iPhone 2.0 - How much longer?

I can not wait for iPhone 2.0 to get released to the public.  I am one of the enterprise users that have been in love with the device, but unable to support an enterprise rollout due to missing features like remote wipe, and Exchange 2007 connectivity.  I hope they roll it out before July 11th, but who knows.  I would think that the 3G phones would already have 2.0 on them when they shipped, so hopefully us first generation iPhone owners won't have to wait too much longer.

The end of an era

For those that may not be aware, today is Bill Gates' last day as a full time Microsoft employee.  I know there are quite a few of us that have made a pretty good living servicing and supporting Microsoft products.  For that I would like to send a "Thanks" out to Mr. Gates.  I hope that his second career as a philanthropist is as successful as his first one.

There are some cool Bill Gates videos on Microsoft.com, and on cnet.com.

VMWorld Session Proposal

Its official, my VMware Fusion sessions didn't get selected as an official session at VMWorld 2008.  Oh well, maybe next year.  VMWorld is a great conference.  I have been a few times, and am always blown away with what VMware has up their sleeves.  The keynotes are great, and the sessions cover everything you could possibly imagine.  This year its in Vegas in mid September.  If you have thought about going, I would highly recommend it.  Who knows what they will come up with for this year's technical presentations.  Seeing Continuous Availability last year was pretty awesome.  I am sure they will probably cover some of there new applications that have come out in the last year like Site Recovery Manager, or ThinApp.  Anyways, its a great show, and I would highly recommend it.

Time is running out on Windows XP

Everyone knew that it would eventually happen, however for those of us that are purchasing Windows XP Professional licenses to run XP based virtual machines, this is a significant moment.  After 6/30/2008, many distributors will no longer be selling Windows XP Professional.  So if you are planning a VDI deployment using Windows XP Professional, you may want to get your OS licenses ahead of time, other wise you are stuck with Vista.  I do believe you can downgrade a Vista license to XP, but I am not totally sure of the process or if its actually possible.  I also don't know if this affects Volume Licensing customers as well.

Cleaning an Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse

So, I have a shiny new Macbook Pro.  My first Apple that I have really used since my days at college.  I love it.  So to go along with it, I purchased a Bluetooth Wireless Mighty Mouse.  Its a great mouse, well, most of the time.  It gets dirty incredibly easy, and the scroll ball decides to quit without warning due to dirt buildup.  Until today, I couldn't figure out a good way to clean it.  I had checked the manual, and everything that came with it, however no luck finding a solution.  Today I finally decided to check google to see if I am not the only person on the planet with this problem.  I found a great video on youtube of all places.  I will place the link at the bottom of this post.  Anyways, it worked great.  There are also several good tips on keeping it clean down in the comments of that video.

Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure - VDI is for Real

So you have taken a big step, and have began virtualizing your server environment. You get all of the benefits of virtualization: 1.) Reduced the number of physical servers in your datacenter. Therefore reducing your power and cooling requirements. 2.) Increased utilization of remaining servers through DRS clusters. 3.) Added High Availability to every single application that you have using VMware HA clusters. And a few others. Now, what's stopping you from taking these same concepts and applying them to your desktop environment? The desktop environment has been one of the hardest IT based management tasks to keep under control. This is the case for several reasons. 1.) PCs are constantly being replaced. Either through hardware failure, or lack of processing power a PC usually has about a 3 to 4 year lifespan. 2.) You aren't replacing all of the PCs at the same time. This means that you now have to manage drivers and other OEM software for each different model that you are supporting. 3.) Users store data on their local hard drives. Most of the time this isn't being backed up by your Enterprise Backup solution. When hard drives crash, businesses can lose quite a bit of critical data. This is a very large risk for small businesses. 4.) Applications and even Windows can go haywire. Files get corrupt. Users delete system files. Its just a fact of life. So, getting back to the initial idea, why can't we take all the great benefits that we get through server virtualization, and apply them at the desktop level? What if you could replace 100 400 watt desktop machines with 100 16w thin clients? Well you can. Your first step is to create a base image. Through this base image, all of your user's desktops will be created. For most of us, you will be creating Windows XP Pro or Windows Vista VM's. Remember, that Windows XP and Windows Vista OEM licenses aren't transferrable to a VM. You must buy licenses from your provider of choice for the VMs. Once you have created your base image, you then convert that Virtual Machine into a template. I like to run sysprep on the image, just before making it a template. VMware VirtualCenter can also do this as a built in feature for many operating systems as you deploy from the template. From your template, you begin deploying your VMs. Watch your physical resources to be sure that you don't oversubscribe any of your hosts. I would also suggest that you keep desktop VMs seperate from server VMs. Desktop I/O and Server I/O is quite a bit different. On the client side you have a couple of choices. To keep it simple I will go over a quick 1 to 1 scenario. This means that for every XP Machine, there is one thin client machine configured to connect to it. The other choice involves the use of a Virtual Desktop Broker software package. There are several that are available today. I haven't used any of them as of yet. VMware is also releasing an update to their VDM in the coming months. For the thin client peice I am currently using several JackPC's from Chip PC. They seem to do the job that I need them for. They are small, and fit in a wall jack. The only drawback to them, is that they are CE based, and not XP Embedded, therefore there isn't as much flexibility to them that I would like. In summary, VDI has several benefits. You get a decent costs savings in your monthly power consumption by dropping your PC power requirements by close to 90 percent. You get the ability to snapshot your client VMs that may contain mission critical data, and even use the VCB to back them up. You can now quickly provision more desktop VMs through your created template. Plus you get all the benefits of HA and DRS.