When I first became involved in virtualisation back in 2003 and 2004, people used to ask me if anyone actually used virtualisation in a product. Most of the time, their plans were to initially restrict its usage to test and development environments and disaster recovery (DR). Quite rightly, I guess, they saw these environments as representing low-risk areas where they could adopt the technology.

Read on…

In this quick tip, I’m going to show how you can use VMware PowerCLI scripts as part of your VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) recovery plan. This quick tip is taken from my soon-to-be-released book on VMware SRM 4.0.

Read on…

This weeks chinwag is with Chris Dearden. It’s a first chinwag I’ve done – so many thanks to Chris for being my hapless guinea pig. I learnt quite a bit in the recent weeks preparing for this – which I think is subject in its own right. There are SO many competing formats, software and publishing methods for video. There are some practical concerns as well – such as watching a delivery man look at me weirdly when I don’t answer the door because I’m in the middle of chinwag!

The big issue I currently have is the lag between audio & video which you get from Skype and re-encoding generally. I had hoped the AVI format and VirtualDub would help – but it turned out not to be the case.

You can keep in touch with Chris by following him on twitter. In his spare time Chris enjoys killing people with paint apparently.

Footnote: In the chinwag, Chris mentions a password management tools they are considering for ESXI. It’s called Secret Server

Chris works for a major financial institution (who will remain nameless!). Chris has been working in IT for about 10 years, although a relative newcomer to virtualisation. It’s something that’s taken his interest more than any other technology. Inspired by some of the high quality of technology blogs out there, he got talked into starting his own by a colleague – its at its fledgling stages currently but like all bloggers, but he has high hopes! When not knee deep in ESX clusters, Chris is also an administrator on the HEXUS.net forums, one of the UK’s larger tech communities.

In the chinwag we discussed, the planned move of a very large number of VMs from the US – and also some challenges he’s been facing with VMware Snapshots. The video is in two segments because Skype bombed out on us half-way through! If you want a MP3 version for your iPOD/iPhone you can grab it here – alternatively if you wish to subscribe to my podcasts you can do here:

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Right you north of England based Virtualisation fanciers listen up, the date of the next Northern VMUG has been set for Tuesday the 13th April  at the Round Foundry in Leeds.

Now this is a short walk from the Leeds train station,and also has good local parking. further to this there are a number of good pubs which also do food in the vicinity.

The agenda will be published later but I just wanted to get the date out there so you can diary it.

So just to recap the date is the 13th April the place is the Round Foundry in Leeds and an outline plan is currently:

12:30 open
1 pm – 1:30 Key note
1:30 – 2:30 Sessions 1 & 2
2:30 – 3 Networking and presentation Q&A time
3 – 4 Sessions 3 & 4
4 -5 Networking and presentation Q&A time
5 – Late ‘beer’ informal networking

Hope to see you there.

Watch this space for how to sign-up for the event…

Well, it’s properly official now

http://www.techtarget.com/html/pr/pr-02012010.htm

I’ve been negotiating since late last year – and creating content since 4th Jan… So good so far. The change over has already had a big impact on the quality of life, and given me new impetus to create new content.

Many people think the key to the virtual data centre is about getting as many virtual machines (VMs) on a physical server as possible. It is still the case, however, that prohibitive memory costs are a roadblock to high consolidation ratios, and virtualisation availability tools still lag behind business need. They have not yet cancelled out the “eggs-in-one-basket” scenario that virtualisation endemically brings with it.

Read more…

Hey, fellow virtualization blogger. Perhaps your on Eric S list? Well, I have proposal for you. Once a week I want to Video Skype with you and have a good old chinwag. What is a chinwag? Well, it’s defined as ” light informal conversation for social occasions…” but I want our chinwags to be about virtualization. Your challenges, problems, solutions, opinons – hey, maybe you just want to shoot-the-breeze and get something of your chest. Well, you can do it with me via the RTFM ChinWag! I want to begin with bloggers first because I think you might be at more liberty to chat than others, but in time I would like to ChinWag with real folks (not that you or I are not real) doing virtualization for real. As a blogger you’re probably doing that already – but I what I mean is that I don’t want ChinWag to be just a bloggers thing – but you have to start somewhere.

I’m thinking somewhere in the 15-30 minute time frame. Non-scripted. But we would dream up some questions to keep our juices flowing. Perhaps you might want to fire a question back at me – and see which side of the fence I prevaricate on?

Interested? You know where I am.

In this article, we eschew the normal blue-sky 2010 technology predictions for something a bit more everyday that will affect your daily virtual life.

Scale up, up, up and away
Firstly, it’s no surprise that by mid-year there is likely to be a major rerelease of vSphere4 with a strong emphasis on increased scalability. Building on top of vSphere4’s current scalability I wouldn’t be surprised to see the number of vCPUs a single ESX host can support go beyond the 128 core range. I think it’s likely that by the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011 we will be looking at more than 8 vCPUs to a VM – with VMware pushing the amount of RAM per-VM into the 512 GB to 1 TB range and the ESX host supporting 1 TB or 2 TB of physical RAM.

Read on…

Here’s a video of my vNews. It’s quite long just over an hour. Opps. Still its hard to round up news and pass comment on it meaningfully in 10 minutes. These won’t be very frequent – about one a month I think. It depends on how my user group work pans out – as I tend to cobble these together in time for a UG.

Also I think I could have made the picture-in-picture video bigger – I will know better next time. I’m investing in a green-screen so I can do it more professionally and some lighting gear too. All I need now is an attractive anchorwoman. Perhaps Carmel will do the virtual weather too… The other thing I’m thinking is I want to drop the whole PPT approach altogether – it works fine when your presenting in UG. But its all a bit static as a video (Gee, I’m really selling you this aren’t I!) So more graphics – and pictures to make it more like an actual news programme!

You can watch here or use the download button to download and play your on iPOD/iPhone. [Just click and open in iTunes]

The full version at high quality is here (beware it is 370MB). This format is suitable for play back via a projector. [Right-click and Save-As)

If you want the power-points – which include the links to the stories – they are here. If you do use them for your user group that’s fine. The PDF file contains links to each of the stories that I mention.

If you want to watch in a browser, streamed to your desktop – just click the little Video Mov graphic below!

 vNews - January 2010: Download

I will be there in body & spirit but I wont’ be talking. I will be butting in at every moments notice with long-winded pontifications, about how wrong the world is…

A message from our illustrious membership secretary, MC Al Davies…

The Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting, kindly sponsored by Pano Logic, to be held on Thursday 25th February 2010. We hope to see you at the meeting, and afterwards for a drink or two, courtesy of VMware.

Our meeting will be held at the Thames Suite, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP, +44 (0)20 7248 4444. The nearest tube station is Mansion House, location information is available here. Reception is from 1230 for a prompt 1pm start, to finish around 5pm. Our agenda is not final at the moment, but looks something like this:

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