Enable Spell Check in Jabber Client

This worked for me, i can’t guarantee it’ll work for you

My company uses Cisco Jabber for their chat and softphone client.  I noticed that the new 10.5 client running on Windows 8 allows spellcheck.  Since my spelling is not exactly excellent, i found this to be a wanted feature.    However it seems that my company did not have it enabled by default in the backend.  Here is how to change it for your client.

  • Close Jabber if it is running.
  • Browse to C:\Program Files (x86)\Cisco Systems\Cisco Jabber
  • Open the “jabber-config-defaults.xml” file.
  • Add <userconfig name=”spell_check_enabled” value=”TRUE”/> to the <!–Options –> section of the file.
  • Save the file.  (I had to change permissions to the jabber folder to allow my user to save there)
  • Open Jabber.  You will now the the red “squiggly” line when you spell poorly, and are able to right-click for options.

New Position

I’ve recently taken a new position at World Wide that will allow me to touch and play with some cool stuff as well as give back to the Professional Services deployment teams.

My first tasks are to develop some training labs around UCS, Avamar/DataDomain as well as Data and OS Migrations.  Whats cool is it lets me play with the equipment, learn it incredibly deep and then help write the guides and design and build the environments to let our guys learn this stuff.

It will be a bit different for me as i will no longer be external customer facing.  All levels of Management and internal teams will be my customers.

Wednesday here at VMworld

Today is the third full day of VMworld.  So far things have been a whirlwind and i’ll admit i’m beat.  Coffee is becoming my best friend again after not drinking much of it in a while.

There has been a bunch of announcements over the past few days, the EVO product line being announced, VMware releasing VMware Openstack, improvements to the EUC space, discussion about vSphere 6.0 Beta, various updates of other products to 5.8 like SRM for one.

Today is my marathon session day.  I’m looking forward to them all.  I have sessions that deep dive on EVO:RAIL, Performance best practices around VSAN, a full End to End demo of VMware Openstack and a deep dive in increasing performance for those apps that need a bit more care when virtualizing.

Tonight is the VMworld party as well, which is usually a pretty good time, although a bit crowded.  I’ll admit i don’t know who the band is that is playing but they usually have somebody pretty good.

Anyway, i’m off to some sessions, i will be creating small posts around each of them, assuming they are as good as their title suggests.

 

Enhancements in vSphere 6.0

I have been using the vSphere 6.0 Beta for a while now.  It has been a pretty cool experience and VMware has done a nice job with the product.  VMware has announced some of the features that are in the Beta.  I’m only going to go into detail where i can, or where others have blogged.  Technically the Beta has an NDA, so i can only really mention what has been made public. Below is some of the new or improved features.

Enhanced vMotions:

vMotions are a very important part of vSphere.  As of vSphere 6.0 you are able to vMotion VMs between two different vCenters.  This is pretty cool.  You can now move a VM anywhere inside your datacenter, if you have multiple vCenters.  Even cooler is they now support “Long Distance” vMotions.  This means you could actually vMotion VMs from one datacenter to another.  This should NOT be used as your sole Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plans.  Now there are some caveats to this long distance vMotion.  You need a ~250mbps connection between the vCenters.  This does NOT have to be L2, you can route the vMotion.  The connection between the datacenters should also be ~100ms roundtrip time.  So your old satellite links aren’t going to cut it.  This is pretty cool and something i could see people using.  Remember that since its still a vMotion, the storage must be migrated cross-sites as well.  This operation could take quite a bit of time.  I wouldn’t want to be doing huge VMs or too many at once.

Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance:

Finally after so many years of FT existing, and only being limited to a single vCPU, VMware has come through.  As of 6.0 Fault Tolerance will not support up to four (4) vCPUs in a FT protected VM.  This opens FT up to 80%+ of all your VMs.  Now FT typically consumes a pretty good chunk of network bandwidth.  Remember your sending CPU instructions over the wire.  I’ve seen just a few FT VMs consume a 10gb link.  I think people will quickly realize that you can’t enable FT for all your VMs.  This is still really cool.  You could now protect your vCenter VM without having to use vCenter Heartbeat.  I would like to see how this plays out with other apps, such as SQL or Web Servers.

Improved Web Client:

VMware has listed to the community and their customers in regards to the Web Client.  They have improved not only its responsiveness but its layout a bit.  They have also added some nice little bells & whistles that are only available to the Web Client, in the Networking & Storage space specifically.  I’ll admit i have NOT been a fan of the Web Client since its introduction.  However, as of the 6.0 Beta i have actually liked it and have gotten used to its UI.

 

 

Good Morning Its Day 2 of VMWorld

Morning all.  It is a very nice Tuesday morning (even though i keep thinking it is Wednesday).  Today should yield some big news around the End User Computing space.  I’m really looking forward to seeing what will be announced.

If you haven’t hit any of the hands on labs, i recommend going as soon as you can.  The lines can be a bit long but they have some really neat ones so i’m told.  I will be hitting a bunch later.

I also recommend visiting the vendors in the Solutions Exchange.  Today is a good day to actually get some excellent information from them, instead of just grabbing a ton of Swag.  🙂   I’ve been really impressed with some new technology and innovations from Vendors that i normally would not have really given a second look at.

Tonight there is a bunch of parties and events.  I’d look here, VMworld Gatherings.

Now onto the General Session

First General Session

The first VMworld Keynote is now over.  There has been a lot of really interesting information presented this morning.  VMware has announced information around their business approaches, recommendations to the community at large as well as some cool product announcements.

They started off the session with some neat looking dancers that was quite different.  The CMO then began to discuss the Golden Gate Bridge and how it was revolutionary when it was conceptualized and built.  She then talked about how building bridges between products and areas of technology are important, as are pushing the traditional boundaries.  Change is always happening and it’s not a scary thing.  They continued this theme throughout the entire presentation.

As an engineer who works for a company that is always changing internally, as well as somebody who works at customers sites typically deploying platforms and solutions that will cause a lot of change for the customer, i couldn’t agree more that change is a good thing.  Yes it can be scary, but in this industry the minute you stop moving, your out of date.

VMware’s big announcement is EVO.  It is their hyper-converged platform, bringing compute, storage and virtualization into one unifiying platform.  This is the previously rumored MARVIN product.  They are using various compute hardware that runs VSAN for storage and NSX for networking.  The first release is EVO:Rail, this is targeted at Medium businesses.  There are a variety of hardware vendors that have partnered up with EVO:RAIL, interestingly enough both HP and Cisco are NOT one of the partners.

They have also released vCloud Suite 5.8 along with vCloud Air.  vCloud Air is the newest version of vCHS.  It has a lot of increased functionality over vCHS and is something that is pretty intriguing.  It is currently in Beta and actually available right now using minute billing.

They also then had a few customer talks which were pretty neat.    Anyway there is more to come around these topics.  For now i’ll post a few links to more information.

VMware EVO:RAIL

vCloud Air

 

Good Morning VMworld Attendees

Good Morning,

Today is the real start to all of the action at VMworld.  Last night there was the “Welcome Reception” down in the solutions exchange.  I was actually really impressed with the amount of attendees that were there last night.  In fact talking to a few of the vendors they were also as surprised by the numbers.   In addition, last night there were a variety of parties, including #VMunderground.  I heard it was a blast, unfortunately due to my back i had to bail early.

This morning i am sitting in the Hang Space, meeting quite a few cool people, waiting for the General Session to start.  I am expecting and hoping for some really cool information to be delivered.  I am expecting a very interesting and exciting keynote.

There looks to be some really neat Hands-On Labs.  I recommended heading there in the middle of breakouts, lunch, etc.  Thats when it is typically WAY less busy.  I do like how they are breaking out the lines into general “technologies” so that you can possibly get to the Lab you want quicker then waiting in one giant combined line.

I do recommend attending as many breakout sessions as possible.  There are some really good looking ones out there.  There is a LOT of NSX stuff, which i have a bunch registered for.  There is also some neat ones around EVO, which looks to be very very interesting.

Anyway, everybody enjoy today, make sure you see as much as you can.  Enjoy the technology, the people and the celebrations later.