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Author Archives: Gregg Robertson


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All Things Virtual 17

 

As you can imagine the virtual community is still abuzz after all the news of VMworld US. So obviously All Things Virtual 17 is heavily weighted to this news and the additional information coming out after it.

First are number of blogs that are still coming out about VMware vCloud Director, with all the talk of everything moving to the cloud the release of the product has caught the attention of a lot of people. So because of this everyone remotely related to this field for example everyone in virtualisation are now trying to get their knowledge up to scratch on the product in preparation for their boss asking if the product can be deployed,how it all works and when will it be ready in the company. Hany Michael has done an amazing job of listing all the videos related to VCD on his blog here. it is quite staggering how many videos are already out for a product only fully released just over a week ago. Hany is also very well known for his Visio diagrams of any kind of processes in the VMware field (one of the reasons I’m sure that he was snatched up by VMware) and has done a very detailed and brilliant diagram all about The VMware vCloud Director Cell Architecture. Have a look through some of his diagrams and then you’ll understand why he’s well known for them. Aaron Delp has also done a very extensive link directory of all the links for VCD here. I’ve still got a large amount of the links and videos to get through but the lists from both Hany and Aaron are extremely helpful.

Kendick Coleman and David Davis did a session at VMworld all about Free vSphere Tools. I’m looking forward to being able to view the session once it’s published on the VMworld website and if Kendrick can organise a flight and a hotel being able to attend it at VMworld Europe(if you want to sponsor him he’d be more than happy to hear from you via his site). He did a posting all about the session on his website as well as some serious name dropping about the rest of his activities and who he met each day :). If you haven’t seen his free tools page have a look here, it’s got some amazing tools on it. David Davis also did a posting all about a survey he is doing all about the session and how he obviously wants you opinions to help him and hopefully Kendrick better their presentation and know what people like. CompuerWorld have also done a nice posting of Eight great virtual appliances for VMware, free for the downloading.

One of the big open sessions of the week at VMworld was the Storage Super Heavyweight Challenge with Adam Carter from HP, Eric Schott from Dell, Vaughn Stewart from NetApp, and Chad Sakac from EMC. If you ever read or follow either Chad or Vaughn’s blogs you would know there is a very healthy competition and debate between Chad and Vaughn which I feel can only be a good thing as long as there is no FUD throwing. So this was a great way for the general public of VMworld to put questions to the panellists in a controlled manner. Chad blogged about it and put up the video here. As to only be fair and as to not be labelled biased(even though I am referring you to the video in the blog) Vaughn also blogged about it with the same video here. It’s a really interesting video and I feel everyone gave fair and precise answers and hopefully this healthy style of questioning can happen again next year.

As of this morning VMware View 4.5 is now GA. You can download it from the VMware site here. If you are like me and haven’t been able to get your knowledge fully up to scratch on the product then as posted today by Mike Laverick(yes the same one who features in the storage heavyweights video) you can get his VMware View 4.5 Guide – Author’s Edition for a small donation to UNICEF. So get donating and downloading and as Mike says “When the full version is ready you will be welcome to contact me with your proof-of-purchase, and I will send you a private link where you can download the full PDF version at no additional charge”.

Scott Vessey has posted about the exclusive VCAP-DCA exam release date here detailing that the exam will be available from September 13th 2010. I’ve personally started to build up my home lab for my preparations for this exam but looking through the blueprint I think it will only be next year by the time I’m possibly ready to attempt the exam( which is quite exciting as I enjoy having to really push myself to gain knowledge to try pass a certification)

Scott Lowe has posted all the vSphere4.1 links he was planning to use for his latest instalment of Mastering VMware vSphere which was sadly not picked up by the publishers. A great bit of resources if you are planning to write your VCP4 exam soon or if you need to update your knowledge like myself on the new values and features of vSphere 4.1.

If you live in the south east of England like myself or are really keen to travel down to the south east then the announcement of the next London VMware user Group (VMUG) on Thursday the 28th of October will be of interest to you. Already Gabrie van Zanten of GabesVirtualWorld fame will be presenting.

Last is something I’m really proud of which is that all three of my blogs summarising the news from each of the main days of VMworld: All things Vmworld: Day 0, Day 1 and Day 2 all made it onto the main page of the VMworld 2010 Buzz page and was re-tweeted numerous times by a number of the top people in the industry. I know it’s nothing insane but I’m really proud of it especially seeing as I only started blogging properly in January this year. Mine is the third in the list below 🙂 Also the exposure has increased my number of views substantially 🙂

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Gregg (@greggrobertson5)


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All things VMworld: Day 2

As you would expect day 1’s announcements were the biggest ones due to the keynote speeches and it being the first real day of VMworld.But even so there was still some really interesting news coming out yesterday , some additional information about previous announcements and an exclusive video of an iPad application.

  • First just due to it being a really exciting application and another tick on my list of why I feel I need to get my hands on an iPad is the exclusive video of the vSphere Management app for the iPad. I’ve pasted the video below and don’t hold me to this but Duco Jaspars of www.vconsult.nl/ has said he has been told first hand by Srinivas Krishnamurti, (the guy in the video) that the ETA for the iPad vCenter client is VMworld Europe.I really hope he’s right but it does beg the question as many people I follow twitter have commented , when is the client for Macs coming out seeing as they can do one for the iPad. I’m not a Mac fanboy myself so it doesn’t bother me too much but if VMware want to keep all the Fanboy’s happy surely making a client is a good idea?*Update*Eric sloof pointed out that if you look carefully you can see he is using ESX 5.0. .So much for no more ESX after vSphere 4.1?
  • Next is another video from VMworld TV’s YouTube channel interviewing Eddie Dinel, who demonstrated the new vCloud Director product during the Keynote with Steve Herrod all about the announcement on Monday. There is also already a new VMware KB article on How to create External Networks in VMware vCloud Director
  • Next is the video with Steve Herrod VMware’s CTO where he explains all the new acquisitions VMware has made and are planning to make in the future. A very very interesting interview and I always like to hear where companies like VMware see a need to grow and strengthen and what new technologies they are looking at.
  • Next are two videos also from the VMworld TV’s YouTube channel (yes I really am enjoying these videos and it’s a nice rest bite from reading blog after blog) with their review of “day 3 at VMworld” and for those of us who are still puzzled as to why VMware bought Zimbra their VP (Zimbra’s that is) explains what VMware is doing with their products.
  • Next is just a reminder of the link for the keynote speeches happening today at VMworld. For all those geeks and sci-fi fans out there the keynotes are going to be extremely interesting with:
      • Pranav Mistry, a Ph.D. student in the Fluid Interfaces Group, MIT Media Lab “will show us his work on “SixthSense”, a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us, using only hand gestures to interact with information.”
      • Natan Linder, Masters student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab, will provide a glimpse into his work that fuses design and engineering to create novel human experiences, such as the reinvention of traditional items, evolved into a new category of robotic, digital information devices.
      • Tan Le, co-founder and president of Emotiv Systems, will engage you with live demonstrations of a new form of remote control that uses brain waves to control digital devices and digital media.
  • Andre Leibovici has posted a very interesting article explaining all about the storage tiering for VMware View 4.5. I’ve added this to my list of VMware view resources to read up on when I get some time to do it 🙂
  • Next is a great summary of all the other announcements and ones I left out of my list seeing as they are described here by John Rath of datacenterknowledge.com from day 3(my day 2) of VMworld.
  • Last is just a geek fact posted on twitter by Duncan Epping of Yellowbricks.com fame which shows the sheer size of the VMworld labs: “112166 VMs deployed at the #vmworld labs, that is more in 3 days than Citrix managed to deploy over the last 3 years.” *I don’t know about the Citrix claim so don’t quote me on it or send me hate mail, I’m just reposting his tweet 🙂 * Also it was great to see my last posting for All Things VMworld:Day 1 getting onto the official VMworld buzz page :). Yes I got the screenshot as my tweet about being on the page was also in the VMworld 2010 on Twitter stream.

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Gregg


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vBeers – September 2nd 2010(That’s right this evening)

 

Just a very quick posting to remind/inform all of those in and around the London area who weren’t fortunate enough to be allowed to go to VMworld US or like myself are going to the one in Copenhagen that vBeers is tonight. If you’ve never heard of vBeers before here is the “official” definition of vBeers:

vBeers is an informal get together of virtualisation enthusiasts and professionals to meet and discuss all things IT.  It’s a great opportunity to network, learn and meet like minded people.

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The following is quoted from Simon Long’s Website:

vBeers

vBeers-small

Every month Simon Seagrave and I try organise a social get together of like-minded Virtualization enthusiasts held in a pub in central London. We like to call it vBeers. Before I go on, I would just like to state, although it’s called vBeers, you do NOT have to drink beer or any other alcohol for that matter. This isn’t just an excuse to get blind drunk.

We came up with idea whilst on the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day back in April. We were chatting and we both recognised that we don’t get together enough to catch-up, mostly do to busy work schedules and private lives. We felt that if we had a set date each month, the likely hood of us actually making that date would be higher than previous attempts. So the idea of vBeers was born.

London

The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The 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 English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks.

  • Location: The ‘Cittie of Yorke’, London
  • Address:  22 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6BS
  • Nearest Tube:  Chancery Lane
  • Time: 6:00pm
  • Location: Map

Sadly yet again i can’t make it due to me writing a Microsoft exam early tomorrow morning (blog posting forthcoming on this) and therefore even though extremely tempting from past experiences I know I shouldn’t be going out drinking the night before an exam.

Gregg Robertson

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All Things VMworld: Day 1

As you can imagine the first real day of VMworld US has been massive and there has been some really exciting news, some of it unexpected(at least for me) and others not so unexpected (view 4.5)

  • First has to be the keynote speech by VMware Chief Marketing Officer Rick Jackson,Paul Maritz CEO of VMware and Steve Herrod VMware’s CTO. I’ve only managed to watch the keynote once so far(yes i like to watch it a few times to try absorb and understand everything 🙂 ) . I think some of the top bloggers have already done a good job of covering the keynote so instead of me waffling on and giving my take rather watch it yourself right here . The two blog postings I’m making my way through for the covering of the keynote is Scott Lowe’s and Brian Madden’s
  • As I said one of the not so unexpected announcements was the announcement that the latest version of VMware View, version 4.5 is not available. Chris Wolf from Gartner has done a brilliant review of the new version on his blog here.
  • As I mentioned yesterday one of the big announcements was the release of vCloud Director (VCD). Rodney Haywood has done a great posting all about it seeing as he is part of a  major deployment of VCD in Australia and therefore already has a great working knowledge of the product. You can also now download VCD from the VMware website and  as Rodney says “build an internal or public cloud (subject to licensing programs of course)”.
  • Barry Coombs has done a great posting about the Xsigo announcements at VMworld. I’ve only read a few articles on Xsigo myself so it good to learn more from his posting and hear about the new products being launched.
  • Scott Lowe has also done a very good liveblog posting for the View Composer Technical Deep Dive and Best Practices session.From my brief read of the posting it looks like the session was very very interesting and  i plan to read through his posting a few times when I have a moment.
  • As I mentioned yesterday VMworld have created their own channel on YouTube and have posted some more really interesting videos in covering the “2nd day @ VMworld 2010 in San Francisco”,the highly debated question “Tier 1 Apps – Should you run them in virtual machines?” and  a preview if the upcoming “VMware View iPad App with PCoIP support.”
  • Lastly on my list is the three postings by Chad Sakac on:
    • DRS for storage where he shows  and explains how VMware SIOC and EMC Fast allow you to have the DRS you have in your VMware environment now for your storage,
    • His detailing of the VCD product and announcement and how he feels EMC Ionix UIM v2.0 is going to allow a vCloud “in a box”
    • Last is his posting all about the EMC VPLEX and how VMworld attendees “can try VPLEX (it’s in the EMC hands-on-lab on the show floor), and can try it for 90 days” I’m very jealous of this as a number of the vSpecialists I’m friendly with have been working and testing the product and sadly I am yet to have fiddled with it myself. Hopefully i can get some time with it at the VMworld in Europe if they are still doing it, which I would be amazed if they weren’t. Also he mentions the preview of VPLEX Geo – aka vTeleportation and has posted a video of the preview which is really awesome in my opinion (no not because I work for EMC at all, seriously). Have a look at the video on the blog and tell me you aren’t impressed and excited by what it will allow.

Well that’s my list of things that I feel I need to read up on and that have caught my attention.

Gregg


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All Things VMworld:Day 0

 

Yes I couldn’t think of a better title so I altered my normal title for this weeks proceedings 🙂 .

Due to there being so much information coming out of VMworld and certainly a large amount more in the coming week I thought it may be helpful for myself and hopefully others to list all the interesting news and views that are coming out of VMworld each day.

  • First has to be the rap video by Chad Sakac’s EMC vSpecialist’s. Christopher Kusek (@cxi) was the first person I noticed who posted on his blog all about how the “vSpecialists get the job done! “. A hilarious video for anyone in the virtualisation field and the quality of it is remarkable. I’ve sadly watched it about ten times already today

  • As I said in my last All Things Virtual, VMworld have their own channel on YouTube and already the  first Daily Wrap of VMworld 2010 is up and a very interesting video posted on their channel is the biggest news of the day about the not so secret news that vSphere 4.1 release is the last release of VMware ESX. As well as a video preview of the VMworld Solutions Exchange
  • Another big announcement is the release of VMware vCloud Director. As to not give wrong information and because I’m only learning about it now myself i won’t attempt to try explain but leave it to the professionals and both Eric Sloof and Duncan Epping have done two brilliant posting all about the release and what the product entails. Duncan’s posting is here and Eric’s here.
  • Next has to be Microsoft’s open letter to customers attending VMworld telling them how Microsoft feels they are more/as capable to provide the best services for people wishing to utilise the cloud in the future. This is a great bit of publicity for VMware in my opinion as it shows how strong Microsoft feels VMware are in the cloud computing arena. The letter is here (*Warning* this is a link that downloads the letter in it’s pdf format). To be fair Microsoft do make a very good point in weighing up the positives and negatives of both sides(as well as other vendors) and it’s great to see they have their own stall at VMworld as everyone wants a fair competition and for the best products to be decided by the users on a level playing ground.
  • Last is the summaries of other VMWorld news by Scott Lowe here,Dan Kusnetzky on ZDNET.com here and a fairly amusing posting by Larry Chiang of “What They Don’t Teach You at Stanford Business School“ fame with his 9 Lies Told at VMworld. Most amusing to me is due to poor layouts of the page it only shows 7 🙂 I purposely left out some things due to them being covered by Scott and Dan as no one likes the same stuff being repeated numerous times.

Well that’s my day 0 of VMworld summary. I’m sure I’ve missed a few things but i think I got all the best and important stuff.

Gregg


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All Things Virtual 16

As you would expect the virtualisation communities are abuzz with talk of VMworld US starting next week in San Francisco. I’m going to be watching with a very keen eye to all the news and tweets from fellow virtualisation experts(not that I am an expert) about the event as most of the information that will be coming out of the US event will most likely be repeated and re-covered at the one in Copenhagen(of which i am attending 🙂 ). Hopefully I can learn what the best sessions were and make time to try get to as many of them as possible if they are replicated at VMworld Europe.Ed Grigson of vexperienced.co.uk posted a very interesting article about how VMworld Europe is shorter,costs more and has a staggering amount less unique sessions. Thankfully as Ed mentions the sessions from VMworld San Francisco should be online by mid September so if you have registered to attend either of them you will be able to see all the sessions online at VMworld.com.Also the VMworld 2009 sessions and labs are now open for public viewing. I have heard that if sessions go well at VMworld US then they will be asked to present at VMworld Europe. Don’t hold me to this as it is just what i heard but it does make sense and will hopefully bring some of the top unique sessions.

Whilst most of the news is about VMworld there has been a large amount of news not directly related to VMworld.

  • As mentioned by Eric Sloof on his blog,the VCAP4-DCD Exam Blueprint Guide has become available for those who are keen to get the ball rolling on their studies for the certification. I’ve personally started building up my home lab for my preparations and learning for the VCAP-DCA exam. A friend of mine asked me if i knew what exams VMware recommend for the VCAP examinations and funnily enough i had received an email from VMware telling me exactly this. Here is what they recommend:VCAP-DCA Preparation Courses

    VCAP-DCD Preparation Course

  • Also a big congratulations to Eric Sloof(@esloof) on being awarded as the best freelance VCI of the quarter.  Eric’s blog is always a great source for any kind of VMware related course or news and is a blog i would recommend adding to your RSS feeds.
  • Talking of the courses to prepare you for the VCAP exams i asked the same question on twitter to see what people recommended and Jonathon Medd(@jonathanmedd ) pointed out his belief that there would be no need for the PowerCLI course due to himself,Alan Renouf, Arnim van Lieshout and Glenn Sizemore currently writing a PowerCLI book that should teach you everything you should need to know to be able to utilise PowerCLI in the environment. As Alan says in his blog posting the book will be be written by “4 vExperts and a MVP” so you know it is going to be a brilliant resource. Jonathon has told me to stay tuned for news of it’s release.
  • Talking of books the much anticipated HA and DRS Deepdive by Frank Denneman( @frankdenneman)  and Duncan Epping ( @DuncanYB ) is due to be released very soon. These guys are two of the top guys in the industry and for anyone that has tried to read through the whole of Duncan HA deepdive posting will know he is the perfect person to write about the topic. This book is on my list already to buy and I will be keeping a keen eye on it’s release.
  • As you would expect there have already been a few videos and a page dedicated to all the new about VMworld. Due to lack of time I haven’t had the time to look through them yet so here they are as they are on my “to do” list:
  • Greg Stuart (@gregwstuart) has posted all about a competition where you can win the “Ultimate vSphere Library”, with titles from Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe), Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert) and David Davis of trainsignal fame ( @davidmdavis) to name but a few of the things you will win if you are the winner. So get following and good luck 🙂
  • Mike Laverick (@Mike_Laverick) at RTFM-ED.co.uk is also running a competition to win the trainsignal (@TrainSignal) VMware vSphere Pro Volume 2 video series.- find out the details at www.rtfm-ed.co.uk.
  • Eric Sloof has also posted a nice little posting with two slide decks by Iwan Rahabok who works as a Senior Systems Consultant at VMware all about the differences between vSphere 4.1 and 4.0. I always love finding these kinds of things especially when you have to try provide reasons why “upgrading to the latest version of x is a good idea because of these advantages…”
  • A big congratulations and thank you to Stefan Jagger for the passing of his VCP4 exam and for mentioning and linking to my VCP4 resources pages. always nice to get a bit of traffic from different blogs 🙂
  • Frank Denneman has posted all about the VCDX application form and how it should be filled out correctly so that your application is accepted and has the correct amount of information in it. I’ve added this one to my VCDX list for future reference when I am ready to put in my application
  • While on the VMware communities this morning seeing if i could help answer any questions I came across an unusual thread where someone asked for the 10 most common issues in VMware with the steps to fix these problems. True to form a few people replied and i thought their answers were actually quite interesting.  Especially  the one by Petri all about the ten best ways to increase performance for your VMware environment. Also the top ten KB articles at the time is a great page I’ve added to my favourites to frequent to try keep up to date on the latest problems and solutions happening with VMware products.
  • Last but not least is a posting by Maish Saidel-Keesing all about him creating a VERY useful Google spreadsheet of all the VMworld sessions and the information about them. This is going to come in handy for sure especially when I’m sure I’ll arrive at a session at VMworld Copenhagen and it’s full already and i have to find another sessions to attend.

Well that’s everything that has caught my attention for the past few weeks since the last All Things Virtual. As I’ve said numerous times I’m on twitter at @greggrobertson5 if you want to follow me/ask me questions/give feedback/abuse me 🙂

Also any comments are welcome

Gregg


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All Things Virtual 15

It has been a crazy couple of weeks lately due to a data centre relocation I’ve been working on and due to this I haven’t had as much time to post new information and hence the delay of this next “instalment” of All Things Virtual.

  • Firstly a massive thank you to Simon Long for adding my blog posting to his “Recommended Reads” section of his blog. It’s a true honour to be mentioned on his blog for something I posted. I would highly recommend looking through his recommended reads as he’s added some really great postings from some of the top blogs. Also a thank you to Troy Clavell on the VMware forums for linking back to my posting on the Active Directory Web Services encountered an error while reading the settings for the specified Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services instance error and solution. It’s been the most read posting on my blog for the past week because of his reference.
  • Alessandro Perilli posted about VMware officially announcing the ESX end of life.  So for those of you out there like myself who are still trying to perfect your PowerCLi,VMA and vCLI skills, we now have a date that those skills need to be perfected. I still don’t fully buy into the whole reason for the removal of the COS but no point moaning over something that has already been decided.
  • Next is something Darren Woollard ,who I follow on twitter tweeted about, which is a list of all the VMware twitter accounts. There was quite a few mentioned that I wasn’t following. As I’ve said before I believe the amount of knowledge to be gained from following people and organisation related to your field is priceless and it has certainly helped me gain better knowledge of virtualisation products and practices. I’m on twitter at @greggrobertson5 or http://twitter.com/greggrobertson5 if you want to follow me.
  • Mentioning social media there is now a document on the VMworld website for anyone who is attending and plans to use social media during their visit to talk about VMworld and their experiences. I’ve already added my information to the document. *NB* Edit the document as far too many people aren’t reading the steps mentioned at the top and posting comments instead of editing the document. VMworld have also created their own channel on YouTube for all the news and videos of the events here
  • Talking of VMworld ,Gestalt IT are doing a competition in which they’ll  pay airfare, hotel, and registration for VMworld for two lucky winners. It’s a great idea as the winners aren’t just picked at random but rather have to motivate how they are going to “pay it forward” by describing how they are going to give back to the virtualisation community by them going to VMworld.Good luck if you have or are going to enter
  • Scott Drummonds posting a very interesting article on the idea of Designing VMs with Performance SLAs. The article is a very good one and is one that will encourage a very good debate on the positives and negatives of using limits which is one of the techniques Scott mentions in his posting to allow for Performance SLA’s.
  • Tom Howarth has posted all about the session himself and Cody Bunch are doing at VMworld this year and is asking for some questions in preparation for the sessions from the community. Adam Carter of HP,Vaughn Stewart of NetApp and Chad Sakac of EMC are three of his speakers so if you you can think of any I’m sure Tom will be very grateful for your help.
  • Duncan Epping of yellow bricks fame posted all about the ability now with vSphere 4 using ADAM to store the roles and permissions to have a standby vCentre Server in case of a disaster. I’m definitely going to get one of these built up having had the experience of a virtual centre server going awry and having to rebuild it all.
  • With the release of vSphere 4.1 one of the new features is memory management and compression. Gabrie van Zanten has posted all about this feature, how it all works and how it will bring benefits to your VMware environments. A must read!
  • If you are planning to upgrade any of your machines to vSphere 4.1 then I would highly recommend looking through and watching the video from the KB article all about…you guessed it vSphere 4.1 upgrade pre-installation requirements and considerations. I love finding and watching these kinds of things as it always feels as if I’ve actually been shown and taught it from a mentor or work colleague like you would in your daily jobs knowledge transfer. Vladan Seget has posted all about the Best practices KB on how-to install ESX 4.1 and vCenter which is another brilliant bit of information and reference if you are installing ESX4.1 and vCentre.
  • The Malaysia VMware communities has done a very interesting posting all about the VSI plug-in from EMC. The plug-in is a brilliant tool and is a very good example of the VAAI that ESX 4.1 is enabling storage vendors to create for people to utilise in their VMware environments. Chad Sakac has done a great YouTube video on vSphere4.1 and EMC VAAI capabilities. Richard Brambley has done a brilliant posting a while back all about what VAAI is and what it means for virtualisation here.
  • Talking of VMware and EMC Alan Renouf and Simon Seagrave of Virtu-al and Techhead respectively did a session at the last London VMUG all about Why EMC for VMware. Unfortunately even though the day was sponsored by EMC i wasn’t able to make it due to there being a mandatory quarterly results presentation on the same day, so as to not say the wrong information and because Alan covered it so well I encourage you to read his post 🙂
  • Elasticsky have posted a very helpful video on YouTube on how to reset a forgotten or lost root password on vSphere 4. I have posted these steps before but the video is a very helpful addition to this if you ever have the problem.
  • Scott Vessey has posted all about the Changes to VCP exam due to the vSphere 4.1 release.A number of people have been talking about if there are any changes to the vcp4 exams since the release of vSphere4.1 and Scott has answered it perfectly.
  • Kendrick Coleman has done a brilliant resource page for all the resources you may need in your preparations for the VCAP DCA exam. I’m hoping to start building up my own list of resources that I’ll be using in my preparations for my VCAP exam/s once I get it under way :).
  • Lastly is one for anyone going to a convention or conference this year who will get themselves one of the customary backpacks. As Kevin Houston posted, if you aren’t planning to actively use the backpack why not donate it to a local school and fill it with some basic supplies. Great idea Kevin!

Gregg Robertson


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vBeers – August 5th 2010

Yep the third vBeers is just around the corner and I’ll be making a concerted effort myself to make this one. If you’ve never heard of vBeers before here is the “official” definition of vBeers:

vBeers is an informal get together of virtualisation enthusiasts and professionals to meet and discuss all things IT.  It’s a great opportunity to network, learn and meet like minded people.

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The following is quoted from Simon Seagrave’s Website :

Enjoy Talking Virtualization? Come & Socialise at vBeers!

vBeers[7]Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink?  If so, then vBeers is for you!  This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…

vBeers is open to everyone so whether you are a VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer user/fan or none of the above it really doesn’t matter as “it’s all about the virtualization”.

The London vBeers meet-up is held at the lovely ole English pub, ‘The Cittie of Yorke’.  Details and directions below:

vBeers - Cittie of York
When & Where

The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The 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 English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks.

Location: The ‘Cittie of Yorke’, London

Address: 22 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6BS

Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane

Date: First Thursday of every month

Time: 6:00pm

Ye Olde Map: (click to enlarge)

vBeers

Gregg Robertson


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All things virtual 14

Unless you have been under a rock ,you will know the biggest news recently in the virtualisation arena, which has filled most of the top blog posters blogs is the release of vSphere 4.1. For all the news and latest features ,I posted a blog posting last week all about the best resources to get yourself up to speed here this should cover it all for you and most of the blogs are constantly being updated. There no real point to say anything more seeing as the people i linked to have done and currently still are doing such great jobs covering it all

Duncan Epping posted a very interesting article all about the the changes to the snapshot “delete all” mechanism. I still think they should change it to Commit All but it is a very good change that should allow better and faster committing of the data to the virtual machine.

Chad Sakac aka VirtualGeek has posted all about thin provisioning and if you should do it in vsphere and or the disk array and the reasoning to his recommendations as well as a brief lesson on the differing formats of virtual disks and what theses choices will mean for you and your storage utilisation.

David Davis of Trainsignal fame posted a very interesting video all about the new feature in vSphere 4.1 ,Windows Active Directory Authentication-the ability for ESX/ESXi servers to “join” a Windows Active Directory (AD) domain. The video is really good as you would expect from David’s in depth expertise in creating technical videos. also have a look through the site as David has posted up some really good videos and has put up the first vChat with Simon Seagrave from Techead.

Chris Dearden has blogged all about the second volume of the Trainsignal vSphere Pro series. I actually have a set of these with my name on it at our main offices but haven’t been able to collect them due to work constraints, plain laziness in part and the person who has them for me being a very busy person himself. If these videos are anything like the first volume then i can’t wait to get my hands on them and better my knowledge especially as i plan to have assimilated as Chris said in his blog posting all the information into my head amongst many other resources before I attempt the vcap exam/s.

Cody Bunch has started his infamous Brown Bags for the VCAP-DCA exams and the first one is today/tonight(depending on your time zones) I’ve made a few of Cody’s brown bags before and they are brilliant for asking your fellow administrators questions about things and covering the topics you are required to know to pass. Cody also does brown bags for the VCP4 exams so i would HIGHLY recommend getting yourself registered for them and watching some of the past ones if you are writing soon or looking to sit the VCAP-DCA exam at some point like myself.

Well that’s it, I’m sure I’ve missed a few nuggets this past week but most of the news is obviously about 4.1 and I’ll leave that in the more capable hands of the people I mentioned in my blog posting.

If you’re interested in working for EMC Consulting like myself and being a part of this ever strengthening arm of EMC, then drop me a message via the blog and I’ll more than happily pass your information onto our recruitment people.

Some roles going at the moment are:

Senior Solutions Architect/Exchange

Senior Solutions Architect/VDI

DW Architect

FYI: all of EMC Counting’s hiring is done through direct contact. We don’t use recruitment consultants, so don’t waste your or my time if you are one.

Gregg Robertson


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vSphere 4.1 released

Well after the not so quiet news about vSphere 4.1 being due for release, shock and horror it’s been released. As there are a multitude of people that have had the the opportunity to play and use the RC for a while and therefore have a better understanding of all the new technologies and features I thought I would just summarise all the postings that explained all the new features to me and interested me as there’s sadly a very large number of the RC-enabled bloggers that have almost just cut and pasted the same information from a What’s New news release/PowerPoint slide deck into their blog posts.

  • Eric Siebert has posted I think the best resource and posting of all the features and all the changes since the last release/s. It has all the detail you could need and it is being constantly updated by him on the new features. This is what I hoped many more of the top RC-bloggers to have done.
  • Eric Sloof has posted all about the KB articles pertaining to this release. These links are always a great way of learning the best practices for installing and or upgrading your environment to the latest level and warning of possible problems. This is a page I have set a bookmark to for future reference.
  • Eric has also posted a load of amazing postings all about the Emergence of 10 GigE ,improved vMotion speeds , Memory Enhancements – Compression. I would highly recommend reading these as he’s given some really great details all about these features.
  • Gabrie van Zanten has done a brilliant posting with all of the features and comparisons of the varying versions you can choose and the features they contain. As well as all the new features in the new release.
  • One of the big changes in vSphere 4.1 is licensing has changed for a number of the management tools/products that come with the suite. Erik Scholten has detailed this in his blog posting here
  • Luc Dekens has posted all about the new PowerCLI cmdlets with PowerCLI 4.1 and what the cmdlets can do for you. The open source software for vSphere PowerCLI 4.1 is available from here and here
  • Maish Saidel-Keesing has posted up screenshots of the PowerPoint presentation a lot of people are reposting the information of the new release from but has done the New features and enhancements for ESXi 4.1 side of it so it is an interesting read to see how VMware believe ESXi is good enough to push all their current full ESX customers to ESXi. I still can’t see it happening and no matter what anyone says I think they’ll make plans to accommodate people who don’t want to change as not everyone can change over their whole environments in a short space of time and I know a few people who are still to upgrade to vSphere and they are all very large corporations.
  • On the training side Scott Vessey has posted that there will be a new Install Configure Manage course for vSphere 4.1. I asked if the new VCAP and the VCP4 exams will now be related to 4 Update 2 and 4.1 on twitter and Scott replied with loads of information as per usual.
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  • Keep an eye on Scott’s blog for all the latest information about all the training courses and exams here

Well that’s all the best bits and information I’ve come across, I’m sure there will loads of postings in the coming weeks and months about it all. I’m already downloading it to test out in my lab. Hopefully they don’t bring out 4.1 Update 1 too quickly as it feels as soon as I’ve patched and upgraded all my hosts a new update or version comes out.

Gregg

*UPDATE* Eric Siebert has done an INSANE list off all the links and news for 4.1 on his site here. 🙂 Killed my list by miles.