[For those people out of the UK - he's a definition of what a "Mackem" is]

This weeks chinwag is with David Owen – aka vMackem.  He’s a Virtualisation Soultions Consultant working for a large UK organisation. He’s worked in the IT Industry since 2003,and worked for several companies including JP Morgan,Barclays Bank PLC and BAE Systems. He has worked across a wide variety of fields including finance and UK defence and has a full set of clearances. He’s  currently working my way towards his VCDX amongst other qualifications. he started this blog to aid himself and hopefully others with experiences that he faces in his day to day career and any useful information he thinks will be worth passing on. Like everyone nowadays you can find him on LinkedIn. He’s also available on twitter as @vMackem and his is vMackem.co.uk. David was award the vExpert Award from VMware for services to the vCommunity in 2011.

In our chinwag we discuss vBlock and Flexpod – and then we move on to discuss this months hot topic – the VMTN Subscription Movement.

Podcast Video Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.