PC market downshifting, says Gartner

The big news in Gartner’s report is that Dell passed Acer to take over the second place position in the global PC market behind perennial leader Hewlett-Packard.

It’s the first time Dell has held the second-place spot in Gartner’s rankings since the fourth quarter of 2008. Gartner credits Dell’s investment in enterprise PC feature upgrades for its improvement.

via PC market downshifting, says Gartner – Computerworld.

Converting VMWare Workstation images to VMWare ESXi 3.5

Use SCP to copy your Workstation files over to the ESX server. The path is /vmfs/volumes/YourDataStore. Next, ssh into your ESX server and run the following command:

vmkfstools -i sourcefile.vmdk /vmfs/vmfsname/destinationfile.vmdk

Once that process is complete you can point ESX at that file and start it up. Make sure you delete the source files so you aren’t wasting space on the ESX server.

via Righteous Hack » Converting VMWare Workstation images to VMWare ESXi 3.5.

This worked.  The VMware converter failed on two VMs made with Workstation but copying them over and using this command does the trick.  Problem solved! (I hope)

Converter completely failed on Windows 7 and apparently there’s a hack where the type of OS needs to be changed in Workstation settings for the VM.   My PBX in a flash vm wouldn’t boot from its hd after conversion because the converter lost its partition.  I confirmed this by booting vm into knoppix and checking the partitions.  IMHO, converter creates more work than just copying the vm manually.  I fixed my piaf vm by manually copying the .vmdk file over and using the command above.  Will do more experiments later.

Linux Server Cluster for Load Balancing

The Linux Virtual Server is a highly scalable and highly available server built on a cluster of real servers, with the load balancer running on the Linux operating system. The architecture of the server cluster is fully transparent to end users, and the users interact as if it were a single high-performance virtual server. For more information, click here.

via The Linux Virtual Server Project – Linux Server Cluster for Load Balancing.

Linux Virtual Server Tutorial

The Linux Virtual Server Project (LVS) allows load balancing of networked services such as web and mail servers using Layer 4 Switching. It is extremely fast and allows such services to be scaled to service 10s or 100s of thousands of simultaneous connections. The purpose of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to use various features of LVS to load balance Internet services, and how this can be made highly available using tools such as such as heartbeat and keepalived. It will also cover more advanced topics which have been the subject of recent development including maintaining active connections in a highly available environment and using active feedback to better distribute load.

Via Linux Virtual Server Tutorial.

Set up a Web server cluster in 5 easy steps

This article illustrates the robust Apache Web server stack with 6 Apache server nodes (though 3 nodes is sufficient for following the steps outlined here) as well as 3 Linux Virtual Server (LVS) directors. We used 6 Apache server nodes to drive higher workload throughputs during testing and thereby simulate larger deployments

via Set up a Web server cluster in 5 easy steps.

The Next Generation of Unified Communications

Microsoft® Lync® is an enterprise-ready unified communications platform. With Lync, users can keep track of their contacts’ availability; send an IM; start or join an audio, video, or web conference; or make a phone call—all through a consistent, familiar interface.  Lync is built to fully integrate with Microsoft Office. The Microsoft Lync 2010 desktop client is available for Windows and for Mac and mobile versions are available for Windows Phone, iPhone/iPad, and Android devices.

Via The Next Generation of Unified Communications – Microsoft Lync.