Archive for December, 2010

One of the things I’ve been tuning into on BBC Radio4 is the serialization of the now famous “Bob Servant” emails on the radio. In case you don’t know – Bob Servant is a fictional creation of Neil Forsyth – who took into his head to reply to those regular emails you get from bereaved Nigerian Princes who need help moving millions of dollars out of accounts, or Russian beauties who need money for their ailing grandmothers… Bob replies to these emails, and his comments getting increasingly surreal, as the demands for address, sort-code and account numbers increase!

These emails were recently collated into a book called “Delete This At Your Peril – The Bob Servant Emails”

Then Radio4 took these episodes, and created a radio versions of them – which has been the comedy section in Radio4′s “You and Yours” programme with Brian Cox, Felix Dexter and Laura Solon playing the parts.

These first went out on Radio Scotland (Bob Servant is the Hero of Dundee). I understand all the parts will be repeated on Thursday, 26th January on Radio4 at 11.30pm. There are links to episodes on Bob’s website – but as ever with the BBC these go stale pretty quickly and are no longer available. However, as they have only recently been replayed on ‘You & Yours’ you can still catch them there [Not international visitors, unless you are connected to a UK based ISP or have way of spoofing that you are - you will probably not be able to listen to these]

Anyway, I’ve taken the time out to search for the links to each of the episodes for your delight and delectation. Listen whilst you can. My personal favorite is the first

Lions, Gold and Confusion
Bob receives a Royal Appointment from Africa and begins the recruitment of wild animals for his neighbour’s private zoo.

Bob’s Granny Surprise
Bob is going great guns with a Internet bride until her grandmother makes a surprise appearance.

Willie’s Indian Palace [Just played today 31/12/2010 - so not yet available - but when it does it will be here]
When Bob receives an unexpected job offer from India, he quickly establishes a Scottish base and plans the all-important launch party.

Bob’s Servant’s website is here: http://www.bobservant.com/

[Insert virtual drumroll...] [Fumbling with virtual golden envelope...]… “And the Winner is…”

It’s my extreme pleasure to announce the winners of this year VMworld 2010 SwagBag Competition. If you don’t myself and David Davis filled up our spare VMworld 2010 bags – which formed the basis of our Xmas lotto…. and my new colocation provider caught wind of this – they very kindly added some runner up Yamaha racing shirts as runner-up prizes…

First Prize goes to Lars Troen of Norway

Second prize goes to Scott Cochran of Baltimore…

and then 20 runner up prizes go to people below – many thanks to my colocation provider – NODE4 for providing Yahama Team racing shirts!

Simon Davies, UK
Ralph Montgomery, USA
Fabian Hufenreuter, Germany
Mark Ylvisaker, USA
Andy Donaldson, Australia
Manlio Frizzi, Italy
Angelo Luciani, Canada
Scott White, New Zealand
Magnus Andersson, Sweden
Gerben Kloosterman, Netherlands
Vladan Seget, France
Juan Manuel Rey Portal, Spain
David Broome, USA
Kristoffer Andersson, Sweden
Michael Blaser, Switzerland
Phil Dalton, UK
Agnes Sandner, Germany
David Manconi, New Zealand
Nathan Raper, USA
Jack Eales, UK

Well, it will soon be Xmas. And I’ve decide to give the chinwag and vendorwag a holiday. The podcast will return on w/c 3rd Jan which is my first real week back at “work” – with Jase McCarty…

This weeks vendorwag is with Robert Neave of Nlyte. In case you don’t know – Nlyte is datacenter visualization software. Yes, read that again – I said VISUALization not VIRTUALization. But for me the two go hand in hand to some degree. Virtualization hasn’t lead to desolately empty server rooms where nothing tumbleweed drifts by. For many virtualization helped them consolidate their workloads, and for the lucky this freed up valuable rack space. For the less so lucky, those virtualized physicals sometimes were wiped and given a new life – for others virtualization just allowed them to stand-still on the conveyor belt. In other words it deferred until a later period a move to larger facility – they were able to do more with the same rack space.

Here’s a bit of background on Robert:

Robert Neave is a Co-founder and Vice President of EMEA Product Management at nlyte Software.  As a co-founder, Robert co-developed nlyte, our industry-leading data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) suite to address a need for solutions to help data centre managers to make informed decisions for the planning and effective management of their assets, infrastructure power, cooling and space.    As Vice President of EMEA Product Management Robert is responsible for ensuring that nlyte’s product set retains its position as a DCIM market leader and continuously meets the needs of nlyte’s EMEA customers and prospective customers.  In this role, Robert also owns nlyte’s company-wide strategy for Green IT, helping customers to cut their data centre energy consumption and minimize carbon emissions, driving the company’s vision for enabling an environmentally responsible world – one data centre at a time.

Prior to nlyte Software, Robert was Data Centre Manager for UBS Investment Bank (Perot Systems Europe).   In this role he was the architect for the company’s data centre management systems, data centre design, business process analysis and authored the data centre’s operation procedures.  Robert was also responsible for providing global project management for the rollout of these data centre management solutions to UBS’s facilities in London, Switzerland, the Americas and Asia.

Robert has also worked for Equitrac UK, developing cost charge-back solutions for Legal firms throughout the United Kingdom.

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 there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

As ever I did a webex with the Nlyte team to get more familiar with their technology, which then formed the basis of my questions to Robert:

Q. What protocols do you use to discover “objects” in the datacenter?
Q. What would happen if someone moved an server/switch from one location to another?
Q. Is possible that a new device could be introduced – that is NOT in your DB. How does Nlyte deal with this situation
Q. Do you support the new servers with RFID – How does that work?
Q. Can you show which components are out of warranty/maintenance?
Q. What’s the hardest component for you to discover, and visualize – and why?
Q. Nlyte – can give me advice about where to locate a NEW device in my datacenter, – but can it do datacenter “defrag”?
Q. Virtualization was supposed to reduce the number of physical servers – what’s been your experience?
Q, What are your future product development plans – I recognize you might not be able to say much here…

If you want to see the video in hi-resolution and full density – you can open it here.

Podcast Video Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (10)

One of the things that is often discussed is what the biggest barriers are to virtualization – frequently this discussions focus on performance, internal politics and cost of licensing. But have you ever thought that one of the biggest barriers to virtualization – is the very software vendors? Quite often their support/EULA statements are rubbish, and they deliberately frame the licensing to make it cost prohibitive to virtualize. Often the motivation to do this – is to stick to one of their competitors. So much for the helping the customer over come their “challenges” huh. I wax lyrical about this – using Oracle as an example – over on TechTarget.

Read on McDuff…

I will be the one of the guests on John Troyer’s ever popular VMTN Communities Round-Table Podcast, on Wednesday 15th 8pm GMT (3pm Eastern, 12 noon Pacific)

The talk is about the top virtualization stories of 2010 and what we expect for 2011.

I’ll be joined by Brian Madden, and Senior Site Editor Bridget Botelho, and we definitely want listeners to chime in with their thoughts as well. The more interactive, the better! It will help us as we put together our year-end lists of top stories, and maybe it will give you some good ideas for our 2011 predictions contest.

All the information you’ll need to listen and call in is on this VMware Communities Roundtable site.

I’ve been thinking about the cloud a lot in the last year – and speaking to both the sellers of cloudy software, as well as customers thinking of going down the cloud route. For sometime I’ve though the cloud might be more attractive to SMB customers – not so much the private cloud obviously, but the public cloud. After all if I’m small business or start-up why would want all the grief and hassle of managing my own physical or virtual infrastructure when I can have VMs outsourced to a third party. Well, any more of this theme on over on TechTarget’s site where I’ve written an article about this subject..

Read on McDuff…

Those of who follow my blog frequently will know I was recently a “White Van Man” driver for the day – as I moved a lot my hardware into a new colocation facility near where I live. I was going to write a short little missive about my experiences of working with a hosting provider – but in my chats with my buddies over at TechTarget – it soon became clear that they wanted a piece of the action too! So what started its lift as a quick checklist of things to look out for turned out to be an account of my dire experiences at what I call “Colocation-R-US”, and explaination of why I moved over to my new colocation provider – NODE4.

The piece is in the parts – so settle down with a mug of coffee and prepared to astounded – or is that horiffied!

Read on McDuff…

This weeks vendorwag if with the guys at Xangati. In particular Nathanael Iversen who is currently Director of  Technical Marketing at Xangati, Inc and works in a variety of technical and product management capacities.  Previously, he has held technical positions at several start-ups, SBC Communications and the US Airforce, giving him intimate knowledge of enterprise and service provider networks and data centers .  He blogs at http://www.avirtualpond.com and spends most of his day in virtualization related activities.

In case you don’t know Xangati is performance monitoring and management tool, and it was used by VMware in their labs at VMworld US and VMworld EU. That’s when I first met up with them at Copenhagen, where I was taken back stage before the event opened to see their product in real-time on a live system. Later on I followed that meeting with a web-ex so I could quiz their team a little closely – and that became the basis of this vendorwag.

These are the questions I asked of Nathanael:

Q. Initially Xangati started its life a physical appliance, but then became a virtual appliance – what made you make the switch?

Q. What sort of network changes are need in vSphere to allow the Xangati virtual appliance to function? What protocols do use to collect data, and why do you use them?

Q. I understand that Xangati was used to monitor VMware VMworld Labs in SF/CPH – what sort of scale were you looking at there? Did Xangati spot any problems and help the lab guys fix them…?

Q. There are lot of “performance” monitors out there – what are Xangati’s crown jewels? What makes you different?

Q. You have your own built-in “Virtual Trouble Ticket” – what is that, and does it integrate with other help desk style ticket raising systems?

Q. Your system ‘learns’ expected performance over period of time – how does this cope in the early days/weeks of going live, and how do stop the system “crying wolf”

Q. What have been the biggest challenges to introducing Xangati into customers environments

Q. What future product functionality are your think about – what are your customers asking for?

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 there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

From the VMware User Group Ireland Linkedin Page (VMUGI)

First VMUG Ireland Meeting

From John Murphy -Leader of VMware User Group Ireland

I am delighted to announce that the inaugural meeting of the Ireland VMUG has been scheduled for the afternoon of the 16th December at the Clarence Hotel in Dublin. We have been very busy working in the background to ensure that all attendees will have a productive and interesting time. The agenda for the meeting is as follows:

• VMworld Update
• vCloud Director
• Cisco UCS
• VMware View
• Migrate to ESXi

We are particularly lucky to have VMware GSS present the session on ESXi. This is the same session that was presented at VMworld and is not to be missed.

Registration is now live but please be aware that places are limited but we will endeavor to facilitate all that wish to attend.

Registration link: http://campaign.vmware.com/usergroup/invites/Irish_12-16-10.html

All members will receive a mail from VMware with all the details in the next few days.

If anyone has any questions please ask and I very much look forward to meeting you all in person on the 16th.

Regards
John