Each year Kraft Kennedy sponsors the annual ILTA golf tournament. It’s typically the Sunday before the conference and a great way to start your week. You can expect a great turnout each year and prizes awarded for top teams and best shots. Who knows, maybe you will get lucky and win our car giveaway on the back 9 – this year was a 2010 Porsche 911.

Here are some photos from this year’s event.

Additional photos can be found here. Special thanks to Cindy Mahoney for these great shots!

We would love to hear what you thought of the event. Thanks for playing and we’ll see you again next August.

The 2010 12th Annual ILTA Golf Tournament was a great success! Kraft Kennedy would like to thank our co-sponsors: WorkShare, Cypress Communications and Dell-Equallogic for helping to put on a great event. 

Over 60 people came out and we would like to congratulate the following teams who received trophies this year:

1st Place
Fernando Monteleone, Robinson & Cole LLP
Brandon Monteleone, Robinson & Cole LLP
John Sroka, Younts
Vito Squarciafico, Pullman & Comley


2nd Place
Chris Owens, Kraft Kennedy
John Sawyer, Partridge Snow & Hahn LLP
Dana Rotter, Holme Roberts & Owen
Frank Nelson, Linquist & Vennum PLLP


3rd Place
Joey Perez, American LegalNet, Inc.
Ken Levonaitis, McCarter & English
Mike Walls, US Army
Ted Glutz, Kraft Kennedy


Thanks to everyone who came out and we look forward to seeing you again next year!

Microsoft has made a very interesting virtualization play this week by submitting source code for the Linux kernel. This will allow Linux guests to run on the maturing Windows 2008 hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V. This is an unexpected move from Microsoft to publicly release source code and an indicator of their appetite to compete with VMware’s dominate market share.

Microsoft stuns Linux world, submits source code for kernel

In an historic move, Microsoft Monday submitted driver source code for inclusion in the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license. The code consists of four drivers that are part of a technology called Linux Device Driver for Virtualization.

Microsoft Linux Move Puts Pressure on VMware

Microsoft’s historic embrace of Linux technology could have wide-reaching impacts on the virtualization market and Microsoft’s rival VMware.

By allowing greater ability to run Linux on the Hyper-V virtualization platform, Microsoft is making a compelling case that it could be the virtualization vendor of choice for consolidation of Windows and Linux applications, says Gartner analyst George Weiss.

Discovering that your ESX hosts have been unknowingly creating open snapshots can be an alarming, not to mention dangerous, event.

Third party storage and backup vendors frequently call the vCenter API to issue a snapshot creation of running virtual machines before they grab a copy of the virtual machine’s hard disk – VMDK files – which are located on the VMware VMFS datastore. This process is typically followed by an immediate deletion of the snapshot file which will merge the changes back into the initial VMDK file. Problems can occur when this process does not complete successfully leaving you with an “open” snapshot. This problem is compounded when it occurs multiple times against the same guest.

Each open snapshot can significantly degrade virtual machine performance and also contribute to poor storage utilization. Unless you monitor each of your virtual machines on a daily basis, you could quickly be left with an uncomfortable situation on your hands.

The script below can be easily customized for your environment and provide regular email reports for open snapshots.

#Initialize VI Toolkit

Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core

#Configure VC credentials

$Username = ’service_account_name’

$password = ‘PASSWORD’

$server = ‘vcenter_host.domain.local’

#Setup email client

$SmtpClient = New-Object system.net.mail.smtpClient

$MailMessage = New-Object system.net.mail.mailmessage

$SmtpClient.host = “smtp_host.domain.local”

$MailMessage.from = “virtualcenter@domain.com”

$MailMessage.To.add(”admin@domain.com”)

$MailMessage.IsBodyHtml = 1

$MailMessage.Subject = “List of current VMware Snapshots”

#Get snapshots from all servers

Connect-VIServer $server -User $Username -Password $password

$Snaps = Get-VM | Get-Snapshot | Select VM,Name,Created

# Send email

$MailMessage.body = $Snaps | ConvertTo-Html

$SmtpClient.Send($MailMessage)

To execute the script, you will need to install Powershell and the VI Toolkit. Good luck!