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Archive for October, 2011

VMworld Buzz: Day 3

October 20th, 2011 No comments

VMworld Day 3 started a little later than the previous days to give all attendees a little more time in bed to recover from the VMworld party last night.

The day started with the General Session with VMware CEO Paul Maritz which promised an inside look at at the forces shaping Cloud Computing and the next generation of IT. I met up with some London VMware User Group for a more relaxed breakfast watching the session on the screen.

The keynote started with Carl Eschenbach, who brought on stage three customers talking about their IT use-cases.

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VMworld Buzz: Day 2

October 19th, 2011 1 comment

IMG_0729 The VMworld train continues again today with Day 2 of the general conference. I arrived early and decided to take a lab before they get to busy and there were still quite a few people already lined up before the start at 8.

I decided to go for the ThinApp related lab HOL23 – Solving Application Management Challenges with Application Virtualisation as it’s not something I’ve really worked with before.

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VMworld Buzz: vVolumes, VMware’s game changer for storage

October 19th, 2011 2 comments

I attended session VSP3205 — Technology Preview: VMware vStorage APIs for VM and Application Granular Data – Satyam Vaghani, Vijay Ramachandran which was rumoured to be all about what’s coming up for storage.

This certainly didn’t disappoint and turned out to be one of the coolest new technologies VMware is working on with its storage partners. Very strange that it wasn’t even mentioned in the keynote yesterday or not more highly billed.

This is a game changer in storage!

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VMworld Buzz: Day 2 General Session – Raghu Raghuram

October 19th, 2011 No comments

IMG_0731 Day 2’s General session was presented by VMware’s Raghu Raghuram who is the Senior VP and General Manager of Cloud Platforms. It was time to sit down and enjoy breakfast at the same time!

This wasn’t a technical session like yesterday’s keynote so no cool demos of new products. This premise of the keynote was taking about the Software Only Datacenter. Lots of talk about how over time CPUs are getting faster, VM resource requirements are getting bigger, graphs showing more and more…OK so nothing we don’t know.

The talk then went onto the VMware “how we see the future and we will have the products to do it all” .

This doesn’t mean you should stop listening. I think this session is the one you should be listening to and then telling your CTO to listen to so they are seeing the future of where datacenters are going to and can think long term and plan accordingly.

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VMworld Buzz: Day 1

October 18th, 2011 No comments

VMworld kicked off today in earnest with about 6500 expected attendees. My day kicked off trying the local cuisine. A Danish pastry for breakfast in…Denmark…perfect!

The morning’s major announcement was all about Management with VMware announcing vCenter Operations Management Suite.

I then attended VSP3067 — Mythbusters Goes Virtual – Eric Sloof and Mattias Sundling.

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This was a great session with a few very simple yet very important things that every VM admin needs to know. Busting the myths was all about looking at things like RDMs vs. VMFS, Changed Block Tracking, Resource Pools, and PVSCSI vs. LSI Logic. Eric and Mattias went through each one and explained the things that you may have taken for granted but are no longer true. Even if you don’t have a chance to hear the repeat, look up the content and make sure you are following these great tips.

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VMworld Buzz: Day 1 General Session Keynote with Steve Herrod.

October 18th, 2011 No comments

Today’s General Session is where the VMware CTO, Steve Herrod did the keynote all based around the theme of the conference, It’s your cloud, own it. One of his quotes was “The cloud is here, the cloud is changing IT and this is due to you”. I felt it was a bit strange not to kick off the conference with this keynote and only have it in the afternoon. There are 7100 people at VMworld Europe up by 1000 from last year.

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Steve then talked about the VMUG group which now has 65000 members worldwide. It seems VMware is getting serious about supporting the VMUGs around the world which is good but this does have the side effect of taking away some of the independence of the VMUGs.

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VMworld Buzz: VMware announces vCenter Operations Management Suite

October 18th, 2011 1 comment

VMware’s major announcement at VMworld is billed as “The Biggest VMware Management Launch Ever”. What that means is VMware has announced its new version of vCenter Operations which it is now calling vCenter Operations Management Suite and will be released later this year or early 2012. vCOPS as it’s called is the technology VMware bought from Integrien in August 2010. vCOPS-Std vCOPS is used as a performance management application which gathers all the stats from your vCenter infrastructure and uses clever analytics to create powerful visualisations (pretty pictures) so you can more easily troubleshoot performance issues in your virtual environment.

Performance Management is extremely important in your virtual environment. Your infrastructure is only getting bigger as you keep adding more and bigger VMs and understanding and managing your performance capability becomes so important the bigger you get.

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VMworld Buzz: Day 0

October 17th, 2011 No comments

VMworld Europe kicked off today in Copenhagen with Partner Day which is where VMware’s partners get to hear their special dose of VMworld info which is more tailored to helping partners sell & deploy VMware solutions.

I arrived early afternoon and after a quick look around decided to get stuck into the Hands on Labs. The labs set up is pretty good, you get your badge scanned and go into a queue which is displayed on a TV. When your name gets highlighted you go to the entrance and get escorted to your assigned lab seat. There are two monitors and a thin client device. Your friendly usher then helps you get set up if it’s your first lab and makes sure you can get started. You select which lab you want to do and it is pretty much available immediately.

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My VMworld schedule & what you shouldn’t miss

October 12th, 2011 No comments

I’ve been working on my VMWorld Europe schedule which is a lesson in compromise begging for more hours in a day!

There are just far too many sessions which I would like to attend but I need to also take in the following:

Labs
Its not just the sessions that are important but I want to have enough time to do some of the hands-on-labs as getting down and dirty with a product is probably the best way to learn, far better than PowerPoint (or should that be SlideRocket?).

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Can you afford not going to VMworld Europe?

October 6th, 2011 No comments

VMworld Europe is just under two weeks away and there’s still time to register if you haven’t already done so.

VMworld is one of, if not the best technology conferences in the world. Yes, there has already been a huge one in Las Vegas this year but if you weren’t able to attend, there’s still time to register for Copenhagen.  If you think you’ve already “done” VMworld because you watched the interviews, read the blog posts and saw the Twitter feed, you are seriously missing out. VMware, its partners & other vendors will be announcing new cool stuff that wasn’t announced in Vegas.

VMworld is a deep-dive training course & networking event on steroids that you can’t really afford to miss. I’m funding my own way just to be there as I see it as a vital opportunity to further my knowledge and career which I just couldn’t do remotely. Yes, it is does cost money but how much does that instructor led course cost you or your company and you’ll learn so much more at VMworld.

So, why can you not afford to miss it?

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