Mike Tabor

VMware has announced that the Android running LG Intuition and Motorola Razr M can now both be purchased with VMWare Horizon Mobile software. The VMWare Horizon Mobile software separates the devices into isolated partitions that allow users to keep their work applications and data separate from their personal applications and data.

Today, VMware and Verizon Wireless announced that the Android-based LG Intuition and Motorola Razr M can now be purchased with VMware’s Horizon Mobile software, which separates the device into isolated partitions that keep a user’s work applications and data separate from personal stuff. Licenses to Horizon Mobile start at $125 per user and can be purchased through local resellers of VMware and Verizon Wireless.

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VMware is released a maintenance update for VMware Workstation to version 9.0.2. The update is available for free for all VMware Workstation 9.x customers.

Mostly just bug fixes and a few improvements, here are a few highlights:

• Fedora 18 supported as a guest operating system
• Windows 8 host permissions issues fixed
• VMware Tool updated to support the latest Linux kernels
• Improved general host resource management
• OVF Tool has been updated to version 3.0.2
• Virtual machine sharing improvements
• Memory leak which impacted Windows hosts has been fixed

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Before you go updating your vSphere to the new 5.1 version that was just released, VMware had just released this alert yesterday (9/12) that vSphere 5.1 is currently NOT compatible with any version of VMware View.

vSphere 5.1 is in the process of being certified against VMware View. We recommend that you do not upgrade vSphere above the supported versions listed in the VMware View 5.1 Release Notes.

For further updates and more information on this alert, refer to KB article:
vSphere 5.1 is not compatible with any versions VMware View (2035268).

If you don’t use VMware View, and are ready to upgrade to vSphere 5.1 be sure to check out the Installing vCenter Server 5.1 best practices from VMware.

VMware vCenter 5.0 Update 1a has just been released and is the first major update since version 5.0.

The main improvements being:

• vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1a introduces support for the following vCenter Databases
  • Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, Standard ONE Edition Release 2 [11.2.0.3] – 64 bit
  • Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, Standard ONE Edition Release 2 [11.2.0.3] – 32 bit
• vCenter Server Appliance Database Support: The DB2 express embedded database provided with the vCenter Server Appliance has been replaced with VMware vPostgres database. This decreases the appliance footprint and reduces the time to deploy vCenter Server further.

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VMware has just released it’s forth minor update for VMware Workstation 8, bringing it up to 8.0.4. The looks to contain mostly a few bug and security fixes.

General Issues

• Linux guests running the Linux kernel version 2.6.34 or later could not be pinged from the host via an IPv6 address.
• On rare occasions, Linux guests would suddenly fail to Autofit or enter Unity.
• Unity mode would exit if the title bar of an application contained certain non UTF-8 encoded extended ASCII characters.
• On Windows hosts, the VMware Workstation user interface sometimes became unresponsive when minimized from full-screen mode if the suggestion balloon was being displayed.
• On Windows hosts, the user interface sometimes became unresponsive if the application was rendered on an extended display that was abruptly disconnected.

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These are the few steps I do when creating a new "Golden" image. Luckily I don’t have to do these steps all the time as I’ll create the "Golden" image when there is a new upgrade such as when we went from View 4.6 to View 5.0.1. I like to have a new fresh machine using new virtual hardware from the start. You could certainly just upgrade the virtual hardware on the "Golden" image, I just prefer to start clean.

At any rate, here’s my list. Hopefully someone might find it somewhat useful and maybe even others can improve upon it.

Preparing a new virtual machine

1. Create New Virtual Machine – FILE > NEW > VIRTUAL MACHINE (CTRL+N)
2. Under Configuration select CUSTOM.
3. Select a Name, Folder, Host, Cluster, and Storage.
4. Under Guest Operating System select Windows and then Windows 7 32bit under the Version drop down.
5. Select which Network (VLAN) and under Adapter select VMXNET 3.
6. Configure disk size to 30GB THIN provisioned.

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