VDI Connection Brokers

There are only a handful of companies that are currently producing a connection broker product.  If you dig through the documentation from HP, IBM, and others they mention this “optional” magical box that serves as the bridge between the client devices and the hypervisors.  Very few of these vendors who are pushing VDI have come forward and presented a solid connection broker component, which I would consider to be one of the most critical components of VDI.  I have listed them here for convenience in evaluating end-to-end VDI solutions.

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VMware ESX 3 Upgrade

I used this to upgrade an ESX host from 3.0.1 to 3.0.2. It is likely that the same procedure can be used with future releases. Use caution when upgrading production servers as this procedure DOES take the host offline.

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New Features in ESX 3.1 and VirtualCenter 2.1

There are some new features on the horizon for the VMware Virtual Infrastructure in the latest releases of ESX 3.1 and VirtualCenter 2.1.  Although we haven’t officially seen anything on these releases the buzz is that we can expect to see some if not all of the following.

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VirtualCenter 2 with SQL Server 2005

VMware now officially supports running the VirtualCenter database on SQL Server 2005.  As you may have expected there are a few caveats and a handful of configuration items you need to take into consideration.  However, for the most part this is great news and will allow you to *finally* get rid of those SQL Server 2000 servers.

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Running VirtualCenter in a Virtual Machine

Running VirtualCenter in a virtual machine is fully supported by VMware to the same degree as if it were installed on a physical server. There are several reasons why deploying VirtualCenter in a virtual machine would be advantageous:

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