Random Short Take #78

Welcome to Random Short Take #78. We’re hurtling towards the silly season. Let’s get random.

VMware Converter 3.0.3

As I mentioned previously, I had the opportunity last week to use VMware Converter 3.0.3. It worked a charm on a slightly odd P2V. Odd in the sense that the customer ripped 2 hard disks out of a HP Blade BL20P and put them in a pizzabox server, booted it up, logged me in and said go fo it. As the release notes promised, you can now “convert individual volumes on a single physical disk from the source physical machine to separate and independent virtual disks across different datastores”. This would have made things a lot easier at quite a few sites where the physicals used mirrored disks with volumes that needed to go to different datastores. And it seems quicker too. The whole P2V only took less than 2 hours, including mucking about in device manager and testing connectivity.

VMware Converter 3.0.3 available (Standalone Enterprise Edition)

I noticed this morning that Converter 3.0.3 (build 89816) is now available for download. I will have the good (!) fortune of using it next week, so I’ll post if I have any issues or otherwise. The release notes can be found here.

VMware ESX Server 3.5 and other things available

As you’re no doubt aware – I’m usually behind the times. But I just noticed, within one day of it being released – that VMware ESX Server 3.5, VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 and VMware Consolidated Backup 1.1 are now available for download. I also noticed that a version of VMware Converter 3.0.2 Update 1 has been available for a week. That’s great. And what I like most is that I spent the weekend in Melbourne using slightly older versions of all of these products … The release notes for the various products are here and here. Enjoy kids!

VMware Converter 3.0.2 released

So, as you can see, I haven’t been keeping up with what’s new on the VMware website. This just landed in my inbox “VMware Converter 3.0.2 – a maintenance release – build# 59994 – was released on October 18th, 2007 and is available for download”. About bloody time. And there are some cool things in it like “Support for HW v6 platforms (Workstation 6.x, ACE 2.x, Fusion 1.x)” and “Support for importing Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0 images”. Woot! Well, it might be good. Download the standard edition from here, or log in with your store account to get the enterprise version.