Archive for June, 2010

Welcome to vNews a monthly round-up of what’s been happening in the virtualization space. This months is quite heavily dominated by stuff from VMware, but does include stuff from Microsoft, EMC, NetApp and quick survey of the bloggersphere…

If you want to use my PowerPoints in the vNews for your User Group, you can download them here. Just give me a little credit if you would be so kind.

As ever you get vNews delivered to your desktop if subscribe to the podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. By subscribing you’ll also get weekly updates of my chinwag/vendorwags – If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

Below are the links that used to build the vNews, so you don’t need to download the PPT to get to the links. I guess by looking at these links you can see what the topics are going to be in the vNews..

VMware wins awards at TechEd

VMware in the Magic Quadrant

VMware DCAP – DataCenter Admin Exam Experiences - boche.net vmwaretips.com simonlong.co.uk virtualizetips.com

VMware Courses on vSphere4

VMware Management Products on 64-bit Windows

VMware Storage IO Control

VMware VMDirect Path – For and Against1 (Chad Sakac) and Against2 (Scott Drummonds)

VMware & Novell – Independent Response (vinternals), Microsoft Response, VMware Reply

VMware Update 2 and PCoIP Bug

Microsoft Hyper-V Architecture Poster

Microsoft Ebooks – Including Virtualization (Virtualboy)

Microsoft Dynamic Memory in Depth from TechEd (Virtualboy)

EMC and Microsoft Think Big

EMC RecoverPoint Virtual Appliance

EMC Atmos Virtual Appliance

The Future of NetApp – SilconAngle, Scott Lowe

From the Bloggersphere -

TechHead Reviews of Lenovo TS200 ThinkServer and Dell Equalogic PS4000

Eric Sloof – Resource Pools as Folders is dangerous

vCO Blog

Duncan Epping – Swapping and the vmkernel

The Work-At-Home Robot

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Just like Al Renouf, Charle Gautreaux is NOT French. Well, that’s what they say… but I’ve never seen their birth certificates…. Charlie is good friend of mine from the State o’ North Carolina where he resides in the environs of the city of Charlotte.

Charlie is a virtualization advocate and proud father of one.  Charlie has been President of the Charlotte VMware User Group for over three years and is Vice President of the Global VMware User Group.  He spends most of his waking hours as a Sr. IT Engineer for TIAA-CREF, where he leads the virtualization platform.  Charlie has been working with virtual computing for more than six years and in technology for over eleven years.  When he is not working he enjoys the outdoors, spending time with family and of course spending time in the home lab.

I’ve known Charlie for a couple of years, when we met at one of the VMworlds, and he asked me to attend the North Carolina User Summit. I’ve been attending and presenting there ever since, and even had a very nice holiday in the Old Smokey Mountains last year. Anyway, Charlie has finally got his ass in gear, and got himself a blog. It’s called:

http://thickclouds.com/

Not sure when he means by that. Thick – clouds of dense compute, IO and storage power? Anyway, I wish Charlie well in his travels thru the bloggersphere. Welcome, aboard Charlie – the waters lovely…

I first heard this on Jools Holland’s “Later” since then the album has gone into the top ten. I really digging the Smokey Robinson style falsetto.

OK. I admit it the ONLY reason for this blogpost title is get you to pay attention. I don’t really mean that at all. But now I’ve suckered you into reading this thing let me explain. I’ve written an article for TechTarget which is all about my take on VMware’s recent alliance with Novell. In case you don’t know – the top-level on this is that VMware has decide to standardize (now there’s a good idea) all its virtual appliances on Novel’s SUSE Linux. I think this a good step, as any standardization is a good thing in my book. It does raise the thorny question of where this leaves us with the whole JEOS concept – and that’s one of themes of my missive.

Read on McDuff

This weeks chinwag is Eric Siebert. It was actually recorded about two weeks ago. I was at some hotel near Manchester Airport on my way to the North Carolina User Summit, in Charlotte. Eric runs the very popular vmware-land.com. Here’s an author too and has written many books about virtualization and VMware. He’s recently published his “Maximum vSphere” book as well. You can keep track of Eric from his blogger and he’s also twitter as well.

Here’s a bit of Eric’s bio from his blog:

“About 4 years ago I discovered virtualization technology in the form of VMware ESX and have been hooked ever since. I have spent countless hours exploring the product inside and out and learning everything about it that I can. Eventually I also discovered my passion for teaching and helping others learn from my knowledge and experience and turned to writing as an outlet to educate others. I have spent a lot of time helping others in VMware’s community support forums and achieved the highest level rank of Guru as well as becoming one of the forum moderators. I also started this website to share my tips, experiences, knowledge, hundreds of links to technical information and top 10 lists on a variety of subjects. Additionally I took to writing tips and blogging for Tech Target’s websites including searchvmware.com, searchservervirtualization.com and searchdatabackup.com and have published dozens of blog postings and technical tips there. I was a speaker and one of the panelists for the VMTN Community Expert session at VMworld 2008 as well as a judge for the Best of VMworld awards…”

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 Eric tells me more about:

• His new “Maximum vSphere” book
• Eric VMworld Sessions (this was recorded before the voting had completed)
• The Trust Platform Module
• Eric experience Iomega Storage

[I'm sorry Eric, I talked too much on this chinwag!]

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Yesterday I had the pleasure meeting Jacob Jensen of VMware. He’s VMware new Product Group Manager for the SRM product – prior to this he was heavily involved in the network piece of vSphere4, and prior to that worked for Cisco. Jacob has been over in EMEA for some weeks, sounding out customers and partners about what they would like see VMware Site Recovery Manager to do in the future. It was a really insightful and useful two hours spent in London (and I don’t often say that about London, except at the London VMUG!), and the added bonus was I got spend sometime with my partner (Carmel) who is working down there on a contact currently. Carmel wasn’t bored – having been the proof-reader for my end of the Vi3Book, vSphere4 and two SRM books – she knows just about as much as I do. In fact she sometimes finds herself not just correcting my typos, but the odd technical error now and then. Plus she set me and Jacob straight her perspective on licensing of the SRM product and DR.

Anyway, we had a very detailed chat about the current position of SRM and future directions – as well as general chat about the guiding philosophies at VMware. I promised Jacob I would get back to him with an extended email about things I want to see SRM do in the future. I’ve got quite a few ideas of my own. But I do that I thought it might be interesting to reach out to the community of bloggers, partners and customers who come to RTFM each day – and ask if for you input. I’m really interested in hearing from you if you are VMware Customer using SRM, but even more so if you are VMware Customer who’s not. Aside from product improvements and increasing the scope of SRM – I’m really interested in what the barriers are to customers adopting the product, and identifying imaginative and creative ways of getting round those barriers if they exist.

I dare say I won’t come up with anything original or different that Jacob hasn’t heard already. But perhaps with it coming from a different direction – there might be a different perspective. Anyway, if you interested in contributing. Leave an extended comment on this blogpost – and make your voice heard here!

Well, that isn’t really very true. It’s not very new at all. It’s been available on Carl’s www.ultimatedeployment.org website for AGES! And I have been just to goddamn lazy to bring it over into the ESX format, and package it up as an OVA file – for easy importing. Carl has been a busy bee, because the last time I looked at the UDA it didn’t support ESX3i/4i. But now it does!

What inspired me to get off my fat lazy ass and do this. Well, I’m looking at the ESXi 4.1 deployment process and seeing if Carl needs to do any more work. So I hope with Carl’s help (he’s the brains behind the operation, I’m just his lackey), we can have the UDA ready to support ESXi 4.1 when it ships!

Download the latest version of the UDA here, together with a sample template & subtemplate…

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/vmware-content/ultimate-da/

Good news! (for me at least!), my session at VMworld has been nominated for the San Francisco event…and Copenhagen as well. That kinda of surprised me as I expected the voting would cover just SanFran, and there would be separate voting round for Copenhagen. But I guess the two events are so near to each other. So I guess the work begins to get the PowerPoints together. Can I write a powerpoint presentation that doesn’t use bulleted lists?

Session ID: BC7773
Session Title: VMware Site Recovery Manager: Misconceptions and Misconfigurations
Track: Private Cloud – Business Continuity
Presenting at: VMworld San Francisco & VMworld Copenhagen

Now this one isn’t much of an issue. Basically, if you upgrade to U2, you have to download and upgrade the VEM that makes up the Cisco Nexus 1000V implementation. But hey, that’s something your “network team” will be able to handle, eh? :-p

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022721