This is fantastic. Time to get off my butt and get back to blogging.

Check out the VMWare View 4 Evaluators Guide!

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-View4-Evaluators-Guide.pdf

So what do you get when you have an HP C7000 Chassis, 2 brocade switches and a EMC AX4-5 Clarrion, or CX4-120 and some VMWare licenses floating around…. Yeah that’s right!  A big headache.. or maybe a chance to do something really cool! I’m going to attempt and write one section at a time for a total of 4 sections. Ok, so you’ve bought all this equipment or are maybe thinking about it… but you aren’t sure where to go from there?  Well let’s take a look at some visuals and walk through the process.  As for my given situation, we needed a solution for some of our major hub site here at work that were maxed out on power, switch ports, heat issues in the data center, and had ailing hardware (gateway….long story).  Sure, you’re thinking a quick fix right?  Throw the gateway servers out the door and buy some robust HP / Dell computers?  Yeah, that sounded like a reasonable idea to me as well!  But, we had a budgetary constraints, and a slough of other layer 7 (management) factors that I won’t even get into…  Regardless, in our case we decided to go with VMWare and virtualize our servers… Sounds cool, huh?  You betcha!  It’s pretty l33t technology and I can’t get enough of it.. everyday I swear I learn something new.  So down to the first order of business, where do we begin?

Well, luckily VMWare has a handy dandy little consolidation tool that comes built-in with VirtualCenter.  We used that tool in our environment to analzye all of our physical servers.  When that was said and done, we had close to 110 servers that were canidates for virtualization.  After a lengthy battle to win-over our finance team, we were awarded some money to build our environment.  This quick tutorial will be broken down into the following configurations:  go through setting up a HP C7000, configuratin

Check it out! I’m going to upgrade hopefully later this week and see what’s improved.

http://app.connect.vmware.com/e/er.aspx?s=524&lid=6887&elq=6C4F2094751545CD89E12D649DDC99D1

Here are the official release notes.

VMware View Manager 3.1 Release Notes

These release notes cover the following topics:

• whatsnew
• beforebegin
• knownissues
• fixedissues

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The vanilla view portal is nice and all but I wanted to add some flavor to it.  In our set-up we have external security connection servers and internal connection servers.  First off, let’s have a look at the splash page to see what’s available… Using my unsupported client I launched Firefox along with FireBug (a great web development tool, if you don’t have this one installed already) and started to inspect the splash page layout.  After looking through the code for awhile, it appears to have some xhtml / css / and graphic files in two different directories.  These directories consist of:

C:\Program Files\VNware\VMware View\Server\broker\webapps\admin\images\

C:\Program Files\VNware\VMware View\Server\sslgateway\conf\docroot\error

C:\Program Files\VNware\VMware View\Server\broker\webapps\ROOT\styles\default\

So lets get down to business!  First and foremost make a backup copy of the folders listed above……… OK.  Moving onwards.  Let’s change the VMWARE logo to reflect our corporate logo.

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files\VNware\VMware View\Server\broker\webapps\ROOT\ styles\default\ and open the file banner_title_v_portal.gif with your favorite editor.  I like to use GIMP (open-source) or Photoshop (commerical/retail) products depending on what you need to do.  Alternatively, you can always use good old paint (if you’re using a Windows pc of course).
2. Modify the graphic as you see fit and save it replacing the default picture.
3. To change the logo navigate to  C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\broker\webapps\ROOT\ styles\default\ and edit the file banner_logo.gif
4. Lastly, there’s one last image located on the top left corner, this file is in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\broker\webapps\ROOT\styles\default\ and is named banner_vmware.gif.
5. Let’s go ahead and change the Title of the Page, this can be found via:  C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\broker\webapps\ROOT\styles\default\. The file you want to open with textpad,notepad,wordpad is:  style.css.
6. To change the graphic file (the .ico) replace favicon.ico located in directory  C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\broker\webapps\ROOT\ with a modified .ico of your chosing.
7. Server\broker\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\web.xml holds all the data

Sweet, I can’t wait to go to good ole’ San Francisco!  Nothing like the Moscone Center in San Fran.  August 31st-Sept 3rd.

Here’s the link:

VMWorld

I was fumbling around with the vmware support site trying to get my login to work through my EVDO connection when I actually took the time to read the left hand column sidebar.  Much to my amazement I found the Patch Management Alerts.  If you aren’t already signed up, the following link will do the trick:

 Patch Management Alerts

So, I was presented with a unique opportunity to allow a 3rd party into our network by way of any secured means to transfer files.   My initial thought is this would be a slam dunk as their own requirement was to have a way to transfer files from one to another.  Yeah.. I know what you are thinking, go ahead and install Linux, harden the system, set-up local users and lock them to a directory and then configure sftp, DONE.  Well, after our kick-off meeting things started to get more complex (as they always do) once you start asking detailed questions and trying to map out some logical work flow chart in your head.

I was going to just do local policies but figured why not try and use SteadyState as I used prior for all of our kiosk terminals that the public use.

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So.. I’ve been playing around with View for some quite some time, and ran into an interesting issue regarding workstations dropping off the face of the network after performing a re-clone / recomposes / refresh with our persistent linked clone pools…. those pesky SID errors and kerberos messages.. *sigh*.

It turns out it had to do with our AD container relative distinguished names and how we have our OU’s setup within our organization.  The syntax for the QuuickPrep Settings I could not find anywhere in the documentation or in the communities.

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