Archive for July, 2010

For those of you in the UK, you might think I was chinwagging to the Conservative MP. Well, you’d be wrong. I’m not aware of any coalition policies surround virtualization yet. You should know of THE David Davis through his series of videos on a range of topics including Vi3 and vSphere4 for TrainSignal. David just finished up a new addition to the training along with 3 other vExperts. The new video is called “vSphere Pro Vol 2” and it covers SRM, PowerCLI, Veeam Management Suite, and other Advanced vSphere Topics. When not writing his own personal blog you will find David’s articles on a vast array of websites including  VirtualizationAdmin.com and elsewhere.

David’s personal landing zone is vmwarevideos.com come where he’s just started his vChat series.

Mmmm, suspiciously like the chinwag I think… Still as Charles Caleb Colton said “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. 

Like many of the top folks in virtualization, David is on twitter too

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 MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags (beware they are big!).  If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

In the chinwag we discuss David’s idea that VMware should release a vCenter “Express” product. We also talk about his VMworld session which is all about free tools you can use with VMware, and then finally we touch on the concept of the cloud – and air some opinions on whether business will seriously adopt this emerging method of delivering IT services and infrastructure.

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Following on my series of blogposts about vSphere4.1 this article is all about the ch-ch-ch-changes to ESXi. For me, personally – these changes are the MOST important ones in vSphere4.1. Without them, I think VMware would have a real fight on its hands to prize the Service Console from the cold-dead hands of hard-core VMware COS men. Personally, I think VMware’s biggest challenge in the next 12-18 months is going to be convincing business to move from welterweight hypervisor to a skinny-latte version.

There will some folks who might hope, pray, delude themselves that VMware might have change of thought about the end of ESX “Classic”. If VMware did it would be the biggest uturn of recent years…

Read on McDuff

[Note: Article is currently missing screen shots, they are in the process of being prep'd, and should appear very shortly...]

So here’s the back story. A couple of weeks before yesterday’s GA of vSphere4.1 myself and the rest of the bloggers who make up the vCommunity – were privileged to be given 3 closed sessions all about what is new in vSphere4.1. The first rule was the fight club rule, in that we couldn’t blog about vSphere4.1 until yesterday when the embargo was lifted… That seems fair to me. It meant we could all spend time writing articles up front, ready to publish over the week. My articles more or less map to those three sessions. Although because of the volume of the content, I ended up splitting up mine into four parts. The first part is all about performance, Part 2 is about ESXi, Part3 is about VMware Clustering and Part4 is about VAAI.

I’ve been on the beta programme for vSphere4.1 for sometime, but in all honesty didn’t get round to installing the beta until VMware reached out to the bloggers in this way – and that spurred me to get the new version set-up in my labs (yes, I have more than one!) so I could take the necessary scene grabs.  Anyway, for the detail – which is where the devil lives

So part one is all about performance. In it chat about how there is a very small change to the set-up routing to vCenter – and then move on to cover the new SIOC and NIOC options – the former which introduces a new version of Distributed vSwitches (4.0 and 4.1 DvSwitches). I also discuss the new “memory compression” and VMotion enhancements.

Read on MacDuff…

You see the first rule of fight club is – you don’t talk about fight club. Honestly, what is the point of an NDA when others are able to talk…?

http://www.vladan.fr/vmotion-for-smb-market-with-vsphere-4-1-essentials-plus/

http://virtualization.info/en/news/2010/07/vmware-will-ship-vsphere-4-1-on-july-13.html

Well, I’m going out on a limb here, because this idea could TOTALLY crash and burn!

But what the hell. If don’t get submission, I will quietly walk away. Climb under stone, and pretend I never had the idea in the first place. That it was someone else’s idea etc.etc..

Remember this idea has NOTHING to do with the real VMworld event, and VMware does not endorse this idea… But I’m hoping they think its pretty cool!

Here’s the idea. This years VMworld 2010 introduced a new voting method for submissions for the speaker slots. Whilst I was chinwagging with Eric Siebert the other week, I floated the notion of what I called the The Losers VMworld. The idea was inspired by recently close election here in the UK which resulted in our first coalition government for donkey’s years. During the smokey backroom discussions it became clear that we would have either a coalition of the Winners, or a coalition of the losers! Anyway, in the same spirit I thought it would be interesting if the people who were unsuccessful in the VMworld voting process had some other outlet for expressing their thoughts. That’s when I started thinking of the Losers VMworld! Eric was telling me that in the US they some times have 10 minute limit on presentations to keep folks focused and stop rambling – that made me think of Hollywood Movie Pitches, where folks who are seeking financial backing have to say what the movie is about in 3mins, and then promise it will make $100m a day on its first opening weekend. Conveniently, 10mins is the maximum duration of a video on YouTube.com for free accounts!

Some of my buddies on twitter have picked up on this idea and liked to the “Fringes” you sometimes get at political conferrences, and festivals – like the Edinburgh Festivals Fringe…

Anyway, I floated this idea towards some folks I know at VMware/VMworld but I didn’t hear anything back. So I thought I would run with idea on my own.

Here’s how I think it will work:

1. You create 10 minute video – ideally in flash. It’s impossible for me to check if you had submission to the official VMworld because I don’t access to that data, and in the spirit of free-speech all submissions will be welcomed. I will do some light moderation, so please keep your videos clean, and avoid vendor-slamming where possible. Remember videos must be 10mins or less to fit on to youtube…

2. Send me an email (mikelaverickATrtfm-edDOTcoDOTuk) or twitter (@mike_laverick)

3. I will send you back the url where you can copy the video (I’m using box.net and you will need a trashmail style login to get to the shared area)

4. I will upload to my YouTube Channel – You welcome to put you video where you like – after all its yours not mine. All I’m doing is acting as a point-man to collect them all in one place

5. I will also publish the video here on RTFM

RIGHT. GET STARTED!

I first came across Panologic at the North Carolina User Summit some years ago, and then again when they presented to the London VMware User Group. I recently did an evaluation of their device and management software. Anyway, of the back that I made a request to do a “vendorwag”. This is a new idea of mine. One week I do a “chinwag” with someone working in the world of virtualization (blogger, author, customer), and the next week I do a “vendorwag” where I do a Q/A with some hardware or software vendor. I’m no Jermery Paxman by the way (for the US he’s a infamous BBC interview who hauls politicians over the coals – video gets funny about 4mins in…), and I don’t intended to give these guys such grilling that they have to seek their local accident and emergency ward. But nonetheless the idea is to have some one who is an independent (that’s me by the way), asking the questions…

This weeks vendorwag is with Parmeet Chaddha of Panologic

Here’s his bio:

“As executive vice president of engineering, Parmeet brings more than 20 years of operational and technical leadership experience to Pano Logic and is responsible for leadership of the company’s product development. Prior to joining Pano Logic, Parmeet was CEO and co-founder of MobileVerbs, Inc., a next generation mobile marketing platform, acquired by iLoop Mobile Inc. Before MobileVerbs, Parmeet was CTO of the Applications-on-Demand business unit at IBM, which had acquired Corio, an enterprise application service provider. At Corio, Parmeet held a number of executive positions, including CTO, Senior Vice President and President of Corio India. Parmeet started his career at Oracle, where he served as Director of Tools Development. Parmeet has also served as a consulting advisor to a number of technology companies. Parmeet holds a number of patents and has been widely published in industry and technical trade publications. He holds an M.S. and B.S. from MIT.”

In case you don’t know – Panologic is in the VDI space – and have a zero client with management/brokering backend. These are the questions I asked him:

1. What exactly is meant by the term Zero Client – and how is different from a ThinClient?
2. Some of your competitors have what they call a “Zero Client” what makes Panologic different?
3. There’s been a lot of advancements in protocol support with PCoIP, HDX and RemoteFX on its way – the Pano device supports a maximum of 24-bit colours, do you not see this as a limitation?
4. In what scenarios/circumstances does a zero client work best?
5. Is a zero client a good fit for home/remote worker?
6. Clearly, you want the system to integrate with as many vendors as possible – does this limit that tightness of integration between Panologic and the virtual desktops system…

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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The Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting, kindly sponsored by EMC to be held on Thursday 15th July 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 looks something like this:

1100 – 1200 (Optional) Interactive PowerCLI / Powershell workshop – Alan Renouf
Note: If you would like to participate in Alan’s workshop, please bring a laptop, preferably with the most current PowerCLI and PowerShell binaries installed.

12:30 – 13:00 Arrive & Refreshments
13:00 – 13:20 Welcome & News – Alaric Davies
13:20 – 14:00 Sponsor Presentation, Why EMC for VMware? – Alan Renouf, Simon Seagrave

• Thin Storage in a Virtual World – Chris Evans, ‘The Storage Architect’
• Towards a Virtual Desktop – Stuart McHugh, Withers Worldwide
• Experiences with Hyper-V – Mike Laverick, RTFM Education

15:00 – 15:20 Refreshment break

• Preparation steps towards the VCDX – Simon Gallagher, Ioko
• ESX in the DMZ – Steve Bruck, Associated News and Matt Northam, VMware
• vSphere 4.1 new features – James Smith, VMware

16:45 – 17:00 Close
17:00 – Pub

To register your interest in attending, please send an email to londonvmug at yahoo dot 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.

Sincerely, and with regards,

The UKLVMUG Steering Committee

This weeks chinwag was recorded a couple of weeks ago with Rich Bramley. Rich was speaking from his bat/man cave in the basement surrounded by all his kit. You know Rich from his blog vmetc.com. The picture above is of Rich and his kids at Falcon game. If you want to check out Rich’s blog click the graphic below – but not before you list to his chinwag!

and he’s also twitter too

Rich is also the man behind the very popular Virtumania podcast too! So you subscribe and get even more podcasts about virtualization!

Here’s how Rich describes himself and his work:

“My name is Rich Brambley, and since April of 2010 I work as a Senior Systems Engineer in the South East Region for Veeam Software. Prior to Veeam I was a Senior Infrastructure Consultant for Softchoice Optimus Solutions, a VMware Gold VAC partner. I have specialized in virtual infrastructure design and implementation. My focus has been VMware’s solutions for the last 6 years, but my experience and posts include Microsoft and Citrix virtualization technologies as well.

This blog started as my VMWorld 2007 notes. I decided that instead of using a notebook that I would eventually misplace I would try live blogging. I had very little experience with blogging and had no idea how much I would enjoy it! Now VM /ETC has become my own knowledge base and more. I use it to document interesting and helpful information, analyze problems I experience, dump my thoughts and opinions, and even summarize my notes.”

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 discuss – managing a multi-vendor virtualization… We talk about the client hypervisor… and why cloning a VM can take so long…

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