Archive for the ‘Other’ Category

David Davis of www.vmwarevideos.com has released his video of the “Ask The Experts Panel” on the topic of cloud.

On the panel were myself and

• Scott Lowe, VCDX (@Scott_Lowe) of blog.ScottLowe.org
• Jason Nash, VCDX (@nash_j) of  jasonnash.wordpress.com
• Mike DiPetrillo, VCDX (@mikedipetrillo) of www.mikedipetrillo.com
• Moderator: Rich Brambley, vPower (@rbrambley) of www.VMetc.com

Anyway, you can see the video over on David’s Site – click on the big graphic below!

Well, the dust has settled – or rather I’ve been so max’d out that I haven’t had time to write up my experiences. And I really should before it gets all fuzzy, like afternoon beer…

This TFD was in Boston, and virtualization focused. I was joined by a group other Merry Pranksters.

• Ed Czerwin, vSoup and vNinja, @ECzerwin
• Chris Dearden, J.F.V.I. and vSoup, @ChrisDearden
• Edward Haletky, The Virtualization Practice, @Texiwill
• Tom Howarth, PlanetVM, @Tom_Howarth
• Christian Mohn, vNinja.net and vSoup, @h0bbel
• Todd Scalzott, Don’t Call Me Scott, @TScalzott
• Shannon Snowden, Virtualization Information, @ShannonSnowden
• Gabrie van Zanten, Gabe’s Virtual World, @GabVirtualWorld
• Chris Wells, vSamurai, @wygtya

I found the event immensely fun, and tiring – and I wasn’t partying down at the bar with the other guys at the end of each day – and I was grateful to Clare & Stephen for arranging the events and making sure got enough R&R at the end of each day – be ready for the next…

The quality and range of presentation was many and varied – and think some vendors were a little intimidated by the group. TFD has a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, but I think occasionally our bark is worse than our bite. The presenters who came off worst were the ones who hadn’t really found about out the delegates – they came across badly when faced with Edward Haletky who’s a bit of security whizz – another vendor started to talk about VMware SRM not realising that I was in audience. Anyway, I don’t take these things personally (in a ‘don’t you know who am I way’) but no-one likes it when a presenter assumes you know nothing about subject – because they didn’t bother to find out the audience profile. TFD delegates aren’t pro-analysts or journalist (even though I find myself being some sort journo right in my current gig) – so delegates don’t especially warm to the kind of “briefing” content that’s some companies rely upon…

The general theme that came out from the event – is that group wanted more focus on integration with VMware vCenter – from all the vendors. Not a session went by when some didn’t mention whether the software in question had plug-ins into vCenter. That was especially true of the performance vendors – where folks were concerned about bringing in tools where VMware Admins just might not crank up the software – so overwhelmed they are by additional monitoring systems…

Personally, I would have liked have seen more small start-up vendors who were doing real bleeding edge development work. Perhaps that could be the a theme the TFD could pick up on next – Start-up TFD…

Anyway, here’s my decidedly partial view of each of the vendors who presented to us…

(more…)

Congratulations to Kirk Shaffer – he wins the $15 iToons Gift card.

Kevin is a 27 year old Network Analyst for a large Health Care provider in Pennsylvania. Where he supports the VMware infrastructure composed of ESXi, SRM, CapIQ, and View running on HP blades. They are currently 60% Virtualized with 80 Hosts and 1300 VM’s.  He’s been working with vmware for about 2 and a half years starting with ESX 3.5…

I was recently a recipient of $15 Apple iToons gift card in the US. Sadly, I can’t redeem it because Apple says I live in the UK, and I’m not allowed gifts from American friends. Thanks Steve. So I decided to give it away as a prize on RTFM…

Now what do you have to do stand a chance of winning? Well, subscribe to my blog – and I will enter you into the prize draw. Remember when you subscribe to my blog you agree to be contacted by representatives in Nigeria, and young, attractive lady in Russia who has ailing grandmother in need of “the medicines”

The draw will close on Monday, 27th at 5pm GMT. I will contact you by email with the voucher number to redeem your $15.

AND OF COURSE, YOU MUST LIVE IN THE US and HAVE A VALID ITOONS STORE ACCOUNT FOR IT WORK!

It’s with great pleasure that I’ve been invited to my first ever Gestalt Tech Field Day. It’s very gratifying to taking my place amongst other luminaries in the virtualization community… What’s also especially pleasing is that my place along side the others was secured by the votes of folks within the Gestalt Membership. It’s always nice to know that you have been selected by your peers, rather than some secret committee of the unelected.

This is Gestalt’s first virtualization focused Tech Field Day too. Every previous Tech Field Day event has included lots of virtualization experts and companies, but Boston promises to be something special. We will be focusing on server virtualization for the entire event, with every company presenting on this topic. This unique event brings together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders, allowing them to get to know one another. It is a forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback.

I’m not 100% sure of what is expected from the participants – but I understand the idea is that we as group are meant to share our opinons and views via our respective blogs and thru the medium of twitter. This will be aggregated in a single location. They already have a link ready for all the content here – http://gestaltit.com/field-day/tfd6/

This year I will be writing a third edition of my book on VMware SRM. As part of that process I moved back into a new collocation facility near where I live, and started the process of getting my begging bowl out looking for help and support from the storage vendors. I’m pleased to say that a long side EMC and NetApp – Dell have agreed to support my project. So the new book will cover all three vendors.

Of course integration with VMware from these storage vendors doesn’t begin and end with VMware SRM. It extends to all matters related to storage and the way that resource is consumed by VMware. So that includes advancements such as VAAI, but also includes tools that allow you manage your storage directly from vCenter. This isn’t anything “new” by the way – these plug-ins must have been around for at least 18 months – and for many of the storage vendors they are on to their 4th or 5th iteration. What I’m getting at is these plug-ins are well-known and trusted. So whilst the features might be “new to you” as they say on Ebay, they are robust to be used in any datacenter.

So whilst I have access to this enterprize storage, one of the things I want to do this year (along side writing a SRM book and writing articles for TechTarget) is to keep myself and my readership up to date with any new storage vendor goodies that add-value to your VMware investment (does that sound too much like marketing speak? Sorry about that…)

So first up is EMC VSI (Virtual Storage Plug-in) for vSphere. It automates four main tasks – and this each article is going to look at all of them…

• Provisioning New Storage
• Enhanced Storage Views
• Full and Fast Clone (of interest to VDI and VMware View users)
• Managing Mulit-Pathing Policies (to make things interesting I’ve added how to deploy PowerPath via VMware VUM)

(more…)

I’ve done two articles for TechTarget that talk about VMware licensing. I think its a urban myth that VMware is an expensive option for SMB/SMEs. There’s been a lot of work in recent years by VMware to make it easier to consume the vSphere4 product, and last year they even altered the feature matrix of the Essentials Plus to allow SMB/SME customers to access features like vMotion and HA…

Read on McDuff – Part One is out now, as is Part Two

BriForum Europe, taking place 10-11 May at the home stadium of the Chelsea Football Club in London, is the most advanced, technical, hands-on desktop and application virtualisation event. Top-notch industry experts led by Brian Madden, as well as leading solution providers, and hundreds of your peers from across the globe will converge to share the latest tips, tricks and verified techniques around this constantly evolving technology. Walk away being able to do your job better through improved management, lower costs, and ensuring all desktops/laptops are secure and compliant.

Register by this Friday, 4 February and save 200 GBP off your admission fee!
http://briforum.com/Europe/index.html?Offer=BFErtfmpromo

Well, I guess every pundit likes to look back on the previous year and do some kind of review of the previous year – and I’m not different. For me the big stories were the rise and rise of VDI, and increased serious talk about cloud computing.

Read on McDuff

David Davis,  new vSphere Troubleshooting video training course from Train Signal has been released today. This course took him 3 months to create, it’s almost 14 hours, and it’s made up of 30 videos. Like all their training, it’s available via streaming online video (iPad compatible) and in the DVD offline format. In this course, David educate’s viewers on how to troubleshoot vSphere networking, storage, management processes (and much more), from the GUI but especially from the CLI. The new vSphere Troubleshooting course will be part of an upcoming VCAP-DCA training package so he has covered all topics related to troubleshooting on the DCA blueprint. Even if viewers aren’t interested in the VCAP-DCA certification, he designed the course so that it is an excellent resource to learn how to solve virtual infrastructure trouble.

You can see a sample of one of the videos here – http://www.vmwarevideos.com/vsphere-troubleshooting-video-how-to-restore-network-vmware-esxi

(more…)