Well, its been a while since “Mike’s Music”, but its return is prompted by the return of my favourite music show EVER (somehow you supposed to capitalize those words nowadays!). Jool’s Holland’s Later came back to UK screen last week, highlight of the show for me was “Trombone Shorty” a New Orleans (pronounced to N’Oleans to those in the know) band.
Lap it up!
Last week I decided to upgrade my View4.6 lab to View5. I’d have to say the upgrade was smooth and painless – except after the upgrade I had problems with PCoIP connections though the firewall. Looking at the Connection Server (CS) settings everything seemed fine. All the settings behind the CS had been maintained via the upgrade… When I upgraded the Security Server (SS), I was asked to “Specify Security Server Pairing Password”. In case you don’t know every SS that is installed is unique paired to the CS this is done via pairing password to make sure folks can’t go around pairing SS to CS willy-nilly.
Although I could connect to the public FQDN, and get so far as selecting a desktop, my connection kept on being dropped before the desktop was initialized. This looked like a classic failure to open the PCoIP port on the firewall. But I had done that many months ago. So what changed?
Well, it looks as if the upgrade of the SS blatted the previous settings of the SS. I discovered to my horror that settings behind the SS itself had reverted to internal IP addresses…
These are held in:
View Configuration >> Servers >> Security Servers Pane >> Select the SS and click Edit…
I had to clear out the private IP (in the 192.168.3.x range) and replace with public FQDN and public IP address.
Once these were in place the connection proceeded without an error.
I’m still not sure if this was a personal funky experience; something to do with the upgrade; or an known-issue, that I didn’t know about. 
[Clicking on Glenda's photo will take you to her twitter page!]
Few folks get to be on the chinwag more than once – there are so many interesting people to talk to. So this is chinwag history in the making (drumroll please) which sees the return of the ever entertaining and insightful Glenda Canfield. Make no mistakes as a typical Texan she doesn’t mince her words! That’s something it resonates well with folks like me from the North of England – who like to call it as they see it without as little flimflam as possible.
As ever we cover a wide spectrum of thoughts, ideas, opinons and concepts – here’s my list of QA and for Glenda.
Q1. You say Citrix needs to get out virtualising OSes – Why?
Q2. You say VMware needs to get out of the “broker” business – Why?
Q3. What single points of failure does VMware View have? What can be done about them? Is Citrix XenDesktop any better?
Q4. Where are we at with user profiles? Would like to return to Windows 95 where they were optional? 
Q4. BYPC, Bring your own device… or PC – I hear your writing a research paper – what have found?
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
This weeks vendorwag is with Nimble Storage – who have been on my radar for sometime – I seem to keep on bumping into the same folks at every VMUG I speak at in the US! I think this might start a theme because I’ve have been chatting to the guys from TinTri and Astute as well.
I spoke to Ajay Singh who is the VP Product Management at Nimble. Here’s his bio…
Ajay is responsible for product management and technical marketing at Nimble Storage. Ajay has over 15 years of experience in data storage spanning roles in product management, marketing and engineering. Prior to Nimble, Ajay led a team of Product Managers with a broad portfolio of products at NetApp. He also held product management and product marketing roles at Decru and Logitech. Earlier in his career Ajay worked on disk drive technologies at Quantum Corporation as well as the Data Storage Systems Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Ajay holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as well as M.S. and B.Tech. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and the Indian Institute of Technology respectively.
I spoke to the guys at Nimble, and came up with the following questions – but as ever the fluid nature of the vendorwag took us in other uncharted lands too!
Q. Can you outline briefly how Nimble Storage utilizes flash, how does it make it different from say NetApp and their PAM Cards???
Q. How easy do you think it would be for Nimbles competitors to duplicate your design?
Q. I understand Nimble Storage comes with specialist “templates” can you explain what they are, and what would the template for VMware do?
Q. Can you tell me more about Nimbles plans for integration with VMware – VAAI? VASA, SRM? vCenter Plug-ins, VDI Rapid Clones – all things VMware customers have come to expect from their storage partners, how about Nimble?
Q. What are Nimbles plans for the future – NFS as well as iSCSI?
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
It’s my pleasure to announce that the very first UK wide VMUG User Conference is no ready to receive registrations.
It will be held on Thursday, November 3, 2011 from 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m at:
National Motorcycle Museum
Coventry Road
Bickenhill, Solihull, West Mids, England B92 0EJ
Click here for driving directions
The agenda has yet to be published but this basic outline has
Click at the graphic to sign up!
NetApp’s VSC has recieved a refresh primarily bring it into being compatiable with vSphere5, together with whole host of new features…
There’s a review here by Luke Read of NetApp as well: http://communities.netapp.com/blogs/luke/2011/09/09/vsc-211–my-favourite-new-feature
I will probably test the new VSC in my labs next week. I’m done with the 1st round of reviews of the SRM – and next week I will have time to wipe down my lab – ready for production code of vSphere5 and SRM5…
I’m pretty much converted to these storage vendor plug-ins – and I now use the VSC from NetApp, VSI from EMC and the DIT/VE from Dell Equallogic for my most of my day to day storage tasks…
This dropped in through my inbox about 10 minutes ago. And I think I’m already liking it (although I can’t vouch for it personally – as I’ve yet to fiddle with it). I’ve been saying for a while someone nice should produce a utility that turns of all crude you don’t need in Windows client to make them ready for VDI. There’s just to many hardening and optimizing guides – and they often conflict with each other, and are not complete.
Anyway, Quest have stepped up to the plate and created a “Desktop Optimizer” which hopefully handles all that for us. It’s free – and because this is a Windows thing it will work with View and XenDesktop too…
This is your final opportunity to submit your virtualisation use case for the Best of VMworld Europe 2011 Awards taking place on the show floor, on 18-20 October in Copenhagen. Give your IT project the recognition it deserves by filling out our online submission form now before time runs out:
The awards are broken down into five main categories, which include:
Also, one Best of Show winner will be chosen based on the winning entries for the categories above
Each winner and their case study will be featured on SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.UK, a site devoted to data centre and virtualisation technologies. As an added bonus, all winners will receive a certificate recognizing their achievement, as well as a 50 GBP Amazon.co.UK gift certificate, and be entered to win an Apple iPad 2!
The deadline for submission is tomorrow, 16 September 2011, so we strongly encourage you to submit your entry today!
(*Please make sure the form is filled out completely and accurately or else it will not be considered a valid entry. Also, you or another representative from your company must be present at the show to be eligible to win).
Those who have been following the exploits of my fictional character – Luke Maverick will no that he’s been experimenting with scripted installs of vSphere5. Maverick’s work was done using the Release Candidate of vSphere5, and he’s in the process of testing his work against the GA release currently. That work has formed the basis of an article for TechTarget.
Well, I’m back from VMworld. Carmel and I, stopped off at Palo Alto for a weekend decompression – and hooked up with some SF friends – including the legendary “Chickenman of VMware” Hans Bernhardt. We also got a chance to see Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” at the Stanford Theatre – and old timey cinema that was rescued and restored some years ago.
In case you didn’t hear I finally picked up the gauntlet that was laid down many years ago – of attending the VMworld Party as Elvis. It was a hoot – here are some sample photos:
[If you were at the event last week, and got your photo taken with vElvis - let me know I would love to see them!]
If you want to add Mike Laverick on LinkedIn, click on this button:
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