I finally felt I had time to get round to installing the Windows 7 Beta and see what all the fuss was about for myself. Now I could setup my shiney new Samsung NC10 to dual boot it but I thought it would be best to play it safe and start off with a virtual machine. Apart from the helpful snapshot function in ESX it would also be more team friendly as the rest of the technicians could access it. So I created a new VM on one of our ESX dev servers, assigned it a 12GB virtual disk and attached the 32bit ISO of Windows 7 Beta, then started it. All went according to plan to start with, the standard Windows install questions, a reboot or two and eventually I ended up with a Windows 7 desktop in the console.

 The plan worked for about two minutes until I noticed there was no network connection, and checking the Device Manager showed it knew there was an Ethernet Controller but it couldn't find a suitable driver. The driver update utility looked very similar to the Vista one but of course wanted to look on the Internet so was a non-starter. I thought this was pretty peculiar as you can't get much more standard than VMware virtual devices, and Microsoft must expect users to test a beta in a virtual environment. Suspicious that this might be a cunning ploy to encourage the use of Hyper-V I had a quick Google, expecting a rapid answer.

So we've got a nice fat ESX server running in our training lab with 20 XP VMs installed on it - and a bunch of barely IT literate users each with a desktop PC that is fully locked down so there is no chance of them screwing anything up. We want to give them access to the XP VMs so they can screw those up instead, e.g. see how much malware they can acquire in 10 minutes of unprotected Internet browsing. That means we can't allow any sort of network connection between our nice safe desktops and these VMs, otherwise we're going to get all that malware coming back into our network, which rules out the obvious candidates like RDP or VNC. What we can do though is connect to the VM consoles as our ESX server is all properly vLANned so the VMs are on one network with an Internet connection but our ESX server and desktops are on a completely separate network.

So how do we get those users connected to those consoles?

We recently had an enquiry from a client who has around 150 Linux servers in about 20 data centres scattered around the UK. They have a perfectly effective backup solution but were interested in improving their Disaster Recovery, in particular how to speed up recovery of a server in the event of hardware failure. In particular they wanted a solution that would allow them to take complete system images that when required could be quickly restored to a replacement server. Not only that but it had to be doable remotely and by a non-Linux technician following a simple sheet of instructions.