Demitasse

At times it’s hard to believe that these things happen.  It was surreal enough that I got to be part of the vBrownbag Tech Talks at VMworld US in San Francisco and to hang out with Randy Keener doing the Not Supported talks.  Making up and handing out the vBrownbag Swag Bag of Awesomeness was also a pretty cool thing.

Now the unbelievable gets more surreal.  Next Sunday I’ll get on a plane and head for VMworld Europe in Barcelona to repeat the vBrownbag Tech Talks there.  Thanks to Veeam for their sponsorship of the Barcelona Tech Talks and to the invitation from the VMware social media team it’s all on again.

Since everything is so rapidly developing I’m not sure whether any other vBrownbag crew will make it to Europe, it seems that the US vBrownbag crew don’t have passports.

As we did in SF we will have a stage and microphones and cameras, we will have seats for a live local audience and web streaming for a live remote audience.  At the moment it looks like we’ll have four hours of the Lightning Tech Talks covering topics from VDI to designing for operations.  In addition we will have “Not Supported” from William Lam, Duncan Epping and Simon “vTardis” Gallagher.  So far the schedule is full of new material, no repeats of US sessions, so definitely worth watching.  I will have the schedule posted to a document on the VMworld site before the end of the week so you can make plans to take part. Session proposals can still be made using this web page while there are still slots available.

The schedule for the presentations is up on this page, as you will see it’s pleasingly full.  There are still a couple of slots available so there is still time to use the link above.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

My friend Michael Webster wrote a great article about the current possibilities, limitations and issues around presenting a disk device over 2TB to a virtual machine on vSphere. He also gave great guidance about how you might work with the current limitations to achieve unusual requirements. I have one thing to add:

I don’t want technical limitations in the hypervisor to limit my design choices.

Continue reading →

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

Now that I’ve been back for a week and had some time to recover I thought I’d write a little about the whirlwind that was my VMworld.

The first thing was the travel, the flight from Auckland to San Francisco was 12 hours and there were another few hours either end of the trip so it ended up being around 21 hours from leaving home until I arrived at my hotel.  The best part of the travel is that I spent much of the time with some buddies from the ANZ region, even before I got to VMworld the community feel started. Arriving on the Saturday was good, plenty of time to get settled before the main event. Unlike last year where I didn’t get checked into the hotel until after the VMunderground party, so I was carrying all my bags at the party.

The biggest mistake I made this year was with the hotel, it was expensive for no reason and in a poor location.  For next year I plan to find a hotel that is either north of Market Street or within one block of the Moscone centre.  My hotel was neither of these so I had a four block walk to the conference past a large number of homeless people. This was OK during daylight but a little unnerving at night.

Being on the inside of the vBrownBag TechTalks I got access to the Hang Space during setup on the Saturday afternoon , an early introduction to the place I spent most of the rest of the week.  This is where the TechTalks took place, along with the awesome “Not Supported” sessions.  Also around the stage space were the blogger tables, so this was the place to meet the people who contribute to the community.  There was always something happening and someone to talk to around this area and many hours passed without me realising it. The TechTalks and Not Supported talks will filter out onto the vBrownBag iTunes feed over the coming weeks, lots of great content.

The other thread to the week was meeting up at parties.  I started with vBeers on the Saturday then VMunderground on Sunday.  Monday was the vExpert meet up followed by the SolarWinds vMixer, but I got side tracked by Greg Shulz and ended up at vFlipCup which I didn’t expect to get to.  It was a fun event and a lot of interesting people to talk to.  Tuesday is the vendor party night, I started with an HP briefing followed by the customer appreciation dinner, then it was off to the huge Veeam party.  My final party was on Wednesday, it was the Office of the CTO party, this was as awesome this year as it was last year. A personal highlight was shaking hands with Mike Nelson who is the inventor of VMotion among many other things like FT and the new HA agent.  I didn’t got to the main VMworld party and decided not to trek out to the unparty, instead getting to bed before midnight for the first time. 

For me a critical feature of the parties I went to was that I wanted to be able to talk to people, both ones I knew and new people with an interest in VMware. All of the parties I went to had dozens of interesting people and I had to force myself to keep moving to new people.  Meeting people in is the most important part of VMworld for me, especially the ones I have tweeted and emailed with over the year. Having met people in person the electronic communication over the following year is much more personal.  The thing is that I met and talked to more people in one week than I usually meet in months of normal life, so remembering who is hard and by the end of the week I didn’t have the energy to meet another person.  It took me three days after I got home to be able to get enough rest to be able to make any decisions beyond what to have for lunch.

I should wrap up with thanks to my vBrownBag crew, my closest buddies for the conference even though I met two of them in person for the first time on the Saturday.  Cody did a post about the Sunday, when we assembled the vBrownBag swag bag of awesomeness. It was one of those surreal, “are we really doing this?” times and we kept looking at each other and bursting into giggles that we were pulling it together.

VMworld was an awesome event, I wish I didn’t have to wait another year to do it again.  Maybe we can get some real community happenings at vForum in Sydney this year.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

This show is about to get very very real. In a week’s time VMworld will be in full swing,  the first Tech Talks will be in the can and available in recorded form for those who couldn’t be there.

Here’s what to expect next Wednesday from the Community studio:

As always we start the day with Mike Letschin hosting the vExpert hour.  Wednesdays vExperts are: Bilal Hashmi, Ron Singler, James Bowling and Tony Foster. I met Bilal at VMworld last year, full of enthusiasm and I’m looking forward to meeting up with him again.  James is a recent addition to the AutoLab team having written the Fusion setup guide that is now in the AutoLab document, I need to buy this man a beer.

The Lightning Tech Talks in the morning start with Shmuel Kliger asking whether there is still a place for troubleshooting in a modern datacentre. Keith Norbie promises Kung Fu for your end user compute needs (I don’t think we will be Kung Fuing the users, however much it appeals). Edward Shen makes AutoDeploy better with a serving of vCentre Orchestrator.

The Super Star hour has none other than John Troyer and Alex Maier hosting the 200th episode of the VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast. Can you believe it’s been 200 episodes?  And that the 200th episode coincided with VMworld?

To continue the Super Star theme from 1pm until 2pm Duncan Epping will be in the house, then from 2pm until 3pm William Lam will be getting Ghetto for the Unsupported session with Randy Keener.

The afternoons lightning rounds kick of with Tim Antonowicz giving some tips and guidance on sitting your VCAP5-DCD exam, you should already know that exam technique is an important part of the VCAP exams. Shimon Hason will look into Virtualizing Systems Management then  Dan Barr will address testing to make sure thatthe SRM recovery plan actually produces a working application, not just powered on VMs. The final lightning session of the day will be Ben Scheerer using vCenter Infrastructure Navigator to expose applications in your virtual infrastructure.

To round out the day the vBrownBag crew will conduct a review of the days announcements and sessions before heading off to freshen up and hit the party or the unparty.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

The schedule doc has been released for Mike Letschin’s vExpert hour, Randy Keener’s Unsupported sessions and the vBrownBag Tech Talks. Now you can decide whether to go to the sessions you planned or hang out in the community space to watch these sessions.

Head on over to the page on the communities web site and start making more plans.

By the way we still have a few slots available for the TechTalks, you can still submit a session using submissions form, we welcome anyone to present so long as it’s not a product sales pitch.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

After a couple more months work AutoLab v1.0 is released, now with View, vCloud and Veeam.  Details on the announcement post on Labguides.com as well as some information on ProfessionalVMware.com

Also don’t forget the APAC Virtualization podcast tonight which will walk through a case study of an Enterprise virtualization backup project with de-dupe, replication, and multiple locations. Matt Wiessing has been the Infrastructure Architect in charge of designing & overseeing implementation of the backup solution and will talk about the technologies and some lessons learned

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

That’s right, you heard it here first.  I am delighted to announce that Veeam has agreed to sponsor the AutoLab.  This is great for the development of the AutoLab and ultimately the users of the AutoLab. Please head over to Veeam’s site and take a look at their awesome products, if you weren’t aware recent releases include more free functionality than ever before as well as awesome reasons to buy the full licensed product.

One of the results is that I didn’t need to choose between going to VMworld and buying a new AutoLab development system, I can do both.  While I’m thinking about Veeam and VMworld they are doing a heap of cool stuff. Take a look at their VMworld 2012 with Veeam page and definitely check out their Dream Home Lab giveaway, that would definitely be worth the excess baggage charge to bring home.

Very shortly the AutoLab v1.0 build will be released, this is a huge increase in the capability of the AutoLab with Veeam products as well as View and vCloud being added to the list of things you can test, trial, learn about and demonstrate using the AutoLab.

Once again, thanks to my friends at Veeam for supporting the community and the AutoLab.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

It’s less than a month until VMworld in San Francisco and there’s some serious excitement building. 

This morning was the first allocation of tickets to the VMunderground party, this was one of my two favourite parties at VMworld last year. A opportunity to talk to several hundred VMware enthusiasts while in a room with beer and food sounds like a great evening to me.   The other party was Christopher Kusek’s which was much further under the radar.

My selection criteria for parties is fairly simple, I want to be able to talk to people.  I’m not worried about the band or the other entertainment and oddly I don’t want to stay out all night drinking free cocktails.

Another thing that’s getting exciting is the Tech Talks powered by vBrownBag.  These are short sessions broadcast from the communities lounge and recorded for future generations.  The aim is to allow more people to have their material heard, particularly those of us whose VMworld session proposals didn’t make the cut. I will be spending a lot of time helping the rest of the vBrownBag crew to make these happen and learning a huge amount along the way.

The final thing that’s getting exciting about VMworld is the ProfessionalVMware and vBrownBag swag that we will be giving away.  Cody Bunch has been organising this and it’s shaping up to be the “must have” swag. Be sure to find a vBrownBag crew member to get yours, if we haven’t already given them away.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

Ever since the VMworld session acceptance and rejection emails came out we’ve been working on helping people whose sessions were rejected an opportunity to present.  Today the vBrownBag team are delighted to announce that together with the VMware communities team there will be TechTalks at VMworld USA.

We will be recording these in the studio in the hang space and broadcasting them live as well as posting them for viewing later.  The main sessions will be a Lightning talk format, ten minutes long to distil the essence of your chosen topic.  This way we can get a lot of sessions into the limited time. 

The signup form is here on Google docs  and we’re really hoping to be able to give a platform to everyone with good technical content.

Like the vBrownBags we’re looking for technical content that will help other people with something virtualization related.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

It’s not too late to signup and attend the new series of the APAC vBrownBag webinars. We start tomorrow with Virtualizing Business Critical Applications.  Michael Webster will present, he’s warming up to delivering VMworld sessions on making happy DBAs and automating security and Compliance.

In the coming months we’ll cover VMware products in real life use as well as covering some VCAP5-DCA and VCP-IaaS blueprint areas.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz