Archive for July, 2011

For the first time in my life, I got turn left when board a plane. I actually turned right in attempt to locate my seat not realising I’d been upgrade to First Class on an internal flight. OK. It’s hardly business or 1^st on a transatlantic. But I took a photo to record the strange and wonderful experience – I hope to get more of this treatment from United Airlines in the future. One day I will get my 1K stripes!

Dell arrange for a limo drive to pick me up from Boston, MA to take me to Nashua, NH. I was way too scared to pick up a hire car and try and navigate myself out of the airport. Those crazy Americans drive on the wrong side of the road don’t you know.  My driver – Bob, turned out to be a really interesting guy. In a previous life he was skydiver, and did over 4,000 jumps and became an instructor. He even met the British parachute guys “The Red Devils” who he said were the craziest guys he’d met – who invented new tricks to teach the instructors. Bob said the devils were of that age where you think your immortal. Anyway, I tried not behave like a rockstar – there was no wrap-around specs, class-A drugs or groupies in my limo…

This week I spent my first two days in the US with Dell over at their facility in Nashua, New Hampshire. Over the last six months I’ve got quite close to the Dell Equallogic team that’s based out there. They reached out to me late last year as I started to ramp up to write the 3^rd edition of the VMware SRM book for the VMware Press. Anyway, the first day was mostly stuff I could write about, whereas the second day was pretty much futures stuff that will be under embargo for the next couple of weeks or months depending on the release schedule.

Me and the Dell Equallogic Team near the briefing center at Nashua.  I made a joke that the sign above our heads made it sound like we were modern day equivlant of the 7 dwaves. Will’s “Easy to Use”, Dylan’s “Flexible” and David’s “Data Proven” and I’m the dwarf called “Scalable”. To the left is William Urban, Dylan Locsin and to my right David Glynn. You can follow them on twitter @VirtWillU and @d_glynn

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This weeks vendorwag has been in the making for sometime – so I was able to fit into my schedule despite my recent haitus. Despite which I didn’t want to keep the VirtualSharp guys hanging on waiting for me to get my virtual butt back in the saddle. I first came across VirtualSharp at the Leeds VMUG in the Spring – and was very intrigued by them. There product covers the world of DR automation for virtual machines – so I guess you can see why I was interested in them given my background with VMware SRM.

My wag was with Phil Maynard who is the Senior Director, Product Marketing. I asked Phil range of questions about their ReliableDR product including:

Q1. A lot of customers don’t think they need software to automate their DR recovery process for virtual infrastructure. They say they can do it all themselves via PowerCLI scripting – Why are they wrong?

Q2. One of the main USPs seems to me your service orientated approach. How do you detect my service have started correctly & are functioning.

Q3. Can your product keep a history of known-good tests, and roll-back a live environment by factors of hours, or days… How does that work?

Q4. What special requirements are needed at the Protected & Recovery Site?

Q5. Do you physical to virtual conversion – what software do I need to get this working…

Q6. You develop your own “Storage Adapters” to speak the array vendors. What advantages does this development model give you?

Q7. VirtualSharp can work within a single-site. What’s the usage case for doing this?

Q8. In v2.5 you released your own Host Based Replication. How does this differ from SAN Replication?

Q9. Do you automate failback? If not, why not – What future functionality to do think virtualsharp possessing.

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

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

Today’s post is dedicated to John Troyer of VMware – it’s big JT’s birthday (21 again eh, John!). I’ve known John professionally since 2005 when I first setup my VMware Forum account because I thought this virtualization thing looked interesting. John was the guy who persuaded to move my then circa 1997 website into this new fangled blog format – and I was rewarded with efforts by becoming one of the first external blogs to be listed on the VMTN site. Pretty quickly John has become my go-to guy for many of my different relationships with VMware – and he has personally opened many doors for me. I can honestly say I wouldn’t really be where I am now in my career had John not championed bloggers like myself in the early days. Those first few seedlings have blossomed in whole garden of people who are now a part of a much large and richer community. We have John to thank for being such a good gardener…

Of course I’ve met John on number of social occasions – especially when I’m in San Francisco as I have a UK buddy who lives very near by to him. He’s a great big bear (or should that be wookie?) of a guy – warmhearted, cracking sense of humour and credit to the company he works for.

Anyway, happy birthday John – hope you and Kathleen celebrate in style – and I will see you again in HMB soon with luck!

Well, I’m one of those stupid Apple Fanbios who upgrades the day a new version of something comes out from Apple.

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OK, I think you might have worked it out – things have gone VERY quiet on RTFM of recent weeks. There’s been no output from me on vSphere5 or the vRAM issue… My last chinwag was with Scott Lowe in June!

The truth is I’ve got my nose in a book – a new book on SRM 5.0 with a deadline to deliver an “authors edition” for VMware Press ready for VMworld. That means excruciatingly tight deadlines plus I have my writing to do for TechTarget which how I keep the wolf from the proverbial door.

So I guess I’m taking an enforced hiatus for next few weeks. Never fear you can follow my output on TechTargets sites – and I promise to return to RTFM at the earliest opportunity…

Never fear I’ve got plenty of plans…

• I’ve got vendorwags with vKernel, Nimble and VirtualSharp in the diary
• Plans to complete series of vSphere5 videos – I wanna give that young upstart, David Davis a run for his money :-p
• ..and a really wacky idea. I mean really wacky. So wacky, I even asked my partner (Carmel) is this just too wacky – to which she said no, its one of the best ideas you’ve had… My idea is soooo wacky neither VMware Press, McGraw-Hill or Pearson Education would REMOTELY consider it. They’d go – Mike, that’s just too wacky for us.
• Finally. I’m all booked for the two VMworlds. Watch out for me at the VMworld Party in Las Vegas. I should (ahem) be relatively easy to spot. Make sure you have your camera ready. Because there will not be a repeat performance, and it will be for one-night only….

Tomorrow will see some big announcements from VMware. This the one we have all been waiting for months…

It’s with great pleasure to say that for the 3rd year running I’ve been granted the award of vExpert from VMware. It’s indeed gratifying to have my hard work recognised by the great and good in the community. I hope to keep on serving you all with new content and ideas. As you know I’m working on a new SRM book – but I have plans with fellow vExpert of mine to product a VMware View book for the next release. In the meantime you might see the rate of my chinwags and vendorwags slow a little as focus on getting an edition of the SRM book ready for VMworld 2011. It’s going to be very tight, and I might not make it – but I’m working every weekend from now to the event to try to get to folks at the event…

By the end of the year I hope to update the videos on my website to reflect the raft of new releases from VMware. And then I hav a bigger project to consider. I want to write a “cloudy” book that looks up and down the stack from hardware, vSphere, and cloud automation – and takes in the gamut of the vast majority of the higher-level management products in the VMware stable. Next year I want to carry on doing my monthly trip to the US to speak the big user summits in the US and elsewhere. Here’s another great year in 2012…!!!