Two days ago Salesforce and VMware presented their new joint Platform as as service solution which offers the customer a complete Java development and application hosting environment. Based on the Spring & Tomcat platform virtualized with VMware vSphere the applications can run and interact with the force.com Database. The developer doesn’t need to care about software patches or virtual machines because everything is already done automatically. vmforce does also include reporting features. For more information just visit the website at: www.vmforce.com or watch the video.

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Tablet PC’s are not new to me – no I’m a proud IBM Thinkpad x61T user for over 3 years. When I’ve bought the tablet my objective was to write notes with the digitizer and do interactive presentations i.e. whiteboardings, directly on a blank Powerpoint presentation. People who attended my presentations were amazed about this presentation style because it was unique to them. I’ve seen Tablet PC’s really rarely in the past but I guess that will change soon. Apple lately started to roust the market when they announced the iPad, a tablet which can be used just with your fingers without any need for a digitizer. Well there is a onscreen keyboard but no digitizer, the reason for me to buy a Tablet PC years ago. It seems that vendors must have another objective as mine. Even the processing power in an iPad is not comparable to a standard PC but to be honest it doesn’t need to be because it’s designed to consume web services – no, to be clear here: applications hosted in the cloud! There are other hardware vendors who want to get a piece of the big cake! Last week, the CIO magazine published an article with the headline: Rumor: Cisco Wants to Come to the Tablet Party. A tipster hinted that Cisco is working on it’s own tablet device which is based on Google’s Android operating system. It should include a front facing camera, dual noise-cancelling microphones and VPN access. Cool ha? That sounds really interesting! What could you do with this device? Video conferencing? Having access to your virtual desktop? If this rumour comes truth I’m really looking forward to look deeper into it. It seems that Apple just started to revolutionize the tablet market, the iPad is great marketing for every tablet vendor and also for Software-as-a-Service.

My colleague Raymond van’t Hag wrote an article about the ThinApp basics on his blog bright-streams.com. If you haven’t worked with ThinApp yet, you should definitely check his article. By the way bright-streams.com is Raymond’s blog, dedicated to VMware View & ThinApp.

I’m using the Zimbra Collaboration Suite for some days now and I have to say that I’m really happy with it. The user web interface is just awesome, easy to use and I love the Ajax stuff. I’m also using it on my iPhone and it runs perfectly. There was just one thing which made me feel a bit uncomfortable with. After the installation the Webmail component was just accessible via HTTP which is not encrypted. During the last years I got some bad  experience with other applications which needed to be changed from HTTP to HTTPS and this time I had a uneasy feeling but it was without any reason.

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One week ago VMware announced the availability of a new browser toolbar on their Support Insider Blog at: http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/. The new toolbar works with Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Safari. It gives you instant access to patches, documentation and more. The built-in RSS and Twitter capability gives you direct updates from support. A live peer to peer chat gives you the opportunity to ask an VMware expert or staff for help. You can find the download at: http://vmwaresupport.toolbar.fm.

Today VMware announced the availability of the final release of the vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide, which includes the extensive feedback of the VMware Community on the previous draft. You can find further details on the VMware Blogs.

Teradici, the leader in delivering true PC experience over IP networks announced the availability of the Teradici PCoIP Management Console, a software that enables administrators to manage an entire enterprise deployment of PCoIP devices from a central point. The new console allows configuration and monitoring of PCoIP based zero client devices and host devices.

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Running out of memory will prevent the Linux system from running ZCS because it can’t create the needed Java virtual machine and also start essential processes like the MTA. During the installation I came to several situations where I ran out of memory but in the end I could install the software but not start all services. I needed some optimization here. After some searching on the web I found tips which helped me.

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Before I go on with the tuning tips for the Vserver I want to give you an overview of the most important command line parameters and log files. For the log files I’ve found a great resource in the Zimbra Wiki. During installation and configuration I’ve needed the zimbra.log which can be found at /var/log/zimbra.log. In this file you’ll find information for MTA, the system status and 3rd party software as Postfix, Amavisd and more. Also interesting is the Tomcat web server log which helped me finding installation errors with the web interface. The information is written in two files: /opt/zimbra/log/mailbox.log and /opt/zimbra/tomcat/logs/catalina.out.

The first command I needed on the server was zmcontrol. With zmcontrol which is located in /opt/zimbra/bin/zmcontrol, you can start and stop services and also get an status.

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During this week I spent every night at my laptop, to get the the server running. Not because the installation is so hard, no because I don’t want to RTFM. So I had to run the setup several times. It’s important that you have a valid A-Record and MX-Record for your Zimbra Collaboration Server. During the setup those two DNS parameters will be checked. It seems that you can install the software even when you have not configured it but I read in some forums that you can get errors. You’ll also need to edit the /etc/hosts file in order to get a successful installation.

127.0.0.1            localhost.localdomain   localhost
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx      mail.thatsmyview.net       mail

As with every fresh installed Ubuntu system you should also run apt-get upgrade to get the latest fixes. If you start the ZCS installation now it will stop due to missing dependencies. I had to install some additional packages.

apt-get install libpcre3 libgmp3c2 libstdc++5

Possibly you’ll have to install more or less packages depending on your core installation and the selected options. The Zimbra installation can begin. First untar/gunzip the archive file and then start the installation through the installation script.

./install.sh

The installer will ask you which components should be installed. As I’ve to less RAM for all of them I’ve decided to leave the proxy, logger and the memcached option. After that you can configure loads of parameters but the only one which is really needed is the admin password. Press menu 4, then 3 to set the password. Then press a to apply the options and save the configuration in a file as suggested. The setup will try to start the services after the installation but here I got in trouble. The RAM was already full and the Java virtual machine couldn’t be started. Bad for me and I first thought of getting more RAM for my Vserver but in the end I found some more helpful stuff on the web to go on without expanding memory and spending more money. In case you have a Vserver or physical box with just 1 GB of memory, wait for an upcoming article which will give you the needed parameters to successfully run ZCS.