I made my first trip to a VMworld conference this week and had a fantastic time learning in sessions and labs and mixing with some great virtualisation minds from around Europe and the rest of the World. I would highly recommend anyone with an interest in virtualisation to take the opportunity to go to one in the future if possible. I thought I would put together a post of some of the highlights, so in no particular order other than notes I made on the way, home here goes!

If you have been following my blog for a while you will know that between November 2009 and July 2010 I ran a available for download as a PDF. You’ll be pleased to know I have spent many hours tidying it up, making links to other cmdlets internal to the document throughout and it has also been thoroughly reviewed by fellow PowerShell MVPs Thomas Lee , Richard Siddaway and Aleksandar Nikolic - I am most appreciative of their efforts in reviewing and the feedback given!

I recently had another article published over at the Simple-Talk Sysadmin site entitled ‘PowerShell Version 2: What is new and why is it important?’. I hope you find it useful.

Kirk Munro, PowerShell MVP, has announced this year’s PowerGUI PowerPack contest. Create a PowerPack or Add-On for PowerGUI and you’ll be in with a chance of a prize if you are deemed to be one of the winners. The prizes are high value Amazon.com vouchers, however both Alan Renouf and I will testify to the fact that winning can give your profile and IT career a real boost! So I’d encourage you to enter and believe me you will also learn something too from putting a PowerPack together and feel good for making a community contribution.

Thanks for those who attended tonight’s User Group event on PowerShell remoting. I mentioned during the presentation that I would make the slides available on my blog, you can view or download them from below. PowerShell 2 remoting View more presentations from jonathanmedd. test

On Tuesday 14th September 20:30 (BST) I will be presenting for an online meeting of the UK PowerShell User Group. The topic will be PowerShell 2.0 Remoting and I will be looking at what you need to make this available and the consequent benefits of doing so. Sign up details are below: http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2010/09/02/september-powershell-user-group.aspx

If you run Tivoli Monitoring 6.2 to monitor Windows Server systems and use other applications to query WMI, e.g. PowerShell and Get-WmiObject, then you may receive the error ‘Server buffers are full and data cannot be accepted’. Restarting the WMI service will temporaily clear it, but the issue is liable to come back again. This can occur because of a file handle leak in the ITM Windows OS agent when collecting “Processor Information” attribute group.

Recently I noticed an issue with some Citrix VMs which were displaying the Safely Remove Hardware option to users logged in to that server. These VMs were on Hardware Version 7 with the latest VMware Tools installed. Both of the above hardware components were using two of the HW7 only drivers, PVSCSI and VMXNET3. The below KB article explains how to disable the HotPlug capability so that the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ message no longer appears in the system tray.

I had an excellent first impression of this experience because whilst I was waiting for the DVDs to ship from the US I was informed that the same training course was also available for me online so I could start straight away! I thought this was a fantastic idea and a terrific surprise I was not expecting. If you’re like me, then once you decide to get into a topic you want to get on with it as soon as possible, so not having to wait for the DVDs to arrive was great.

One of the major new features within Exchange 2010 is the Database Availabilty Group (DAG). This replaces High Availability options from previous versions of Exchange such as SCR and CCR - it essentially works by having multiple copies of the same Exchange databases replicated across multiple Exchange servers. Exchange 2010 is supported on hardware virtualisation platforms provided the conditions in this Technet article are met. Whilst looking at various options for a possible Exchange 2010 deployment for a user base in the hundreds (it obviously made sense to look at what possibilities are available if deciding to virtualise the mailbox server role) I stumbled across this blog post which suggested that whilst Exchange 2010 was supported as virtual, when running a DAG it was not supported if part of a virtualised cluster.