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Archive for August, 2012

VMworld US 2012: The Day 4 Buzz

August 30th, 2012 No comments

VMworld Day 4 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 after belting out Bon Jovi hits!

The day started with the Genius Machines general session featuring three researchers who are working at the frontier of machine technology Kevin Slavin, Co-Founder, Area/Code; Dr. Dennis Hong, Director, RoMeLa who showed some awesome robots and Chris Urmson who showed the Google Self-Driving Car Project. These were fun presentations showing how far technology has come. It was a welcome break from all things cloud and virtual and seeing some cool other technology stuff.

The Solutions Exchange wasn’t open today which I think was a bad decision. The last day of the conference is normally the day when attendees have completed their preferred sessions and have free time to wander around the Exchange and see what the vendors are up to. Hopefully this will be rethought for next time.

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Categories: VMware, VMworld Tags: ,

VMworld US 2012: The Day 3 Buzz

August 29th, 2012 No comments

VMworld continues with day 3 of the conference. There was no general session this morning so I caught about with of the other bloggers in the Hang Space.

It was then unofficially announced that VMworld US 2013 would be back again in San Francisco from 26-29 August also at the Moscone Center.

2013

I then attended INF-BCO1505 – VMware vSphere Replication: Technical Walk-Through with Engineering by Ken Werneburg and Aleksey Pershin from VMware.

vSphere Replication (VR) used to be part of SRM but as of this year is now a standalone product available free for SMBs if you have Essentials Plus license or above. SRM can still be added on top of vSphere Replication. VR allows you to simply replicate VMs to a DR site or locally for intra-site recovery with application level consistency with VSS. Protection is set on an individual VM basis and you can set a RPO from 15 minutes up to 24 hours.

VR is a virtual appliance which is registered in vCenter. You can only have a single VR appliance per vCenter but you can protect up to 50 VMs per appliance. What is great is you can pre-seed your initial replication set so can ship a tape or USB drive to your DR site and copy the initial files to your destination datastore and VR can pick up from this initial replication state and continue to protect your VMs.

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VMworld 2013 date and venue confirmed

August 29th, 2012 1 comment

VMworld US 2013 will return to San Francisco from 26-29 August 2013 in the Moscone Center.

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Categories: VMworld Tags: ,

VMworld US 2012: The Day 2 Buzz

August 29th, 2012 No comments

The VMworld juggernaut keeps going today with Day 2 of the general conference. We were treated to a True American Breakfast.

Donut2 Donut1

Today the conference started with another general session keynote where VMware CTO Steve Herrod brought out the toys to demonstrate “Delivering the Promise of the Software Defined Datacenter”

This was talking about the End User Computing space. VMware Mirage was announced which deconstructs the PC into layers and allows you to sync these layers to physical or VDI devices so creating a very flexible way to allow Window desktops to be available on non Windows devices and also offline.

Read and see more from Eric Sloof – http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/2116-Video-VMware-Mirage.html

A quick demo of something called Project Appshift which is billed as user experience virtualisation which makes using windows apps and desktop a little easier on a tablet. You can cut and paste from a windows desktop running remote on a tablet to the local tablet OS. There are also some gestures to make navigating windows apps easier as maximising and minimising apps is really painful on a tablet.

Horizon Suite was announced which should available as a beta by the end of the year.

Horizon Data is the rebranded Project Octopus which is Enterprise Dropbox (Octopus was a much better name in my opinion!).

Horizon Application Manager is the store front which shows all application, desktops and data that your IT department has provisioned for its users. These apps can be drawn from web SaaS apps such as Salesforce, Thin-app packages and newly announced was integration with Citrix XenApp applications so you can see your Citrix apps. Interestingly I wonder whether this could also be used to show XenDesktop desktops alongside View. Management of all these apps was shown which explained how simple it is to add new services and either automatically install to users or allow users to request them from the same portal.

Horizon Mobile which was originally only for Android running a secure “work” phone VM on your personal phone. Now this has been extended to iOS but rather than having a whole virtual phone, you can deploy secure sandboxed applications which cannot even cut and paste between the phone OS. This is similar to what Good Technologies has been doing with its email client.  For me this is how it should work on Android as well. I don’t really care about having another virtual phone VM, just secure applications.

Next up were some partner demos, ranging from the bizarre to the dull!

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VMworld US 2012: The Day 1 Buzz

August 27th, 2012 No comments

VMworld US in San Francisco is in full swing today with about 20000 expected attendees.

Eric Sloof is happy to Welcome everyone to VMworld.

The conference kicked off with the launch keynote  featuring VMware’s soon to be outgoing CEO Paul Maritz, incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger and CTO Steve Herrod. This was billed as IT Transformation as the Enabler of Business Transformation.

You can watch the keynote at VMware Now, which is VMware’s new online destination for breaking news, product announcements, videos and demos: http://vmware.com/go/now.

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VMworld US 2012: The Day 0 Buzz

August 26th, 2012 1 comment

Part of VMworld US opened today in San Francisco with Partner Day which is not open to general attendees but for VMware’s partners to be enlightened with their tailored VMworld info. I flew in yesterday and managed to make it (barely) to vBeers at The Chieftain. Was great to see the #LonVMUG crew (a bit strange to fly half way across the world and then enjoy a Guinness with people you see in London 🙂

Today, I started the day getting stuck into some serious networking over vBreakfast, fuelling up for the day ahead. I was very glad to meet Brent Quick, Chris Well of NetApp, Matthew Brender and Will Huber and see again Jane Rimmer and Gabrie van Zanten. The anticipation, excitement and interest in all things virtual was a good primer for the day.

Venue I then headed off to register at the Moscone Center which is decked out in resplendent VMworld everything. As a blogger rather than partner I took the opportunity to head off to the Hands on Labs. Labs have changed a little this year. The labs will be available to access remotely after the show so perhaps the stats busting numbers of VMs deployed may take a hit this year. Labs can be completed in an hour or less and there are now lightning labs which are 15 or 30 minute modules of a bigger lab that you can take when you have limited time and come back and finish the other modules later.  Also for the first time you can use your own device via wireless and run the labs from your laptop or tablet within the conference venue. Labs are open at the following times but remember as the labs take up to an hour you need to be there in time before closing.

  • Sunday August 26, 2012: 11:00am – 8:00pm (extended to 10pm)
  • Monday August 27, 2012: 10:30am – 8:00pm (extended to 10pm)
  • Tuesday August 28, 2012: 7:00am – 7:00pm (extended to 10pm)
  • Wednesday August 29, 2012: 7:00am – 7:00pm (extended to 10pm)
  • Thursday August 30, 2012: 7:00am – 3:00pm

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Categories: VMware, VMworld Tags: ,

How to get the most out of VMworld

August 20th, 2012 No comments

VMware’s conference, VMworld starts in less than a week in San Francisco.

The problem however with VMworld is that there’s far too much to see and experience that you can possibly fit into 4 or 5 days without converting yourself into some distributed processing kind of being which as far as I know is still a few years off.

So, you need a plan and a strategy to get the most out of it. Sure, some people are going on company money and may plan to get up late, see a few sessions and then get treated to beers at vendor parties and enjoy being out of the office for a few days.

Being an independent consultant means I’m paying my own way to be there so I really want to make the most of it as hopefully do most attendees. VMworld is a fantastic opportunity to get fully immersed in the world of virtualisation and take advantage of being in the same place with other like minded tech enthusiasts, so if you are like me getting as much out of VMworld as possible is pretty important.

So, we know there’s plenty going on, here’s a summary.
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NetApp releases Virtual Storage Console for Citrix XenServer

August 17th, 2012 No comments

NetApp has now released a version of its Virtual Storage Console for Citrix XenServer as a plug-in to XenCenter. The VSC allows you to provision, resize and destroy storage repositories, manage deduplication and provision VMs using FlexClone and then import them into XenDesktop.

One of the nice things about XenServer and XenCenter is you create storage at the pool level and it is automatically mounted to all hosts in the pool rather than having to provision the storage for each host individually like you need to do in vSphere clusters. This VSC now makes it even simpler by being able to create the volumes and exports on the array as well.

You can read all about the release from the DataSheet.

Looking into the future at VMworld

August 13th, 2012 No comments

VMware’s US mega conference, VMworld kicks off in San Francisco in just over 2 weeks time. 19000 people attended in Las Vegas last year (we will have to see whether the choice of venue affects the numbers for this year!)

This will be my first time attending VMworld US as living in London I have attended VMworld Europe previously so am excited to see the differences, enjoy the bigger conference and meet some more fellow vExperts and other community members.

There’s obviously a huge amount that goes on at the conference from the keynote speaches, breakout sessions, panel discussions, labs, formal and informal meetings, and general networking so working out what to actually see with so much going on is harder than many people would assume.

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HP ESXi customised images now available on vmware.com

August 7th, 2012 No comments

HP has been creating its own customised ESXi images for while now which contain all the HP specific drivers and software which could be downloaded from somewhere on HPs website (unfortunately finding things on HP.com isn’t the easiest thing to do).
http://www.wooditwork.com/2012/03/28/hp-esxi-5-0-update-1-customised-image-available-for-download/

These images are now available to download directly from VMware’s site alongside images from NEC, Hitachi and Cisco.
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/5_0#drivers_tools

Click on OEM Customized Installer CDs.

Direct Link: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=HP-ESXI-5.0.0-U1-15MAR2012&productId=229

There are also direct links to HP specific documentation.

This should make finding the images just that little bit easier.

Categories: ESX, HP, Update Manager, VMware Tags: , ,