VBScripts BLOG

I personally think that Powershell is one of the best initiatives Microsoft has launched in the last few years. But anyone who is hoping to start with Powershell V2 soon will be disappointed after reading this post.

This post of the PowershellTeam gives us an estimate of when Powershell V2 is to be released. Only no specific date is mentioned because that information is not to be released at this time. But from the post I get the impression that its no sooner than mid 2009 Powershell V2 is to be released.

And now I’m a bit sad because I’m a big Powershell enthusiast.

Login Virtual Session Index (Login VSI), is a free and easy to use benchmarking methodology from Login Consultants. The Login VSI is a complete toolset that allows you to easily compare scalability all of today’s major virtualization platforms and technologies.

Login VSI supports most recent Windows OS’s (including 32 and 64bit), Office 2003 and 2007, all major application streaming technologies and most importantly both SBC and VDI. The next beta (out in a couple of weeks), will also include full support for benchmarking VDI environments”
“Because the setup is so simple there is an infinite amount of combinations and technologies you can now compare. For instance, you can also measure the relative impact of a virus scanner or performance optimization technologies. Additionally, Login VSI will be a perfect tool to compare scalability of different virtualization platforms.”
Login VSI can be downloaded from here.

To Source: Login consultants

Login Consultants releases updated versions of the SoftGrid OSD Editor and SoftGrid Migration Tool to support the upcoming version of Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (formely SoftGrid) which is now still in beta.

New in the SoftGrid OSD Editor 2.1, besides some minor fixes, is the ability to support and manage Dynamic Suiting Composition in OSD files. This is a new feature of SoftGrid 4.5 which allows interaction between different virtualized applications which run in their own “sandboxed” environment. The SoftGrid Migration Tool (SGMT) 1.1 has also been updated to work with SoftGrid 4.5. This version of the SGMT also supports new features of the latest SoftGrid Sequencer version, like the ability to set type of Compression, Block Size and save a Virtual Application in Microsoft Installer (MSI) format.

The SoftGrid OSD Editor 2.1 and the SoftGrid Migration Tool 1.1 can be downloaded through our downloads section.

To Source: Rodney

NetApp have released a powerful new addition to the Open Systems SnapVault range for VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

OSSV installs directly into the VMware ESX service console and acts as a very light-weight interface to backup Virtual Machines on NetApp storage and non-NetApp storage. It works best with NetApp Protection Manager, but works well as a stand-alone product.  There’s also an excellent Best Practice guide for OSSV available here.

To source: Paul Shannon

The last few weeks it wasn’t fun having a VMWare ESX environment. SQL transaction logs that were out of control, ESX server that lost there iSCSI connection, etc.

One of the thing I was investigating was the size of our virtual center database. What I found was that data (events, tasks, etc) is being stored in the database but never deleted.

When browsing the VMWare site I found this SQL script in the knowledgebase of VMWare. The script inspects the database for data older than a certain date. The script works for virtual center 2.0 and 2.5.

———————————————————–
– Use one of these methods to specify the data cutoff date
– SET @CUTOFF_DATE = GETUTCDATE()-180
SET @CUTOFF_DATE = ‘2008/01/01′ <– cut off date
———————————————————–

Default the script count the rows that can be deleted. If you set deletedata to 1 than the script will purge the data from the database.I removed 2.5 million rows from our Virtual Center database and we noticed an increase of performance.

Use it carefully!!! Make your backups.