Upgraded to Windows 8 Pro

Microsoft has taken a bold step towards removing the start menu from Windows 8. However that is not a big deal as it was made out to be by the media prior to the launch. The upgrade process from Windows 7 home premium to Windows 8 Pro for mere $40 was awesome. The upgrade goes through very smoothly and Windows 8 is quite fluid and fast. The metro look and feel is very effective and looks good. The tiles on the screen could be better utilized on a touch screen tablet or touch sensitive monitors. For a regular desktop use you may not feel much of a hassle in getting used to the tiled start screen. On the bottom left there is a tile to take you to desktop mode and that's it - ones there it is as usual. I used to use launchy (which continues to work even after the upgrade) for accessing any program in the start menu and rarely had the need to go to the start menu so for me it is much the same as before. So did you like Windows 8 Pro - feel free to leave your comments.

Installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu Guest OS

VMware Tools are binaries that are guest OS dependent and need to be installed on the VM after the guest OS has been installed. The tools are required to see the IP addresses assigned for the network interfaces of the VM (among other things).

Following are the steps:

1. Power on the VM.
2. Once the guest OS has booted up, go to the VM > Guest > Install/Upgrade VMware Tools menu.
3. This will put the VMware Tools directory under /media directory in Ubuntu.
4. cd /media/VMware Tools
5. cp /media/VMware Tools/VMware*tar.gz /tmp
6. cd /tmp
7. tar xvzf VMware*.tar.gz
8. cd vmware-tools-distrib/
9. sudo ./vmware-install.pl
10. When the installation scripts promps for answers, just hit Enter since defaults are OK.

The above is based on: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-vmware-tools-in-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx.html

Me in Java One 2012 Video

We shot for this video during the Meetup at Oracle Santa Clara where we met James Gosling. I am seen at duration 0:49 sec of the video.

PRO pack development for SCOM + SCVMM 2012

Over and above what is found in the documentation Building PRO Pack for SC2012, we also need to set the following property of the PRO.Base class during the PRO target instance creation:

objInst.AddProperty("$MPElement[Name='PRO!Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachineManager.PRO.Base']/Name$", <target hostname>)

Only then will the PRO tips targeted to instances of the PRO target object be fetched into SCVMM 2012.

Also one important change in SC2012 is the MP Authoring toolkit has been replaced by Visual Studio 2010 Authoring Extensions for System Center 2012 – Operations Manager.