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Archive for October, 2012

UK VMUG – 15 November 2012 & I’ll be presenting

October 30th, 2012 No comments

Update: 11 November – WIN A FANTASTIC PRIZE!!!

During my session I will be giving away a voucher for FREE access to all on-demand recorded VMworld 2012 sessions and content which includes:

  1. Videos (general sessions and super sessions)
  2. Flash presentations w/ audio over slides (all breakout sessions)
  3. PDF downloads (all sessions and labs)
  4. MP3 podcats (all sessions)
  5. Demo videos and scripts (select sessions and labs)

Just attend my session and have a chance to win this amazing prize, worth more than £500!!

Registration is now open for the second annual combined national UK VMUG is being held on Thursday 15th November 2012 from 8am-5pm with a pre-event vCurry reception the night before from 7pm-9pm.

The location is the same as last year:motorcycle

National Motorcycle Museum
Coventry Road
Bickenhill, Solihull, West Mids,
England
B92 0EJ

The day promises to be packed full of in-depth technical sessions, demonstrations and partner exhibits with a speaking line-up that can only be beaten by VMworld itself.

There are presentations by some of VMware’s premiere knowledge experts, including resource and availability gurus Duncan Epping & Frank Denneman, VCDXs Hugo Phan & Aidan Dalgleish, Mr. VMware Storage, Cormac Hogan and automation luminaries Alan Renouf and William Lam along with many others.

You can hear all about VMware’s vision of the Software Defined Data Centre from VMware’s European Chief Technologist Joe Baguley as well as Staying Sharp in IT from well known EMC industry expert Scott Lowe.

What is also exciting is there are a large number of community presentations by independents giving you the real how-to from the trenches sans the marketing.

I’ll be presenting a session on vSphere Networking and Converged IO with Blade Servers. I will be going through how blade servers bring converged IO to vSphere Networking and what design options you have to ensure high performance and availability.

The other community presentations are:

Ricky El-Qasem | Creating VMware Apps for Novice Programmers

Chris Dearden | A Techie’s Guide to Getting the Most Out of IT Support

Mike Laverick | Building my vCloud Director Home Lab

Tom Howarth | Deep Dive on Desktop Design for VDI

VMUGs are fantastic days filled with information that is invaluable to any IT person working with virtualisation. It’s not just the presentations that are useful but the chance to network with fellow IT people and share problems and solutions. Every time I attend I come back with a list of things I’ve learnt.

You can see the full agenda and register here: http://www.myvmug.org/e/in/eid=106&source=5

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Categories: VMUG, VMware Tags: , , ,

VMware vVolumes: the game changing future for storage is demoed

October 29th, 2012 No comments

At VMworld 2011. VMware Virtual Volumes, vVolumes or vVols for short was previewed which I reviewed in my post at the time. You can now see the original presentation:

VMworld 2011: VSP3205 – VMware vStorage APIs for VM and Application Granular Data Management

Well, another year and another VMworld has passed and it seems the storage game changer is getting closer to seeing the light of day if the recent spate of tech preview demos are anything to go by.

First of all, a recap on what are vVols.

vVols are a completely new storage architecture designed to be the next generation of storage with a few key features:

  1. Allow management of VM storage to be at the VM level, no longer at the LUN / volume level
  2. All the storage heavy lifting in terms of moving data, snapshots, replication, deduplication etc. is done at the storage array
  3. No disruption to existing VM creation workflows
  4. Massive scale of number of VMs per storage system

Read more…

Categories: ESX, HP, NetApp, vCenter, VMware Tags: , , , , , ,

VMworld Europe Independent #vBrownBag Tech Talk Sessions

October 12th, 2012 2 comments

The official VMworld Barcelona session catalogue was huge and full of VMware sanctioned content. However running in parallel there was a fantastic community run fringe event.

The #vBrownBag guys stepped up to the plate and spent a lot of personal time to put together a whole series of short Tech Talks where anyone with something to say could have the spotlight.

Now, this wasn’t some soap box in the corner of a room with some nutters yelling into a megaphone but a super organised, livestreamed sponsored event with some serious content.

There were VMware employees and engineers talking about how you can run some seriously awesome yet unsupported VMware configurations as well as some seriously brainy and very highly regarded community members who have a passion for virtualisation and in their own time put together presentations that they thought the VMware community would be interested in.

Luckily these were all recorded so you can take some time out and see for yourself what the VMware community has to contribute.

Read more…

vBeers – London (This Friday, 12 October, 2012)

October 10th, 2012 No comments

Short notice I know but I’m attempting go gather people for a vBeers this Friday. There are VMworld attendees heading to London after sunny Barcelona including head socialite, John Troyer. vBeers will be a great way to catch up after VMworld.

After toying with trying somewhere new, its probably best to use the same tried, tested and enjoyable watering hole starting at 6:00pm in London vBeersThe Cittie of Yorke’ pub which is placed centrally to both London’s West End and The City. This venue serves a fine of selection of (Cheap) English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks. We will head for somwehere to eat when we’re hungry, traditionally this has been a vCurry but we can make that call on the night.

Location: The ‘Cittie of Yorke’, London
Address: 22 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6BS, Map: here
Date: Friday – 12th April
Time: 6:00pm – Till we get asked to move on and/or get hungry.

Categories: VMware, VMworld Tags: , ,