of the delegates, resulting in the best session of this Tech Field Day – Boston 2010. Although Vblock is a great piece of machinery the feeling amongst the delegates was almost unanimous about Vblock being very hard to sell and offer little extra value over a self-built configuration using the same components. Writing this blog post took me quite some time reading several guides to better understand the Vblock and during this investigation I changed my mind on whether Vblock is a good or bad idea several times. I hope the following helps you make up your mind.

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by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

As you may have seen on the Gestalt IT website, I have been invited to join this great event and today I’m on my way to Boston. I’m looking forward to meeting all the delegates some I’ve know for some time, others I will be meeting for the first time this week. The program that Stephen Foskett has setup for us is intense, we’ll be hearing a lot of new things and discussing with the bright minds that came up with these great products. We will be paying a visit to Cisco, EMC, Data Robotics, Hewlett-Packard and last but not least vkernel. Should you have any questions about their products or their vision you want me to ask, feel free to post them in the comment section.

On my blog and on twitter I will try to cover the event and talk about all the interesting things that are going to be told. On twitter the hashtag will be #TechFieldDate and on my blog I will mark the post title with [Gestalt].

Disclaimer: My trip, hotel and food during this event is paid for by the sponsors of the event. However, I’m not obliged to blog about it or only write positive posts.

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

For my home lab I’m always testing several configs, creating VMs, removing VMs, reinstalling hosts and breaking them on purpose. Sometimes I have 40 VMs running and a week later I’m down to just 5. This week I stumbled upon something strange when cleaning up unused VMs. On my 3 hosts cluster I had enabled DRS and DPM and I also had HA active. Just a few numbers of VMs where running and as expected DRS started freeing host number 1 and then, thanks to DPM, host 1 was shutdown. Nothing strange here. But a few minutes later, host number 2 was freed too by DRS and DPM decided to shutdown host number 2 as well. This surely was unexpected. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

Just stumbled on this link to a list of VMware Tools version numbers, which shows that the new ESX version will probably be the 4.1 version:

# VMware version-mapping file.
# This file provides a one-to-one mapping between VMware Tools for
# ESX/ESXi version-number codes, and paths to OSP repositories suitable
# for that Tools version.
8289        ../unsupported/tools/esx/4.1
8288        ../unsupported/tools/esx/4.1
8194        esx/4.0u1
8193        esx/4.0
8192        esx/4.0
7304        esx/3.5u5
7303        esx/3.5u4
7302        esx/3.5u3

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments