VMworld Day 2 – Liquidity and Air

A slight delay in this blog post but couldn’t be avoided.

Day 2 was all about VMware showing its journey and evolution in the SDDC (Software defined DataCenter) and Pat Gelsinger was covered off all the major software updates as well as the improvement of the partner ecosystem which now includes HP and HDS in the EVO Rail (Another converged infrastructure block) stack. This is designed more for the SMB space and I’m looking forward to hearing more about its bigger brother, EVO Rack, when it’s released. Sanjay Poonen took us through the EUC landscape and how the the new Horizon Flex solution will improve container desktops and also the local desktop offerings on both Mac and PC devices. Another great stage presence from Sanjay and he clearly showed his passion for the area he has been put in charge of.

I made it a point to attend a few session yesterday on vRealize Ops Manager and then wanted to talk to some vendors at the Solutions Exchange.

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As always there are plenty of key players demonstrating their SDDC vision and how convergence is being shown. I talked to both IBM and Nutanix on their new platforms to tackle this. I met my good friend Yossi Siles from the storage team in Tel Aviv who walked me through IBMs vision for vVols and it’s good to know they are catching up with the competition (finally !!). I also had a good chance to talk to a Nutanix UK manager who took me through their webscale vision and their ever increasing market share in the hyper converged infrastructure area.

I had some time booked with Nimble storage and it was good to have a deep conversation with Nick Dyer and Charlie Whitfield who are great spokesmen for the company.They explained their growth had increased over a year and have shipped over 700 units which is up from around 100 last year. The Storage market is big enough for everyone to take a segment of revenue and Nimble seem to be doing very well with a wider range of storage units to meet both performance and capacity demands. Very impressive !!

I also took part in the ‘Destination Giveback’ initiative. This is designed for VMworld attendees to donate to charity through the VMware foundation. Simply put, fly a paper airplane as far as you can and this equates to Euros that you can decide to allocate funds to a category such as Children, Women, Health etc. I was lucky enough to hit the €1000 mark and go straight on the leaderboard. Skills in aeronautical design I guess ??

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Finally, I managed to attend the annual Veeam party that was very mellow until Ratmir Timashev (Veeam CEO) grabbed the mic and thanked his partners and customer base. It was a lot more vibrant after this but I had left early in order to get some rest before Day 3 and rest my aching feet.

Stay tuned for more from a Day 3….

VMworld Day 1 – TAM day and HOLs

What a great start today especially as it was a dry sunny day in Barcelona. After having an enjoyable evening at the vRockstar party last night and meeting some new faces, it was down to some serious business.

This year I was lucky enough to have a TAM pass from our account manager and it was well worth it. Small crowds were entranced with speeches from Carl Eschenbach (VMware president) and Joe Baguely (EMEA CTO) and as ever Joe was great at painting a picture of the future of I.T with the focus on doing away with infrastructure thoughts and moving to more app centric futures. Since I am under NDA I cannot say too much but everyone will be picking up a lot of it at the keynotes throughout the week.

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I then attended a great presentation from Kit Colbert, who works out of the Office of the CTO for EUC, and he led us though the vision for device management and how recent acquisitions have helped the VMware portfolio. I also had the pleasure of conversing with Kit over lunch which was a nice touch to the TAM day experience.

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Finally, I was very privileged to hear from Ben Fathi (CTO based in Palo Alto) who talked about the strategic direction for VMware. Another great presenter who is passionate about driving change for the end users and within the hallowed walls at VMware. We also saw an interesting slide of when GSX 2.0 was released and how the vision for that grew into the more mature product we see today in the SDDC.

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The day was well worth it and even though Pat Gelsinger was delayed and could not present it was a good day and well worth hearing about the vision for this big software defined company. Watch this blog and feel free to share amongst your peers as there will be more to come over the next few days.

IPExpo Europe 2014 – Review

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A long day for me at the ExCel center but there was a lot of interesting exhibitors and knowledge to take in and this led to a tiring but very interesting day. Its amazing that there are so many vendors playing in niche markets in the software defined space. This is a highly competitive area and I can see that most of these companies are vying for customer interests by creating unique differentiators to entice potential customers. Its a good ploy but there will always be losers in this game.

I wanted to make sure I caught up with developments with Nutanix and Pernixdata and see how they have developed.

I caught up with Darren Woollard who has recently moved to Nutanix and he explained how the concept of converged infrastructure was going from strength to strength. His enthusiasm about the technology was evident and I know that the product vision is one that I like. This led me to attend Dheeraj Pandey’s (Nutanix CEO and Founder) session on ‘The Future of Convergence’ and it was a brilliant insight into where technology is going. He explained that having the traditional SAN in the datacenter is a thing of the past and the future lies in converging technologies into a single x86 platform where the customer can choose what components they would like – compute, memory, flash and traditional disk that can be configured to a requirement by a customer and these form a nutanix node. The evolution of the traditional phone to the smartphone was illustrated very well as an example of where converged infrastructure has already taken place in the mobile telephony world and I have to agree that traditional datacenter stacks must be more agile to meet the ever increasing need by devops folk to have virtualised servers on demand. Webscale architectures are no longer required for the likes of Google or Facebook and Dheeraj made the point that enterprises are now looking for this agility without spending a lot of capital on traditional infrastructures. No SAN does not mean no delivery but instead means less complexity in the datacenter and advanced analytics on top of the Nutanix platform mean anyone can look at and interpret the metrics in the compute, network and storage stack very easily. A great presentation delivered with finesse and simple to understand from Dheeraj.

Next I caught up with James Smith from Pernixdata and he showed how and why Pernixdata make a good fit for accelerating workloads in any shape or form to save cycles at the SAN level and lower down in the application stack. With version 2.0 just released, its now a more mature product and being able to choose varying acceleration media such as SSD, PCI-E or RAM, make this a great solution with great heritage. James also showed me the new interface and how easy it was to deploy and be up and running in less than 30 mins. You can choose individual VM’s to accelerate or datastores using write back or write through policies and the metrics available will show you in that over time you can reduce latency and also deliver more IOPS to your sensitive applications.

Personally, I’m looking forward to more conversation and networking in Barcelona at VMWorld with these vendors and others, hoping to delve a little deeper into how and why Silicon Valley innovators are taking the world giants on by delivering and showing USP’s that continue to WOW the world.

Countdown to VMworld Europe – This is it

Its just over a week before I jet off to Barcelona for the annual get together with like minded virtualization enthusiasts. I won’t be listing all the sessions I am attending but am looking forward to more networking and community sessions this year.

Not to be missed are the vBrownBag sessions – vBrownBag TechTalks.

These are great community led presentations and very different to the standard sessions you find at the event. I’ve also volunteered to be on the vExpert panel on Wednesday so why not come and embarrass me further by watching.

Be sure not to cram too much into the day as you’ll find that the community and networking elements of the event are great to share ideas and catch up with people you only know by their twitter handles.

You can catch me in sessions / blogger area / various parties (vRockstar, Pernixdata, Veeam etc.) and I hope to meet some new faces and introduce myself as more than a twitter bod. If you see me, come and say Hi. I’m not your conventional blogger as I’m a manager and not a consultant or an Ops guy so you may learn something about being on the other side of I.T.

See you there !!

VMworld 2014 US is imminent. What’s next ?

Indeed what’s next and what can we look forward to the US conference starting in a few days.

I won’t be there myself but have the fortunate pleasure of gracing the European conference again this year. On the plus side this means that I’ll be able to follow the conference in the US very closely and bring you the stories that count.

I see some great new innovation from VMware themselves especially around the vSphere core changes and a certain Project Marvin…Its also going to be jam packed with vendors with an interest in Storage and computer acceleration in the datacenter in order satisfy the need for virtual machines to work faster and with less latency eliminating the favourite storage bottleneck.

I’m looking forward to seeing posts from some of my favorite bloggers who are out there but I’ll be sure to provide my own thoughts as well as content links from other bloggers in the field so stay tuned.

I’ll leave you with this thought. If last year was the year of VDI or SDN or any other acronym you can think of, could this be the year of all things Air ? Let’s see how branding and marketing play an important role in the festivities that lie ahead.

BRACE YOURSELVES !!

London VMUG – 15th May 2014 – Another touch of class

I don’t often write my thoughts on VMUG events, especially the regional ones, but this was one of the events I have been to this year that showed a level of organisation and brilliance that I couldn’t avoid this post.

As is customary, the day started off with some good networking opportunities with regular attendees and also some new ones. It was a chance for my to peruse the stands of EMC, Zerto and Opvisor to see what they were doing in the virtualisation space.

We swiftly moved onto the opening from Alaric Davies (The Chair) who always does a good job of showing us the value of the community and what the VMUGs are all about. Some good information on the number of VCPs, VCAPs and VCDX’s in the world and also how the UK was doing well on increasing its vExpert number of which I am proud to be a statistic now.

The opening presentation was delivered by Itzik Reich, from EMC, on the value proposition and technology associated to its newer acquisition on the block, XtremeIO. This is a block piece of all flash storage known as an X-brick and can range from a 2U footprint up to a full rack which could have up to 250TB of logical capacity. It gave me a chance to learn all about how important garbage collection on SSDs and how vendors may be approaching this common performance bottleneck it different ways. My thanks to Itzik of delivering an outstanding presentation with a few bouts of humour which is always great to encourage the audience.

I also attended the VSAN presentation from Owen Sheehy who had come over from GSS in Cork. Another great presentation all about what VSAN is and how its setup with a few gotchas.

Next on my list was a great presentation on why SSL certificates are so important in a VMware environment and this was delivered by Frank Buechsel who had flown over from Germany for the day. A very bright Escalation engineer with a clear passion for certificates and SSL encryption. A bit over my sphere of knowledge but I managed to take away the key points and relevance to tightening security in order to stay safe and secure. I wouldn’t like to manage over a thousand Hosts and their associated certificates as he quoted from a recent support call he had to deal with !!

After the customary lunch (which is very good by the way) it was time to see what Zerto were doing. Johua Stenhouse took to the podium and delivered a concise and calm message on the benefits of Zerto as an enterprise class DR solution. He mentioned a few points over why it was possibly better than SRM but stuck to his brief and highlighted some key differentiators such as the journalling where a replica could be taken back up to 5 days and this was all through the power of software only. Feel free to read up on them on there web page but they a clearly a company with high ambitions and want to branch out into the cloud fabric as this where software defined platforms need to deliver.

Simon Gallagher was up to talk up his vCAC experience and despite his demo not working out, he was able to show the audience what he had learnt while implementing at a customer site and mention his frustration with the lack of DOCUMENTATION. It was key to see the pain points he had been through and more relevant for me since my company is also embarking on making this journey a reality. Well done Simon.

Lightening Talks (15 min presentations) were delivered by Darren Woollard on SRM, the basics and how he felt about the product on its delivery of runbook automation. Another snappy and focused powerpoint which was very refreshing. Craig Kilborn and Gregg Robertson then talked about their journey to VCDX. Wow, what an impressive show of dedication and commitment. I was very impressed on how they had both laid out the approach they took and also the amount of hours and days it took of preparation. Admiration is the only word that comes to mind for what they have done. I know I wouldn’t find it relevant in my role but the audience members that would were clearly appreciative of the words of wisdom. Well done to them both on this quick fire presentation. Lastly, but not least, was Simon again with more on his vTardis lab and how he runs nested ESXi to run his labs and how to make tweaks to run VSAN in a nested environment. I can see everyone now going out to buy similar equipment to meet the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor).

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it to the vBeers and was gutted as I would have loved to meet the CTO of Pernixdata (Satyam Vaghani) but I heard it was good and well received.

I’d like to say well done to a great VMUG team on such a good setup and well organised event. Alaric Davies, Jane Rimmer, Simon Gallagher and Stuart Thompson are a great team and clearly all engaged with the community to consistently deliver a raft of sponsors and key speakers and I’m sure this will carry on. Thanks to Jane for highlighting one of my tweets on her blog post !!

Lastly, I’d love to say it would be nice to present at an event like this and I can think of few areas that the audience may appreciate. Not sure on a title yet but I may work on a presentation and run it by the committee for some advice. Time will tell but watch this space….

Vsphere Monitoring Products (Reporting) – Veeam MP vs. vCenter Ops Manager

Recently I was asked about why I would use one product over another and what are the differentiators that would make a company choose 1 product over another or indeed both. You can read lots about the feature sets and how useful each product is here and here but my intention for this post is to give you an idea of the reporting capabilities of each product to help you decide. Both products are licensed per socket and have pricing options dependent on what is required so again I urge you to investigate this if this is a key requirement for your organisation. So read on if you’d like an idea of how reporting compares for both products. » Read more

vExpert 2014 accolade

So great to finally hear the news (while on vacation) that I have been selected as one of the recipients of this award. Thank you to both Cory and John and the other selection judges on deeming me worthy enough for this.

I’ll be sure to post more informative and innovative posts as the year progresses and ensure that my social presence is increased with more community collaboration.

Thanks to all my followers so far and look out for more from me for the coming year !!

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