Inspired by an exchange between two bloggers – Scott Lowe (EMC) & Steve Chambers (Cisco) – I’ve stepped in to weigh in the balance – the desire for greater consolidation ratios against the dangers of putting too many eggs in one basket. Every generation seems to demand a new panacea – virtualization; the cloud – while the same old problems caused by what I call “stupid IT” persist.
The article is in two parts on the techtarget website:
This weeks chinwaggie is Simon Seagrave of the techhead.co.uk website. He’s a London based Senior Technology Consultant & VMware vExpert, who is passionate about virtualization and Enterprise IT in general. He love’s his work and spends most of his time working with and exploring virtualisation technologies, server and storage products and also Microsoft Server Operating Systems and back office products. He’s have been working in IT for 16 years and has spent spent 11 of those in London working for various sized organisations, from blue chip city based companies through to smaller technology based businesses. Simon has just joined EMC’s vSpecialist team he’s looking forward to working with a highly talented team of people and having the opportunity to work with VMware vSphere on daily basis.
As with the other folks who tend to wind up “on the wag” you can follow Simon via his twitters:
As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link.
In the chinwag we chat about Simon’s home lab experiences – something that TechHead is quite well-know for… we also chat about the new iPAD… and we finish up chatting about EMC..
This is just quick reminder that the vExpert 2010 nomations are open…
As you know, vExperts are selected each year based on your evangelism and community contributions from the previous year. Please stop by and quickly let us know what you’ve been up to!
The official deadline is Friday, April 30
If you are going to be in the Charlotte, NC area on June 11th please join me, Charles Gautreaux, Chad Sakac and Scott Lowe of EMC, and Vaughn Stewart of NetApp for the Charlotte VMUG Regional User Conference!
There will be tons of information being shared on VMware solutions from NetApp, EMC, HP, 3Par, Isilon, Riverbed, Trend Micro, Viziocore, Wyse, and many more!
I’m confident that this year’s event will exceed 1,000 attendees, so don’t delay and register now!
The London VMUG Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting, kindly sponsored by RES Software, to be held on Thursday 6th May 2010. We hope to see you at the meeting, and afterwards for a drink or two, courtesy of VMware.
To register your interest in attending, please send an email to londonvmug@yahoo.com with up to two named attendees from your organisation. If you do not receive a confirmation mail, please don’t just turn up since we will not be able to admit you to the meeting. Please separately mention if you intend attending Alan’s PowerCLI workshop at 1100. Content from the meetings will continue to be uploaded to www.box.net/londonug, NDA permitting.
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 looks something like this:
1100 – 1200 (Optional) PowerCLI / Powershell workshop – Alan Renouf. Please bring your own curly brackets
1230 – 1300 Arrive & Refreshments
1300 – 1320 Welcome & News – Alaric Davies
1320 – 1400 Sponsor Presentation – RES Software
Migrating ESX v3.5 to ESX4i on HP Blades – Colin Style, Prudential
Brunel University virtualisation experiences – Peter Polkinghorne, Brunel University
1500 – 1520 Refreshment break
Virtualising Terminal Server workloads – Simon Gallagher
Interactive (and possibly contentious!) Panel Discussion – UG Committee with contributions from the floor
1645 – 1700 Close
1700 – Pub
I’ve wrote this wee like article for TechTarget about the vMA – the VMware Management Assistant. Now, I’m a big fan of PowerCLI and PowerShell generally. But when it comes letting going of the Service Console and the ye olde esxcfg-commands its a bit of leap. That’s where I think the vMA will come into its own – you can carry on using those very same ESXCFG command you know (and love?) but just carry out them remotely. In the article I document how you setup the “Fast Pass” configuration which reduces the authentication required to get focus on the ESX host – to the point that you can run commands on a ESXi host as if it was ESX “Classic”. I challenge you to spot the difference! RIP COS…
http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1510368,00.html
In this short video that I’ve done for TechTarget and NetApp – I show how you configure SnapMirror for SRM. I start from the very basics of creating a volume, setting the NFS permissions, mounting the volume to the ESX hosts – and then I head to show how to configure NetApp SnapMirror – not content with that I show you install the NetApp SRA and configure the “Array Manager” ready to run a recovery plan with VMware Site Recovery Manager – you can watch the whole thing here.
Tip: I recommend you watch in full screen! 
http://searchvmware.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1271184800_706.html
Well, its that time again – my favourite music show on the planet, Jool’s Holland’s “Later” has started up. If you don’t Jools Holland used to be in a influential 80′s band called Squeeze who had a number of hits including one a play on almost daily basis called “Up the Junction”. Anyway, he runs a show of just musician performing live to studio audience (what a concept eh?). For some reason I’m always drawn to the lone performer who comes on stage with just guitar – such as guy is “Villagers” (sic) and his song “Becoming A Jackal”
Well, last year it was the SoBo phenomena – that swept the internet – perhaps this year its one little Chloe Hickimbottom! Expect this to plastered all over the newspapers and the net within a couple of days! Some how this song has a reassurance now – coming as it does in Britain’s darkest hours, the current economics climate seems to inspiring a certain nostalgia. The cynics will say this was sung just to get the “grandma” vote, and there certainly wasn’t a dry eye in the crinkley brigade… Anyway, the main thing is this girl can sing…
This week’s waggee is Matt McSpirit of the virtualboy blog, and virtualboy tv site. Matt is a Partner Technology Advisor, a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist, and a VMware Certified Professional, and has worked at Microsoft UK since January 2006. Matt’s role aims to ensure Microsoft Partners understand the ‘Art of the Possible’ when it comes to Microsoft technologies, and how to build solutions around the platform. Matt’s role has taken him across products, from Client to Server, through to Virtualisation & Management. Matt has delivered a number of high-profile events, including IT Forum in Barcelona, the Partner and Customer UK Launches of Windows Server 2008, and the UK Virtualisation Launch.
As with the other folks who tend to wind up “on the wag” you can follow Matt via his twitters:
As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link.
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