Archive for September, 2010

A new blogger came on to my radar recently. Originally from Buffalo, NJ – Christopher Wells is based in Japan. He’s one of the few bloggers out there writing about virtualization, and writes in English, and gets his stuff translated into Japanese. As I understand it that region is has been slow to adopt virtualization, but its a rapidly growing market. Anyway, if your English or Japanese speaker you can find the blog here:

http://blog.christopherwells.com/

His tag line is vSamurai!

If you want to follow him on twitter – here’s here

Here’s how he describes himself (from his blog)

My name is Christopher Wells. I am an IT professional with about 12 years of experience at all levels of information technology. I have been working with Linux for about 10 years, virtualization (specifically VMware) for about 7 and enterprise storage for about the past 3 years. Virtualization is my true calling. The purpose of this blog is to give an outsider’s view of virtualization and cloud computing from the perspective of someone living in Japan. I also intend to give Japanese IT professionals the tools to help them educate themselves in preparation for the cloud and hopefully learn quite a bit myself along the way…

This months vNews is a little delayed. Mainly because I was so busy with the run up to VMworld. And then VMworld happened which generated even more vNews! But I’ve managed to sit down this week and puts some powerpoints and links together. If you want the PowerPoints for the vNews for use in your user group or elsewhere, you can download them here – just remember to give me a credit somewhere along the lines…

Here’s the links from the video:

Podcast Video [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This weeks vendorwag is with Quest Software, specifically focusing on their vWorkspace product. In the hot seat is Matthew Evan. Sadly, we were unable to arrange a Skype-to-Skype video call, so this wag is voice only. Matt Evans is a Senior Systems Consultant for the Quest Desktop Virtualization Group. Matt joined Quest Software in May 2008 and brings 15 years experience with him having previously worked at Wyse Technology and Igel Technology.

These are the questions I posed:

Q. Why would some select Quest vWorkspace over View/XenDesktop?

Q. Who do you consider to be your main competitor?

Q. Does Quest have plans to support the PCoIP protocol?

Q. vWorkspace can present just an application, rather than the complete desktop – what usage cases are there for this?

Q. What is vWorkSpace EOP? Experience optimization protocol?

Q. The demo environment was based on W2K3-32-bit, do you support W2K8-64+R2 for the broker

Q. I notice you have a Java Client – what are the benefit of using this over a native  client?

Q. Does vWorkspace support a “remote control feature” and task manager process controls?

Standard Podcast [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This weeks comment competition concerns VMware’s Site Recovery Manager…

So this weeks competition is to win a VMworld 2010 Virtual Roads; Actual Cloud T-Shirt (Size Medium. It’s the only size I got, and its my personal shirt from VMworld – don’t worry it’s unworn!). You can see what the t-shirts is like because a fellow twitterer – Matt Brauchler (@mattbrauchler) sent me a picture of him and his son modeling the said t-shirt.

(See I give away the shirt not from my back!), and the other thing that’s included in this weeks comment competition is a copy of  the rather excellent “Mastering vSphere 4″ by Scott Lowe. The competition closes on Wednesday, 29th Sept

So here’s the subject of this weeks comment competition:

Some months ago I was asked by the SRM Team to put together some thoughts about SRM. This I duly did – on the flight from London to San Francisco… I’d been a little tardy in putting my thoughts down, but somehow being trapped on a snake infested plane at 37K Feet helped crystallize my thoughts. Just before writing, I wrote a blogpost asking for thoughts, ideas and attitudes from the people who read this blog…

That’s right. I got precisely ONE response. Needless to say I was a little bit disappointed. Anyway, I’m still interested in what you think – and I thought perhaps a comment competition might inspire you!

Last week I finished off the months work of articles for TechTarget. The View 4.5 Guide was released. So I found I had time to take a look at vCloud Director.

I found the installation process tricky, mainly because I gave myself a bit of mountain to climb. I was trying to setup Oracle on Linux. Despite my extensive use of the Service Console for ESX, I wouldn’t say I was Linux Guru by any stretch of the imagination – and I know absolutely zip about Oracle.

(more…)

This weeks winner of the VCP4 Study Guide – is Mike Martino…

Mike Martino is a “jack of all trades” systems administrator and aspiring VCP for a medium-sized produce and logistics company on Long Island, NY. In his work life, he covers everything Windows, Linux, and vSphere and crises from printers that won’t print to datastores that won’t connect through iSCSI and beyond. In his play life, he takes up improv comedy and taekwondo and travels as much as possible.”

This what he had to say about books, virtualization, cloud and VMware:

Yeah, I feel like it’s time for something more advanced beyond install and here’s how to create a VM. I feel like I can get that from any book and soon it’s going to be so mainstream that everyone will know how to do it (or can read a 20 page primer and be okay).

Perhaps it’s time to bridge the beginner and advanced gap with something intermediate. Sure, it’d still have a basic theory of virtualization, overview of VMware products, basic install and config, but here’s where you can make a real difference:

Talk about design. Not too advanced, but basic and intermediate treatments of how to approach designing a solution. What to ask and think about with regards to networking and storage and perhaps physical servers. Doesn’t have to be vendor-specific (I think Scott Lowe’s Master vSphere book does a pretty good job here).

Another difference you can make: Start incorporating some of the advanced stuff we’re seeing in the VCAP (Security, Scripting, Troubleshooting, Managing Performance) – I’d write later chapters with an eye towards these subjects. It doesn’t have to comprehensively address these topics, but you could enhance normal beginner topics with an eye toward each (e.g., here’s the Powershell way, here’s the GUI way). Also you can fit in some performance considerations, security notes, and troubleshooting stuff in your coverage of the beginner and intermediate topics.

Many books feel fairly basic nowadays (all cover beginner stuff and have maybe a couple variations worth skimming through at the bookstore, but not buying) and I hope authors can adapt their current offerings to push into more advanced topics in their books.

Congratulations Mike!

The Steering Committee of the North VMUG is pleased to announce that they have arranged a new meeting. They have booked the Park Plaza Hotel in Leeds, this can host up to 250 guests, and enables multiple concurrent sessions and a vendors trade area.
If you want to register – the link is here:

I will be doing the vNews segment of the event:

http://www.vmug.org.uk/index.php?option=com_seminar&Itemid=5

You are cordially invited to a VMUG Party at VMworld Europe at Copenhagen. This event is free for all attendees of VMworld and VMUG members. Please bring your VMworld badge or registration as a ticket. Its not posible to pre register for the event. Just show up . The guys in Denmark have opened this website for further details…

The whole thing is sponsored by the likes of EMC, Trend Micro, Magirus, IBM and Veeam…

I’ll be there too, so see you there at:

Custom House
Havnegade 44
Nyhavn 1058

Shortly after the end of the VMworld 2010 event in San Francisco – myself and Jo Maitland of TechTarget sat down in their studio to have a little chinwag about the state of virtualization. It was meant to be just 15mins but some 27mins later…. we were done. Anyway, you can view our little natter over on the SearchServerVirtualization site.

In the last couple of months I’ve become increasing anxious about the availability of VMware’s vCenter server – so much now relies on the little management server that could – View, SRM, vCloud to name but a few that are close to my heart. Anyway, in the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with VMware’s vCHB (OEM from NeverFail). I’m pleased to say that all 4 parts of my article which outline setup and my experiences are now available on TechTarget’s SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.uk

I worked very closely with the NeverFail, in fact they were rather excellent – and helped me on a mammoth 4/5 hr web-ex to get to the bottom of an issue I was experiencing – which I’m pleased to say has surfaced as a KB Article on vmware.com! That’s something I’m really proud of, and pleased about – it goes to show if you really engage with VMware/NeverFail they are willing to really help you out.

Anyway, you can read the entire series over here. Settle down with a big mug of coffee cos this is a long one!

Part 1 is narrated (by a computer below)…

Boost vCenter Availability with vCHB - Part1 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download