Archive for the ‘User Groups’ Category

The Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting, kindly sponsored by Xsigo is to be held on Thursday 28th October 2010. We hope to see you at the meeting, and afterwards for a drink or two, courtesy of VMware.

Our meeting will be held at the Thames Suite, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP, +44 (0)20 7248 4444. The nearest tube station is Mansion House, location information is available here. Reception is from 12.30 for a prompt 1pm start, to finish around 5pm.

Our agenda is below and is subject to change (but hopefully not too much!)

11:00 – 12:00 PowerCLI session with Alan Renouf – optional
11.00 – 12.00 Roundtable Strategy Session with Martyn Storey & Spencer Pitts; Justifying the Business Case for VDI – optional (spaces limited)
12:30 – 13:00 Arrive & Refreshments
13:00 – 13:20 Welcome & News (Alaric)
13:20 – 14:00 Sponsor presentation (Xsigo Systems)
14:00 – 14:30 Invesco (Julian Woods)
14:30 – 15:00 Gabrie van Zanten (http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/) Design Considerations for Virtual Environments
15:00 – 15:20 Refreshment break
15:30 – 16:00 VMworld debrief (Simon Gallagher & Martyn Storey)
16:00 – 16:30 VMware View 4.5 (Spencer Pitts)
16:30 – 16:45 Close
17:00 Pub

Note: If you would like to participate in Alan’s workshop, please bring a laptop, preferably with the most current PowerCLI and PowerShell binaries installed.

To register your interest in attending, please reply to this email address (londonvmug AT yahoo DOT com) with up to two named attendees from your organisation. If you do not receive a confirmation mail, please don’t just turn up since we will not be able to admit you to the meeting. Please separately mention if you intend attending Alan’s PowerCLI workshop at 11.00 or would like to be considered to attend the VDI roundtable strategy session. Content from the meeting will be uploaded to www.box.net/londonug, NDA permitting.

This Septembers Scottish VMUG Date has been announced… and my pal Alistair Sutherland will be doing the vNews…. The theme of the meeting will be “VMworld 2010 – Looking Back/Looking Forward.”

September 23, 2010
13:00 – 16:45

Location:
Teacher Building
14 St. Enoch Square
Glasgow, G1 4DB

Agenda:
13:00    Registration
13:30    Introduction (Scott Walkingshaw)
13:45    VNews (Alistair Sutherland)
14:00    VMware Speaker
15:00    Coffee/Networking
15:30    VMworld 2010 Customer Presentation (Craig Stewart/Martin Currie)
16:30    Close

If you want to attend you need to toddle over to here:

The Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting, kindly sponsored by EMC to be held on Thursday 15th July 2010. We hope to see you at the meeting, and afterwards for a drink or two, courtesy of VMware.

Our meeting will be held at the Thames Suite, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP, +44 (0)20 7248 4444. The nearest tube station is Mansion House, location information is available here. Reception is from 1230 for a prompt 1pm start, to finish around 5pm. Our agenda looks something like this:

1100 – 1200 (Optional) Interactive PowerCLI / Powershell workshop – Alan Renouf
Note: If you would like to participate in Alan’s workshop, please bring a laptop, preferably with the most current PowerCLI and PowerShell binaries installed.

12:30 – 13:00 Arrive & Refreshments
13:00 – 13:20 Welcome & News – Alaric Davies
13:20 – 14:00 Sponsor Presentation, Why EMC for VMware? – Alan Renouf, Simon Seagrave

• Thin Storage in a Virtual World – Chris Evans, ‘The Storage Architect’
• Towards a Virtual Desktop – Stuart McHugh, Withers Worldwide
• Experiences with Hyper-V – Mike Laverick, RTFM Education

15:00 – 15:20 Refreshment break

• Preparation steps towards the VCDX – Simon Gallagher, Ioko
• ESX in the DMZ – Steve Bruck, Associated News and Matt Northam, VMware
• vSphere 4.1 new features – James Smith, VMware

16:45 – 17:00 Close
17:00 – Pub

To register your interest in attending, please send an email to londonvmug at yahoo dot com with up to two named attendees from your organisation. If you do not receive a confirmation mail, please don’t just turn up since we will not be able to admit you to the meeting. Please separately mention if you intend attending Alan’s PowerCLI workshop at 1100. Content from the meetings will continue to be uploaded to www.box.net/londonug, NDA permitting.

Sincerely, and with regards,

The UKLVMUG Steering Committee

Well, a nice email await for me inbox on Saturday morning. I’ve managed to make it into the vExpert 2010 award program. The award recognises “The VMware vExpert Award is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year.”

Anyway, I nominated some people here in the UK, so I’m really hoping they got a nice email.

The benefit of vExpert are pretty limited (although it’s a benefit to have the recognition), personally I’m hoping that this year’s vExpert program will deliver 1-year NFR licenses to those who have enrolled. It seems to be the case that some vExperters struggle to gain access to software and licenses that allows them to continue their contributions. Personally, I’m OK as I’m still a freelance VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) so I get licenses for training every 60-days…

Next week I head off to North Carolina, for their annual user summit in Charlotte. It will be my 3rd year (or is 4th I forget now). I will be doing two panel sessions there with my pals – Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart…

Anyway, I touch down late Thursdays, and I will scoot over to make the dwinks party that happens the day before the event. The event is itself is Friday, and I believe there is a post-event dwinks party too… On the Saturday I hope to spend sometime with my buddy – Charles Gautreaux. Not quite sure what I’m doing on Saturday evening yet, after all the dwinks I might need to the assume the recovery position. But I thought I might head out to down-town Charlotte and see what delights there to be had on a Saturday. If anyone want to get together tweet me @mike_laverick. Sunday late morning I’m back to the airport, and back to Blighty (That’s the United Kingdom to you folks…

It looks like the agenda for the Charlotte VMUG is firming up.

http://info.vmware.com/content/VMUG_Conference_Agenda?ug=cha

So you know I will be there as will Scott Lowe, Vaughn Stewart, and Chad Sakac…

If you are going to be in the Charlotte, NC area on June 11th please join me, Charles Gautreaux, Chad Sakac and Scott Lowe of EMC, and Vaughn Stewart of NetApp for the Charlotte VMUG Regional User Conference!

There will be tons of information being shared on VMware solutions from NetApp, EMC, HP, 3Par, Isilon, Riverbed, Trend Micro, Viziocore, Wyse, and many more!

I’m confident that this year’s event will exceed 1,000 attendees, so don’t delay and register now!

The London VMUG Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting, kindly sponsored by RES Software, to be held on Thursday 6th May 2010. We hope to see you at the meeting, and afterwards for a drink or two, courtesy of VMware.

To register your interest in attending, please send an email to londonvmug@yahoo.com with up to two named attendees from your organisation. If you do not receive a confirmation mail, please don’t just turn up since we will not be able to admit you to the meeting. Please separately mention if you intend attending Alan’s PowerCLI workshop at 1100. Content from the meetings will continue to be uploaded to www.box.net/londonug, NDA permitting.

Our meeting will be held at the Thames Suite, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP, +44 (0)20 7248 4444. The nearest tube station is Mansion House, location information is available here. Reception is from 1230 for a prompt 1pm start, to finish around 5pm.Our agenda looks something like this:

1100 – 1200 (Optional) PowerCLI / Powershell workshop – Alan Renouf. Please bring your own curly brackets
1230 – 1300 Arrive & Refreshments
1300 – 1320 Welcome & News – Alaric Davies
1320 – 1400 Sponsor Presentation – RES Software

Migrating ESX v3.5 to ESX4i on HP Blades – Colin Style, Prudential
Brunel University virtualisation experiences – Peter Polkinghorne, Brunel University

1500 – 1520 Refreshment break

Virtualising Terminal Server workloads – Simon Gallagher
Interactive (and possibly contentious!) Panel Discussion – UG Committee with contributions from the floor

1645 – 1700 Close
1700 – Pub

This round of nominations has opened for the coverted vExpert Award. Despite its name vExpert isn’t a purely a technical recognition – you can become a vExpert based on you outstanding contributions to the VMware Community – by your work with the VMUG programme for example. If you think you deserve vExpert or someone you know deserves it then nominate yourself or them today!

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2010/04/vmware-vexpert-2010-applications-now-open.html

Well. So far I’ve got ZERO responses. Perhaps I was much to broad in my request. So he’s a little refinement – how about Stupid Virtualized IT – another words horror stories of people virtualizing and getting it wrong. It can be a mix of both technical and organizational issues – BUT my real interest paradoxically, is the human side of the equation. We have all heard stories of over saturated LUNs or too much/little RAM being allocated to the VM. But what about bonkers stuff – where people only run VM, on one ESX host – because folks are too scared to consolidate…?

VMware’s proud goal is to “simplify IT”, but I’m more interested in “Stupid IT”. Stories which humorous or other wise tells a tale of what happens when IT gets it wrong. My plan is to learn from these various stories – and see if I can see themes and patterns that emerge. The idea is to see whether we can learn from IT horror stories. I’m firm believer in you can learn as much from mistakes as you can successes. I’m beginning my research using various UK Central Government IT projects that have gone pair shaped and I was inspired is the recent BBC Radio4 File-on-Four expose called “Computing calamities” first broadcast on the 2nd March of this year. To be honest I take a perverse pleasure in the worse the story is. The sad thing about the BBC Radio 4 documentary is the waste of public money. Honestly, it begs belief some of the stories couldn’t be made up – even though they have a  Yes, Minister feel to them

Anyway, I would love to hear your “Stupid IT” stories – humorous or calamitous! Given the nature of things, if you post a comment here – its perhaps wise to use a vanilla email and pseudonym. Avoid direct reference to individuals and companies – and keep it vague. I don’t want anyone getting into hot water over this – I will moderate comments closely to make sure this happens.

Come on – spill the beans – tell me your story of Stupid IT…