One of my biggest pet peeve when it comes to deploying the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) and other OVF/OVA directly onto an ESXi host is the lack of OVF property support. If you have deployed the VCSA before, you are probably aware of the different user experience when deploying to a vCenter Server versus deploying directly to an ESXi host. For those of you who are not familiar, the difference is when you deploy an OVF/OVA that contains custom OVF properties such as the VCSA, you have the ability to provide input to these parameters when deploying to a vCenter Server as seen in the screenshot below.
Want a free VMware Workstation 10 License?
Last week, I gave away seven free VMware Fusion 6 Professional license worth a total of $903 USD to seven lucky readers as part of a fun give away for my fellow Twitter followers. I know a couple of you who were asking about VMware Workstation licenses and it looks like the Workstation team has just answered that call 🙂
I have in my hands, seven VMware Workstation 10 licenses worth a grand total of $1,743 ($249 USD per license). I would like to give a big thanks to the VMware Workstation team for donating these seven licenses to me so that I could give away to my Twitter followers. If you are interested in learning more about VMware Workstation or have any feedback/questions for the Workstation team, you can follow and interact with them on Twitter at @vmw_workstation. One pretty neat feature of Workstation is the ability to manage your ESXi hosts including Free ESXi which really could come in handy.
So, if you want a super easy way to win a free VMware Workstation 10 license key, then CAREFULLY READ through the instructions below to see how you can score a free Workstation license!
How to Win:
- You must be following me on Twitter, I am at @lamw and I will be contacting winners through Twitter.
- Leave a short comment on this post on what this VMware Workstation license key would enable you to do, whether that is solving a particular problem or challenge.
- What is the one feature that you are most excited about for new users or what new feature would you like to see for existing VMware Workstation customers.
- Include your Twitter handle in the comment
- Must not be a VMware employee, I will check
Simple, right? I will randomly select seven winners from the list of comments in one weeks time, so make sure you leave your Twitter handle in the post else you will not be eligible to win. This is open to everyone, you do not need to live in the US to win.
Winners:
@Rob_Coote
@phil_wiffen
@MaureenCioe
@billyboskovski
@k00laidIT
@Hazy2k10
@lukeaw
How cool is that!? Using VMware Workstation to manage your ESXi hosts (including Free ESXi) & VMs
To be completely honest, I have not played with VMware Workstation in quite awhile as my day-to-day job primarily revolves around our Enterprise suite of products. In a recent meeting that I was in, I picked up on some interesting tidbits about the latest version of VMware Workstation 10 and after giving it a try in my lab, I thought I would share one very cool feature that you may be aware of (there is actually a lot of cool features in latest release, check what's new here).
The very first thing I noticed is that unlike other downloads from VMware in which you need to register the product and get an evaluation key. VMware Workstation can be downloaded without any registration and you can start the 30-day free trial immediately after installation! I think that is a really slick and can also come in handy if you need to install Workstation right away for something. Make sure you download from this page here by clicking on "Try for Free" instead of going to www.vmware.com/downloads
One of the capabilities that Workstation introduced probably a couple of releases ago was the ability to connect to a remote system whether that is another Workstation instance, vCenter Server and even an ESXi host. At the time I assumed this was to enable users to easily cold migrate a Virtual Machine that was created locally onto one of these remote targets.
What I did not realize was that you could do a lot more with this capability than to just copy offline Virtual Machines. To my surprise I found that you could fully manage the Virtual Machines on these remote targets including changing the virtual hardware configurations such as adding memory, cpu, disk, etc. guestOS as well as provision new Virtual Machines. The VM Console is fully functional leveraging VMRC and you can even connect to Free ESXi instances and get same capabilities you had with the legacy vSphere C# Client. The other neat thing about this is you can also manage your Virtual Hardware 10 VMs even though the latest vSphere C# Client does not allow this because VMware Workstation 10 is vHW10 aware.
Here is a screenshot of managing my Free ESXi host which is running on my Apple Mac Mini as well as my vCenter Server. As you can see you can have multiple connections open up which is quite useful, especially if you have a couple of Free ESXi hosts in which you would like a single pane of glass to manage.
Another nice feature is the amount of backwards capability it provides for vSphere. You can go as far back as vSphere 4.1 (vCenter Server & ESXi). To prove this in my environment, I provisioned a Nested ESXi running on vSphere 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5 and connected them all to Workstation. This is another great way to manage standalone ESXi hosts if you still need to run older versions.
Lastly, you do not need to be running the Windows version of VMware Workstation to get these benefits. You can also do the same using Workstation for Linux and here is a screenshot of running Workstation on an Ubuntu desktop.
As you can see this is just one of many new and cool capabilities of VMware Workstation 10 and I have to say for $250, this is a steal to be able to easily manage not only your VMs running locally but also remote systems like vCenter Server, ESXi hosts including Free ESXi which is a huge deal IMHO. The Workstation team really knocked it out of the park and I am glad I had the opportunity to check out their latest release. I also hope VMware Fusion will be getting these capabilities in the near future! Simon, I hope you see this 😉
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