VirtualVCP IT Virtualization

Ever wanted to build a home lab to study new technologies such as vCloud? I bet you have! However, all of us know that it could cost quite a bit to get it up and running. In addition to the initial capital expenditure in getting your home lab up and running, it also costs a small fortune in energy costs to keep it going. Well, now there's another way to getting a lab up and running, just a lot faster and much more cost effective.

I'll let Mike Laverick explain it to you, and if you get to his site in time, there might even be a PROMO code to get you started.

Read Mike's comprehensive write-up here:

http://www.mikelaverick.com/2013/03/not-ready-bare-metal-cloud-for-your-auto-lab/

If you’ve ever had to answer the following question “Is application X supported on the VMware Platform?”, then you will probably be familiar with the website that VMware has set up over at http://vmware-alliances.force.com/supportedapps/. It’s a website that is dedicated to Business Applications on the VMware Platform and currently, at the time of writing this post, shows that there are 3707 applications that are officially supported to run on the “VMware Platform”.

What if you were passed a list of 3500 applications that a customer has deployed in their environment? How would you go about verifying each application’s support status? You could of course sit down and manually search the website for each of the applications in your list, but to be honest, I wouldn’t want to be doing that, nor would I be happy to pay an employee a salary to sit down and carry out such a task. The better way to do this of course would be to fully or at least partially automate the process.

There are a few ways that we could automate such a process. One would be to look and see if the website provides some kind of an API that you could query. If it doesn’t have an API, then you could do what we have done, and create a .CSV or .XLSX file which contains all of the data.

A colleague of mine was asked to do exactly what I described above. He was asked to verify the support status of some 3000+ applications on VMware vSphere. So we sat down and thought about how we could extract the current supported applications form the “VMware Business Applications on the VMware Platform” website into a CSV file. A few minutes after we sat down, we came up with the following theoretical method:

• We would download the raw HTML of each of the 287 pages of the website using wget.
• Once the raw HTML is on disk, we would parse the HTML using a Perl script and generate the CSV.

So my colleague set off and started writing a script that could download all of the website pages to HTML files on disk. Whilst he was doing this, I started working away on a small Perl script to parse the HTML. To make a long story short, about an hour after getting the idea we had all of the data in a CSV file that we could easily work with.

However, getting the data was still a two-step process. You had to download the HTML to disk using one script and then parse the HTML using another script. So, in order to make this a little more streamlined, I sat down over the weekend and made my Perl script a little better. The script can now download each page from the website and parse the HTML into a CSV file on the fly.

Although I would love to help the community, I have decided to not make our scripts available. However, I have decided to make the data available.
The data file contains the following data:

• Application Name
• Vendor
• Support Status
• Support Page (Links to the Application Support Page on the VMware Website)

The List of Supported Business Applications can be downloaded from here

As most people in the VMware Virtualisation Community will know, we have been working on a new book entitled “VMware vSphere Performance”. The book was first announced in June 2011, and although being listed as available to pre-order on sites such as Amazon, the book is still yet to be published almost two years later.

Since the project began back in 2011, we have suffered several setbacks, with issues ranging form changes at the project management level, to issues with finding relevant performance related issues in order to produce content. I'm not going to go into much detail as to what exactly the issues were, however, since December 2011 the project has stalled and started up again on several occasions, and for the past year, there has been very little movement in terms of content being generated and therefore reviewed for the book. We have missed several targets in terms of publication dates. The book was originally planned to be released for VMware vSphere 5 and would cover VMware vSphere 4 and 5. We missed the publication for vSphere 5, and then vSphere 5.1 at which point Sybex (an imprint of Wiley) decided to push the publication date back even further and wait for the next release of VMware vSphere, whenever that may be, which would make sense, as at the time the shelf life of a book that is focused on vSphere 5 would not have been long enough to make it worth publishing.

Ever since the publication date got pushed back again, there have been even less interaction between the authors and the editorial teams, and I must admit that there were times that I had though that the book was dead. However, yesterday, the 24th of January, after a conversation with our technical editor, I decided to get in touch with all the authors, and the acquisition editor at Sybex, in order to determine the current state of the project. I have now received responses from most of the parties involved and to make a long story short, this is what is now going to happen.

We are yet to work out the finer details, but as of today, myself and co-author Jonathan Fitch will be taking control of the project in a much more involved way. Previously we were simply writing and submitting content and the rewriting the same content after editorial reviews. We are yet to determine who the “lead” author will be, but together we will review what has been done and what still needs doing, and together we will drive this thing forward. There is now a lot of work to be done, but we will be pushing hard for the next three to four months.

I would like to thank everyone who's been waiting for the book to hit the stands for their patience. I would also like to thank co-author Jonathan for his good work on the book thus far as well as technical editor Matt Liebowitz for his patience, understanding and words of encouragement.

I've been looking into enabling audio recording in VMware View Desktops. This would be useful as it would allow the use of applications such as Skype and TeamSpeak within VMware View published desktops.

By default, the VMware View Agent which is installed within the desktop operating system installs the VMware Virtual Audio Driver. The VMware Virtual Audio Driver enables audio playback from the View Desktop to be played through the VMware View Client. However, the VMware Virtual Audio Driver does not enable analog audio input from the View Client to the View desktop. With the VMware Virtual Audio Driver, audio recording within the View Desktop from an audio source connected to the View Client, such as a microphone, is not possible and applications that rely on Audio input will not function correctly.

One workaround is to install a USB sound card on the View Client machine and use USB redirection to redirect the USB sound card to the View Desktop. Although this works, I've had mixed results during testing, with problems including poor recording quality and at times, a delay in audio.

After a quick search, I stumbled upond a VMware KB Article that provided me with hope of a better solution than USB redirection. VMware KB Article 2000611 states that in order for audio input to be enabled within View Desktops, an audio driver from Teradici needs to be installed. The Teradici Virtual Audio Driver will enable support for Analog Audio input from the View Client to the View Desktop. The driver can only be downloaded directly from the Teradici support site, although the support site does require registration in order to access the download. Once registered the driver can be downloaded from the following page:

http://techsupport.teradici.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=15164

I've only tested the driver with Windows XP View Desktops. I was quite impressed with the recording audio quality and latency that the driver provides.

Although the driver works very well with VMware View Clients running on Windows, the same cannot be said for the VMware View Client for Linux (Versions 1.5 & 1.6). After going back to the Teradici Support site and reading the driver release notes, my fear that the VMware View Client for Linux does not provide the neccesary audio input functionality required for analog audio inputs to work in View Desktops accessed from Linux. The release notes state:

“Note Linux-based VMware View Clients support audio output, but do not support analog audio input (this requires audio input support in the View Linux client, please contact VMware if you are interested in this capability).”

I would love for this functionality to be included within the VMware View Client for Linux, as I have now updated most of my personal computers at home to run Linux desktops.