Thursday, February 7, 2013

Maryland VMUG Meeting 2/6

I attended another great presentation by the Maryland VMUG last night. As always, the team puts together a great evening. Here's a quick recap for those who are interested.

InMage gave a presentation on their vContinuum software which provides automated disaster recovery for virtual machines. It's an alternative to SRM, and InMage claims that their product is less expensive due to the smaller licensing packs they offer (packs of 8 with InMage versus packs of 25 with VMware). The software replicates your guests to an alternate site; the hypervisor isn't aware of what's going on. The presentation was really put together well, and their engineer was very knowledgable of the product and many use cases.

We were also introduced to VMware's Mirage product, which is AWESOME. It's a really clever solution to desktop migrations. As someone who has seen several organizations struggle with migrating from XP to Windows 7, I really latched on to Mirage. In short, you push a Mirage client to a Windows XP desktop. That client will download a pre-defined Windows 7 image (that you've built according to your standards and policies) to the XP machine in the background. When the download is complete, you reboot, the install completes, and you're running Windows 7. (There's LOTS that happens in the background to make this work, and there's a bit more to it than this, but you get the idea). No helpdesk visits to each desktop, no backing up user data to a temporary location (Mirage leverages USMT to move that to the new OS). Even works over long distances.

So looks like I'll be installing Mirage today.

If you're in the area, I encourage you to sign up for Maryland VMUG events in the future.
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