A few iPhone bits and bobs

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Yesterday, I found some notes I made when I was preparing my one month with the iPhone post last year – including a bunch of iPhone tips (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4).

If you’re based in the UK, and you’re looking for free Wi-Fi courtesy of Apple’s agreement with The Cloud – they have a hotspot location tool on their website (I’m not sure if you can change the browser agent and enter a phone number associated with an iPhone for access from any device as AT&T users could at Starbucks outlets in the States until the service was removed).

Lego man unpacking iPhoneFinally, I stumbled across what has to qualify as the best set of unboxing photos I’ve ever seen. Lego men unpacking consumer electronics is certainly geeky but somehow it’s very cool at the same time.

Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool

Posted on By Mark Wilson

In my recent article about the realities of managing a virtualised infrastructure, I mentioned the need to patch offline virtual machine images. Whilst many offline images will be templates, they may still require operating system, security or application updates to ensure that they are not vulnerable when started (or when a cloned VM is created from a template).

Now Microsoft has a beta for a tool that will allow this – imaginatively named the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool. Built on the Windows Workflow Foundation and PowerShell, it works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and either System Center Configuration Manager or Windows Server Update Services to automate the process of applying operating system updates through the definition of servicing jobs. Each job will:

  1. “Wake” the VM (deploy and start it).
  2. Trigger the appropriate update cycle.
  3. Shut down the VM and return it to the library.

Although I haven’t tried this yet, it does strike me that there is one potential pitfall to be aware of – sysprepped images for VM deployment templates will start into the Windows mini-setup wizard. I guess the workaround in such a scenario is to use tools from the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) to inject updates into the associated .WIM file and deploy VMs from image, rather than by cloning sysprepped VMs.

Further details of the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool beta may be found on the Microsoft Connect site.