Virtual Snow Leopard Server

 Posted on April 22, 2011  |  Erik

Whoah! This one slipped by my radar, but contains a very interesting tidbit that will join my two competing passions: Apple and Virtualization. The article from virtualization.infohas a list of leaked features from the next major release of vSphere (number 5 for those of you counting). When the article first crossed my RSS feed, I didn’t read all the way to the bottom, figuring that I’d wait for the beta program to start and then really dig in my teeth since I’m already good and busy with vSphere 4. [Read More]

Asymco on the numbers

 Posted on April 15, 2011  |  Erik

If Asymco isn’t already in your RSS feed, it should be. His newest entry concerning the latest numbers from Gartner and IDC PC shipment numbers points out some interesting trends that are being completely ignored by the other analysts looking at the same numbers. It also has possibly the tallest chart I’ve seen on the web. Views on this market depend entirely on how you (arbitrarily) decide to segment it. Are the new tablets “media tablets” or just the next logical evolution of portable computing and thus extremely personal “Personal Computers”. [Read More]

Odd ESX behavior on USB pass-through

 Posted on April 15, 2011  |  Erik

I ran across an interesting problem recently with the (relatively) new USB passthrough feature on some ESXi 4.1 and 4.1 Update 1 machines. For some reason, I would get into a situation where I couldn’t add any USB devices to any VMs. After digging around a bit it seems that you can produce this behavior by removing a USB device from a VM that is attached to an external hub. I was using an 8 port Trust hub that has two hubs internally. [Read More]

Nice little switch for ESX

 Posted on March 22, 2011  |  Erik

I’m currently building a little self-contained two server appliance for a client and one of the things we were looking for was a small 8 port switch capable of handling trunked VLANs, and inexpensive enough that we could include two for redundancy. After some poking around the interwebs, we ran across the SLM2008 from Cisco (!) which is perfect. Cheap here in France at around 85€ street price this is a great little switch that is perfectly capable of handling not only port level VLAN assignment, but also VLAN trunking. [Read More]

Something goofy with VDR

 Posted on March 21, 2011  |  Erik

There’s something that’s confused me with VMware Data Recovery that I’m wondering about. If you’ve ever watched the performance counters on the backup data stores assigned to VDR, one thing you notice right away is the very high level of read IOps. Glancing at it quickly that doesn’t seem to make any sense, since it’s the destination for your backups, not the source. Looking further at it, it appears that there is a high level of read operations of 4KB. [Read More]

Omnigraffle for the win!

 Posted on March 15, 2011  |  Erik

OK, I’ll admit to being an unabashed fan of the OmniGroup and their software packages for a long time now. That is because they consistently deliver quality software that does exactly what I want, in a way that I find easy and effective to use. OmniGraffle has been my go-to diagram editor for a number of years now, but I’ve been on the fence now for a while considering OmniGraffle for the iPad. [Read More]

Blast from the past

 Posted on March 14, 2011  |  Erik

I’m finally getting a little further along in my personal project to get better organized dealing with paper records, I’m trying Paperless from Mariner software which seems to be much nicer than most of the other apps I’ve tried so far (but any other recommendations are welcome). So I was wading through the papers from a box pulled down out of the attic and ran across a folder of newspaper clippings including this gem: [Read More]

Making money in the mobile economy

 Posted on March 2, 2011  |  Erik

An (as usual) interesting article from Tim Bray on making money in the mobile market. Then I tripped over John Gruber’s note that highlights the odd juxtaposition that software is considered expensive at $10, but somehow an eBook at $8 is not. This spun off a couple of ideas. First and foremost, are these two things really different in any appreciable manner today? I’m starting to think that ultimately, in many cases, they are the same thing, especially for apps with relatively little server-side dependencies. [Read More]

OS X Server is dead, long live Lion

 Posted on February 25, 2011  |  Erik

Holy cr*p!!! It appears that Lion will a href=“http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/"integrate OS X Server/a features in the standard version. Obviously, this will need to be explored to see exactly which of the server apps are included and maintained, but this is a huge deal. OS X Server at $999 was an interesting offer that went head to head with Windows Server Standard Edition from a price perspective. Then the price dropped to $499 which was a really interesting offer when you look at the value of the integrated software like the integrated LDAP directory, mail server, dns server, web server, wiki, streaming server, etc. [Read More]

iPad Retina Display?

 Posted on January 11, 2011  |  Erik

This seems to be the subject of the day (although somewhat pushed to the background with Steve Jobs’ medical leave announcement). If true, it’s clear that Apple’s approach will be a strict resolution doubling, in precisely the same manner as was done for the iPhone 4. This is an absolute requirement for ensuring app compatibility and simple evolution. I’m desperately hoping the rumour is true because this would put yet another nail in the coffin of paper in my life. [Read More]