TechEd Video: NetApp’s Glenn Sizemore Demonstrates their PowerPack

If you have not seen yet the amazing PowerShell work which NetApp team has done to vastly improve their storage manageability and get more agile – here’s a quick video interview and demo which I recorded at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta last month:

If this got you interested, you can download the NetApp PowerPack for free here.

For those who want some additional sqoop here are:

• Inside story of NetApp PowerGUI PowerPack, and
• Official NetApp PowerPack announcement.

PowerGUI 2.4 gets a great review by Windows IT Pro magazine

It’s not often that you get an independent product review with summary like this one:

PowerGUI Pro 2.4
PROS: Cost-effective; easy to install and use; removes barriers to implementing in-house PowerShell solutions
CONS: None to speak of
PRICE: $199 per installation
RECOMMENDATION: Get it, and use it. I’ve become addicted to PowerGUI Pro, especially the PowerGUI Script Editor

Yet, this is exactly what Windows IT Pro magazine has just published. And they were reviewing version 2.4 – without all the 3.0 functionality taking PowerGUI to the new level. Saying that I am excited would probably be an understatement.

And this is even better, Ryan Femling from Windows IT Pro was actually actively using the tool – rather than relying on some sort of vendor marketecture (I did not even know this review was in the works) and his review is solely based on his scenarios and applications he found to be important for his work.

Read full review here and I bet there is a good chance that you might learn a couple new things even if you are already an active PowerShell or PowerGUI user!

Virtual Desktop provisioning with PowerShell

I love it when teams in my own company (Quest) get serious about PowerShell, and our VDI (virtual desktop) folks are definitely the group that is very serious about PowerShell-enabling their application. Which makes a lot of sense – if you cannot automate bulk virtual desktop management how would you get the benefit of mass centralized desktop administration?

So let me give them a plug: they have just released a great new version which among many other things fully supports virtual desktop provisioning:

And they made available a beta of the next version that adds several new capabilities amongst which is the capability to configure (or reconfigure) virtual desktops for use Microsoft Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.

And the rumour is that there is a PowerPack in the works. If you consider virtualizing desktops in your company or starting your Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) business – check out vWorkspace – this team is committed to full PowerShell scriptability of the platform.