Archive for November, 2011

I first met Josh Atwell at RTP, in North Carolina – I just happened to be in town, and got to speak at the VMUG he runs there. Josh is a Husband, Dad, Golfer, & Audiobookphile. VMware VCAP-DCD/VCP/Engineer/Architect – and does a lot of work for Cisco. He also runs a blog called: http://www.vtesseract.com/

In this miniwag about the VMTN Subscription I asked Josh about his personal experiences of having to use 60-day evals, and whether there was any possibility that the VMTN Subscription could “undermine” the partner programs because they get NFRs licenses as part of other benefits.

I think youtube is doing something weird to the audio because the local .mov file sounds, great but once upload Josh sounded like he was talking through a paper cup. I had to put through another media encoder before uploading before it worked how I wanted it too.

Today I received a very nice letter from UNICEF, as thanks for raising for money for their cause last year.

Of course NONE of this would have been possible without you folks.

Can I take this opportunity to thank all those people who bought either the SRM 4.0 or View 4.5 books/guides – who helped to contribute in their way to raising of the bulk of the money. Also I big shout out to all the sponsors who contributed to the SwagBag Competition. And finally, thanks to all the people who paid for raffle tickets at the recent UK VMUG event.

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Today (24th Nov) and Tomorrow, I’m recording a series of “miniwags” – 10 tens minutes of VoxPox Video all about the VMTN Subscription Movement. In case you don’t the campaign is community initiative to persuade VMware to bring back a “TechNet” style subscription for its technologies. If you want to find out more here’s some links:

The VMTN Community Forum Post – http://communities.vmware.com/thread/335123

My First Post on the subject: VMware! Bring back the VMTN Subscription (Please!)

Hear what other bloggers & Your peers think: Week 1: The VMTN Subscription Campaign – Blog Roll

Join the discussion on Twitter: #VMTNSubscriptionMovement

If you want to have your say – I will be recording from 9-5 GMT. All you need is Skype Account, Mic and Webcam.

First up is Michael Poore who I know personally from the London User Group – he’s a vExpert, and runs the popular blog vSpecialist.co.uk

Hear Michael thoughts and experiences on youtube…

This weeks vendorwag is with Ash Ashutosh, who is CEO of Actifio.

If you’ve not come across them – here’s an in-a-nutshell paragraph from their website about what they do:

“Actifio’s Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform is the industry’s first solution optimized for managing copies of production data, resulting in the elimination of redundant silos of IT infrastructure and data management applications. By virtualizing the management and retention of data, Actifio transforms the chaos of multiple silos of infrastructure and point tools traditionally deployed for backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, compliance, analytics, and test and development into one, Service Level-driven, virtualized Protection and Availability storage device. Actifio PAS delivers a radically simple, application-centric, policy-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure, resulting in 10X reduction in costs.”

Ash comes with quite a pedigree and experience – as you would expect with a founder and CEO:

Ash Ashutosh brings more than 25 years of storage industry and entrepreneurship experience to his role of CEO at Actifio. Ashutosh is a recognized leader and architect in the storage industry where he has spearheaded several major industry initiatives, including iSCSI and storage virtualization, and led the authoring of numerous storage industry standards. Ashutosh was most recently a Partner with Greylock Partners where he focused on making investments in enterprise IT companies. Prior to Greylock, he was Vice President and Chief Technologist for HP Storage. Ashutosh founded and led AppIQ, a market leader of Storage Resource Management (SRM) solutions, which was acquired by HP in 2005. He was also the founder of Serano Systems, a Fibre Channel controller solutions provider, acquired by Vitesse Semiconductor in 1999. Prior to Serano, Ashutosh was Senior Vice President at StorageNetworks, the industry’s first Storage Service Provider. He previously worked as an architect and engineer at LSI and Intergraph. Ashutosh remains an avid supporter of entrepreneurship and is an advisor and board member for several commercial and non-profit organizations. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Penn State University.

As ever I spent sometime with the guys – which helped me build up list of questions dealt with towards the rear of the podcast.

Here’s my list of questions:

Q1. How has storage evolved over the past few years to better handle virtualized workloads and where do we need to get to to achieve the full promise of cloud/virtualization?

Q2. How is Actifio implemented into my existing environment and what are the implications? (Actifio sits in front of my storage – and add additional features – How does that work? Do I need give Actifio rights to my existing storage? Won’t this add an “overhead”?)

Q3. How does Actifio gain access and provide application/hypervisor-aware information protection? (You say you don’t need an “agent” for some of the advanced features – but isn’t a “connector” just another word for an agent?)

Q4. Where does Actifio work? (Currently you support iSCSI and FC. Do you plan to support NFS in the future? What made you choose iSCSI and FC in the first instance?)

Q5. Can you walk us through a restore process? Say my manager has deleted a photo of his daughter from an email, and wants it back – how would I go about doing that?

Q6. What are the main challenges to adopting Actifio – If a listener wanted to adopt the technology, what gotchas should they look out 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

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

Vendorwag with Actifio - Ash Ashutosh Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Well, were are into our second week of the VMTN Movement. Things are chugging along nicely, although there’s been a significant tailing off in activity on the Community Forum post that I started :

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/335123

Were currently running at 5,560 views, and 200 odd replies. Many of those are +1′s which is something I called for in my original post. I’m now wondering if that call was very smart, as what we really need is people sometime and effort into expressing their opinions. Of course the trouble is that there is OVERWHELMING support for the reintroduction of the VMTN Subscription, where the debate is how should be done, and how to protect it from “misuse”.

There’s been increased activity in the bloggersphere – and if you are interest in hearing what my fellow peers/bloggers thing you can locate a hand list here:

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/2011/11/10/week-1-the-vmtn-subscription-campaign/

On a lighter note – I notice some bloggers have been creative in making their own photos & pictures symbolising the Movement. Many of them have picked up on the recent “Occupy” campaign. Indeed for a while OccupyVMware was a popular hashtag. Personally, I’m not sure if we really want the association. Putting aside whether you agree or not with the Occupy Movement, it seems apparent to me their often their objectives are unclear, and their tactics not perhaps well thought out. I’d like to think our goals, objectives and tactics are much directed than that. But anyway, the association is a fun one, and the photos are great!

Descubre y domina VMware vSphere 5 es el tercer libro publicado por el autor, José María González, sobre las tecnologías de la virtualización de sistemas con VMware vSphere™ 5.

Este nuevo libro pretende descubrirte todos los pasos desde la instalación y configuración, hasta la administración de las soluciones de virtualización con VMware vSphere™ 5. Tanto si eres un reconocido experto en la administración de sistemas con VMware vSphere, como si es la primera vez que te embarcas en el apasionante viaje hacia la virtualización de tu centro de datos, este libro te guiará paso a paso hacia la virtualización y optimización de tu centro de datos con VMware vSphere™ 5.

Descubre y domina VMware vSphere™ 5 es uno de los manuales de referencia sobre la virtualización de sistemas con VMware y el primer libro sobre VMware vSphere™ 5 disponible y publicado en español. Puedes usarlo para reforzar tus conocimientos, para adentrarte de lleno en el mundo de la virtualización de sistemas o para apoyarte y avanzar en la instalación de VMware vSphere™ 5 en tu empresa.

Algunas personas importantes a destacar en este libro

Me gustaría dar las gracias a Duncan Epping, Principal Architect en VMware y autor del blog Yellow-Bricks.com por tener la amabilidad de escribir el prólogo de mi libro. A Magirus, centro oficial autorizado por VMware para dar cursos oficiales, por brindarme la posibilidad de ofrecer mis servicios de formación oficial de VMware a todos sus estudiantes. Y por último, pero no por ello es menos importante, a Ángel Arias Perez, por tener la amabilidad de leer el libro para corregir erratas en tiempo récord.

José María González, es fundador y presidente de JmG Virtual Consulting, una consultora IT dedicada y especializada en el diseño, configuración, implementación y formación de soluciones de virtualización y cloud computing a empresas. Es también el creador y Editor in Chief del aclamado blog de virtualización y cloud computing en español.

Well, its nearly a week since I fired off my first blog post about the VMTN Subscription. We’ve trended on twitter, posted to forums and blogged incessantly. Who knows if our vCommunity can keep up the momentum? I hope we can. This evening (or is morning – it’s 3.30am and I’m having one of those nights where I can’t sleep) I thought it would be interesting to google “VMTN Subscription” and build a list of bloggers comments and ideas. If I’ve missed you – blame google. Drop me an email if you want your post to be included in this compendium:

Update: Josh Atwell has own compendium of links too: http://www.vtesseract.com/post/12629508601/vmtnsubscriptionmovement-links

Howard Marks – NetworkComputings.com – Restore The VMTN Subscription

Simon Seagrave – TechHead – The VMware VMTN Movement…

PCWorld.com – Blogosphere Launches Virtual ‘Occupy VMWare’ Campaign

InfoWorld – David Marshall – Blogosphere launches virtual ‘Occupy VMware’ campaign

Port115: VMTN

vSamurai: Another Take on the VMTN Subscription

Virtulization Practise:  The Campaign to Bring Back the VMTN Subscription

Michael Requeny: VMware give technet-esc subscriptions please

vTessract: Bring back VMTN Please!

CRN: VMware May Bring Back VMTN Subscription For Developers

SearchVirtualDataCentre UK: Users urge VMware to bring back VMTN subscription

Yellow Bricks: Investigating the options to bring back VMTN Subscriptions!

vSpecalist: VMTN Subscription Campaign

GabesVirtualWorld: VMware! Bring back the VMTN Subscription …

vNinja: VMTN Subscription

Boche.net: VMware: Bring Back VMTN Subscriptions

LoneSystemAdmin.net: Thoughts on the VMTN Subscription Idea – The Lone Sysadmin

vLadan: VMTN Subscription – Shout out Loud

Rick Vanover: VMTN Subscription–The Revival!

VirtualLifeStyle: VMTN Subscription

vInfrastructure: VMTN Subscription

Veeam Podcast: Special Episode – VMTN Subscription | Veeam Community Podcast

Last night VMware employee, blogger, author-supremo stepped into the online debate about the VMTN Subscription. If your into VMware you will obviously know Duncan Epping’s Yellow Bricks website. It appears that VMware have for sometime being investigating the option to re-introduce the VMTN Subs, far from being prompted by the recent online activity – its being something they have being discussing internally for some time. Here’s what Duncan says:

During the weekend I dropped my management an email about this campaign and all the traction it had within the community. Literally within minutes I had a reply. I am happy to be able to confirm that we are investigating the option to reinstate the VMTN Subscription program. Keep in mind that starting a program like this does take time and the program will need a serious overhaul. As such I cannot make any promises on when this will happen. I do want to stress that all feedback is highly appreciated, we are listening! All blog posts voicing your opinion on why this should happen are more then welcome and all comments on the VMTN thread will be read by our team.

Head over to the community thread and post your feedback:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/335123

At the time of writing that forum post has garnered 3,650 views, and over 150 replies. So there appears to be some definite movement on the issue – but I think its still important for folks to register there interest – so that senior management have a quantifiable measure of the numbers of people who are interested – it might even help them guage what the initial demand might be if the offering was re-instated.

To that aim today a new site has been launched called – bringbackvmtn.com has been established by some of the folks at the Global VMUG – and there’s also a “Bring Back VMTN” page on the the MyVMUG Site. It’s my understanding that they have for sometime being lobbying VMware to add the VMTN Subscription into the “VMUG Advantage” package. Up until know its been hard for them to demonstrate to VMware that real subterranean support exists for the move.

So please head off  to express your interest – I understand the poll will be used to offer hard quantifiable data to VMware. I’m bit concern that this might split the responses – but I will leave it to you – you could register your interest on bringbackvmtn.com and also on the original forum post. You can follow the dialog on the MyVMUG Site as well.

The choice is yours.

Make your voice heard.

As you may (or may not know) I recently tried to trigger a grass roots campaign to try and see if VMware would be receptive to re-introducing the old VMTN Subscription. I must admit I was surprised with the terrific response I’ve received from the community. I’ve tried various community based things in the past with varying degrees of success – but this campaign does appear to be “trending” as the social media folks like to say. I must admit when it only started to take off I was a little bit worried that I might upset my good contacts/relationship with VMware. After all I don’t want to be branded a “trouble maker”. But judging by the response from others, it seems like my initial instinct was right – that there’s a lot of pent-up need/demand for a reintroduction of the VMTN subscription.

 My original post on the Office of the CTO forums at vmware.com now has over 2,700 pages views and over 133 replies – and twitter is busy with hashtag #VMTNSubscriptionMovement coined by Rynardt Spies. I think it would be nice for folks to stop +1 and start to say where both VMware customers and VMware could benefit. According to sources close to VMware, there does seem to be receptive ear to the proposal but the community voices need to be continually and consistently heard over the coming days, weeks – perhaps even months – so the message is a clear and resounding one.

One thing I have noticed I how many people haven’t different ideas on how it could be done, and what the benefits are to VMware. That’s started me think from VMware’s perspective about the advantages, disadvantages, risks and rewards associated with re-opening the program. You see I’m a share holder of VMware stock both directly and via various managed funds – so that often makes me think from both the customer and shareholder perspective.

I guess the biggest fear I would have if I was VMware is unscruplous folks using the VMTN subscription in production – especially if its functionality meets or exceeds a SMB/SME SKU. You could get folks using the VMTN subscription & renewing – instead of purchasing the product properly. It’s precisely for this reason that in our industry evaluations are hard-coded to expire after a limited period. One argument could be that most folks are honest, and the benefits of a VMTN subscription far out way those risks. After all it existed in the past precisely under the same conditions… I think the only way to secure the product from miss-use like that would to perhaps limit its scalability such that the product functionality remains, but its practical use in production would be so limited that it would never be used in Prod. The downside of that is some peoples homelabs touch closely to Production style environments – precisely to make them as realistic as possible. My host currently have a combo of 12GB and 16GB RAM. I’m running out memory and I’m considering an upgrade (unless I can get Dell, HP, UCS to kindly donate new hardware – hint, hint). It would be a shame to do a hardware upgrade, to later find software limited my capabilities.

The other issue is how dice & slice the VMTN. If I was VMware I would be wanting to keep it simple. There’s been a lot of talk about different types of VMTN – core, desktop, management and so on. Here’s what I’m thinking. A “VCP” VMTN design for those working towards their VCP that includes the core features of the vSphere5 platform. Once someone has passed their VCP they would then qualify to “Upgrade” their VMTN subs to be “Certified”. This would unlock the door to ALL the VMware technologies for a yearly sub. This could be seen as facilitating the certification process – and also be seen as a “reward” for attaining” the VCP status. It would acknowledge that self-learning doesn’t begin or end with the VCP and knowing vCenter/ESX. I’ve always been keen to see the VCP and VMUG membership as offering real tangible “benefits”. I guess that also leaves another option – of rolling the VMTN subscription into the existing VMUG Advantage package which has proved so popular in the community.