Archive for April, 2011

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It’s my extreme pleasure to say that the agenda for the San Diego VMUG Regional User Conferrence has opened.  Of course I will be there delivering the industry keynote at 12.15pm. My subject is all about the future of virtualized DR with a sneaky-peak at the future of technology close to my heart – VMware Site Recovery Manager. My attendance is sponsored by the newly founded “Global VMUG” and the event co-ordinators SmithBucklin. It goes to show that new “Global VMUG” is beginning to bear fruit – enabling the regional user conferences to bring speaker from around the world – erm, like me!

So even if you can’t afford the money or time to attend this years VMworld, you can rest assured you can attend your own mini-VMworld in your own state!

Other sessions include:

• Technology Sneak Preview: Advanced vCenter integration for Dell Storage and VMware vSphere (Dell)
• Tackling Storage Performance, Scalability, and Management Issues With HP and VMware Storage Technologies (HP)
• Under the Hood with Virtual I/O Technology, and How VMware Uses It to Do More (Xsigo Systems)
• vCloud Director (VMware)
• A Practical Guide to vCenter Operations (VMware)
• Performance Best Practices for vSphere (VMware)
• vShield, Stephen Scheiman (VMware)

Well, this blog post takes its title from one of my favourite novels and songs – Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and WIllie Nelsons 1980 hit “On the Road Again“… This week I’ve be on the other side of the pond in the USA. I’ve spent a couple of days in Salt Lake City, Utah and Portland, Oregon. I’ve been the guest of Mountain States Networking who have sites both in SLC & Portland, as well as a presence in Boise and Las Vegas.

Mountain States Networking very kindly paid for me to travel across – so I did a presentation in SLC and in Portland, and in between had back-to-back, customer 1-2-1s. My presentation was all about the “Future of VMware Site Recovery Manager”. It’s a presentation I will be hawking around the US and elsewhere over the next 12 months. I was very kindly given a dispensation from VMware to talk about the roadmap of SRM – the kind of thing you would normally have to keep quiet, or sign a NDA to hear…

The customer 1-2-1 have been incredibly useful – both the customer and for me. During the last 4 days I think I’ve meet around 12 customers from all manner of sectors, densities of virtualization, diverse storage replication and network bandwidth. It’s been a real insight into the the many various challenges customers have in deploying a DR strategy, and specifically VMware SRM.

It hasn’t all been down to me – I’ve been supported well by Jeff Drury of mstates.com – who happened help review the last SRM 4.0 book. It’s early days but me and Jeff are already discussing the idea of extending our tag-team to make a session at next years VMworld all about case-studies of genuine customer deployments of SRM and their experiences. It’s bit late to do that for this years VMworld, and a bit late because we want to see how this weeks R&R shakes out.

In the meantime, I think I’m now able to say where & when I will be for the rest of the year.

• Apr 20th – San Diego
• May 5th – Charlotte
• May 10nd-12th – Palo Alto
• Jun 7th – Western PA
• Jun 21st – Brisbane (TBC)
• Jun 23rd – Melbourne (TBC)
• Jul 28th – Indianapolis
• Aug 28th-Sept 4th – Las Vegas/VMworld US
• Oct 17th-20th – Copenhagen/VMworld EU
• Nov – Atlanta (TBC)
• Dev – Toronto (TBC)