VCD | TheSaffaGeek

There has been an unbelievable amount of news in the past week and a half since my last All Things Virtual. Also i came across one or two blogs in the past few days that were a bit older but have so much great information in them I’ve added them to this list also.

First is the announcement of the next London VMUG meeting. It is happening on Thursday the 28th of October with some really awesome sessions by Xsigo and Gabrie van Zanten of www.gabesvirtualworld.com/ fame. If you are near the London area I would encourage you to mail the address and book your spot and come join all the attendees for vBeers afterwards and hear how we can all talk about not just VMware stuff but all things geek 🙂

I’m very fortunate to have become a part of a very current and global company like EMC due to the company I worked for being bought by EMC. If you are like i was and always wanted to join a big international IT company at the forefront of the industry then Chad Sakacc’s posting about the more than 200 open positions at EMC,EMC partners and VCE will be of interest to you. There are some amazing roles open especially in my opinion the latest vSpecialist roles to be filled as the vSpecialists are definitely one of the “elite” teams of Virtualisation professionals which I hope one day soon I can become a part of.

Chris Dearden has done an in depth blog posting all about Kaviza VDI in a box V3. If you haven’t heard about Kaviza they won the best of VMworld 2010 Desktop Virtualisation award and has been rated very highly by a lot of top people in the virtualisation industry. Chris has done a great posting all about the features and also just posted about the latest release of it version 3.1.

If you didn’t read my last All Things Virtual then you wouldn’t know that the registration for the VCAP-DCA exams were due to be opened on September the 13th as mentioned by Scott Vessey on his blog. You can register here for the exam. A few of the guys I follow on twitter have already registered. I’m personally waiting quite a while until i feel confident enough in my knowledge and having got through and confidently ticket off all the things on the VCAP blueprint with links as created by by Kendrick Coleman. Eric Sloof posted all about test questions for the VCAP-DCA exam on his site, which will be a nice way of doing some practice before the exam even though a large part of the exam is doing labs. Cody Bunch has started registrations for the VCAP-DCA brown bags consisting of 18 sessions run on a bi-weekly basis starting next week Wednesday (30th of September). I have been through quite few of Cody’s VCP and VCDX brown bags (recorded due to the times they have been running) and they are going to be a brilliant resource in my preparations for the exam.

David M Davis of the Trainsignal vsphere training materials fame has done a very interesting video all about VMware ESXi 4.1 Lockdown and New Total Lockdown Mode. this video is great for someone like me who is having to build and strengthen their knowledge all about ESXi seeing as I’m an ESX only user so far and with the next release not having ESX included.Eric Siebert has posted a great posting all about Upgrading hosts from ESX to ESXi in seven steps. This is brilliant for the exact same reasons of learning ESXi die to ESX being discontinued.

Eric along with David M Davis and Simon Seagrave have also covered his blog posting along with HP microserver and cool vSphere iPad apps on their latest vchat episode. If you haven’t watched any of theses vChat’s before I would highly recommend them as the guys cover all the latest and greatest things coming out and a personal bit of enjoyment is seeing how remarkably happy David is in every single vChat episode 🙂

The talk and blogging about VMware vCloud Director is still going strong since VMworld and there have been some top class blogs all about features,fixes,lab builds and hardening guides. William Lam has done a posting all about automating the installation of vCloud director and the oracle database. Duncan Epping has posted about the vCloud Director security hardening guide. From what a number of people have been saying on twitter this is a must read before using vCloud Director. I am yet to get round to it as I’m still trying to finish building my test lab of the product but as usual the guide looks like a brilliant resource.Duncan has also posted about creating a vCD lab on your Mac laptop. I’m not an Apple Mac person myself but I’m sure a substantial amount of people will find this posting very interesting.

Mark Vaughn has posted all about a challenge he has made for someone to try make a mini version of the VMware Express truck. If you haven’t heard about the VMware Express tuck then read about it here. Mark is challenging someone to create a smaller version and try put it into a Mini Club-S. I along with a large number of people judging from the talk of it on twitter would love to see this achieved so if you feel up to the challenge then check out his blog and please tell me when it being started and keep me up to date on it’s progress as this is a brilliant idea and highly interesting concept.

Frank Denneman has done another brilliant posting all about Resource pools and simultaneous vMotions. I’ve posted a few of franks previous postings on the topic and i would highly recommend reading through his latest posting on the topic as i know a large number of people and see a very large number on the VMware communities still believing setting values and limits for resource pools as well as using resource pools for organisation.

Duncan Epping has also done a posting all about the misconceptions of the amount of memory allocated to the service console and how it is actually calculated. a nice little bit of information possible for someone writing their vcp or VCAP soon as they love these arbitrary kinds of questions in the exams.

Due to vCentre 4.1 now requiring the base Os to be x64 a number of people are now needing to upgrade their vCentre to a 64bit server.Barry Coombs has blogged all about the VMware document detailing how to achieve it and some of the points of interest he feels you need to pay special attention to.Thankfully due to my vCentre needing a rebuild a while back my vCentre is already 64bit. If you like a large number people seeing as how much traffic I get to the posting you may get an “Active Directory Web Services encountered an error while reading the settings for the specified Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services instance. Active Directory Web Services will retry this operation periodically. In the mean time, this instance will be ignored.” error and will need to make a few registry changes to fix the error as defined in my blog posting.

Alan Renouf has posted all about the latest PowerCLI 4.1 Poster and Quick Reference Guide. This guide is very useful to me due to my trying to teach myself Powershell/PowerCLI and the learning of these commands for my usage due to the removal of the COS soon. Alan is obviously one of the top guys for PowerCLI and as I’ve mentioned loads of times before if you aren’t using his vCheck program then you need to start using it ASAP.

The next one is an amusing one for anyone working in the virtualisation field who is asked by someone what they actually do for a living and having to try explain it to someone who doesn’t work in IT. Gabrie van Zanten wrote the posting and it’s a great article especially the comments of what other people say 🙂

Next is all about the latest release of the vReference card by Forbes Guthrie. The reference card is an amazing amount of information you could even need to look up on one very easy sheet. I always have the pdf saved to my desktop so i can access it whenever i need to do a quick lookup of any information or values

Next is the availability of the schedule builder for VMworld Copenhagen for all the attendees. I’ve already started playing around with my schedule trying to get in the sessions and hands on labs I want to attend and do ,as well as leave some time for social networking as one of the big things about the conference for me is meeting all the people who I follow and chat to on twitter and whose blogs I have and still learn so much from.If you are a blogger or social media contributor and are attending or will be blogging about VMworld Copenhagen then remember to add your information for the VMworld Europe 2010 Social Media Contributors.

Duncan Epping of yellow-bricks fame has a contest to win yourself a free VMworld Copenhagen ticket so if you aren’t attending and wish to attend but for whatever reason couldn’t afford it then go check out his posting on the contest here and hopefully I’ll meet you there at one of the events.

Talking of events at VMworld the Danish VMUG have taken on a crazy task and have opened up a VMUGParty for all VMworld Copenhagen attendees with free beer and cold drinks sponsored by EMC, Trend Micro, Magirus, IBM and Veeam. I have a feeling this pay get out of hand with the amount of people invited but I’m planning to make it myself and hopefully i can meet you.

Chris Dearden has come up with a very clever idea of instead of exchanging information and business cards at VMworld to exchange self created t-shirts and maybe by the end of the week you’ll have yourself a couple of very cool shirts with your fellow VMware bloggers websites on them.

Gregg

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.