vSphere Beta Program is open

VMware are excited to announce the upcoming VMware vSphere Beta Program. This program enables participants to help define the direction of the most widely adopted industry-leading virtualization platform. Folks who want to participate in the program can now indicate their interest by filling out this simple form. The vSphere team will grant access to the program to selected candidates in stages. This vSphere Beta Program leverages a private Beta community to download software and share information. VMware will provide discussion forums, webinars, and service requests to enable you to share your feedback with us.
You can expect to download, install, and test vSphere Beta software in your environment or get invited to try new features in a VMware hosted environment. All testing is free-form and we encourage you to use our software in ways that interest you. This will provide VMware with valuable insight into how you use vSphere in real-world conditions and with real-world test cases, enabling them to better align their product with your business needs.
Some of the many reasons to participate in this beta opportunity:
  • Receive early access to the vSphere Beta products
  • Interact with the vSphere Beta team consisting of Product Managers, Engineers, Technical Support, and Technical Writers
  • Provide direct input on product functionality, configurability, usability, and performance
  • Provide feedback influencing future products, training, documentation, and services
  • Collaborate with other participants, learn about their use cases, and share advice and learnings
Participants are expected to:
  • Online acceptance of the Master Software Beta Test Agreement will be required prior to visiting the Private Beta Community
  • Install beta software within 3 days of receiving access to the beta product
  • Provide feedback within the first 4 weeks of the beta program
  • Submit Support Requests for bugs, issues and feature requests
  • Complete surveys and beta test assignments
  • Participate in the private beta discussion forum and conference calls

Here is the link to signup – vSphere Beta Registration Form

Opvizor Update – Kill those snapshots !!

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Opvizor is a product that is aimed at proactively addressing any critical errors in your vSphere environment and fixing them. Its unique turnkey solution is built on the premise that it proactively health checks and provides solutions to your vSphere Admin so they can concentrate on other work.

Today sees the release of a new free beta tool called ‘Snapwatcher‘.

You can finally say goodbye to those sneaky broken and invalid snapshots hiding in your VMware environment !!!!

Snapshots are almost a prerequisite in virtualisation, as they give virtual machine administrators the ability to return to previous stages if problems occur inside virtual environments. Unfortunately these same snapshots can quickly hog your disk space if you don’t regularly monitor and manage your virtual environment. Many invalid snapshots occur automatically when backup solutions trigger snapshot creation and deletion; whenever VMware struggles to delete a snapshot, an invalid snapshot is born. Broken snapshots can grow like wildfire if you’re not keeping track of them, and quickly balloon to consume most of your free disk space.

 

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The team at Opvizor noticed hundreds of terabytes of wasted broken or invalid snapshots in their customer environments and had a real passion to attack this head on. The problem with these snapshots are that a single Snapshot’s Delta-file is able to grow to the same size of the original file. Broken snapshots are a common problem and affect 81% of all VMware vSphere environments. If left undetected, they can easily amass and cause space shortages in datastores.

Snapwatcher is designed to be simple to use. With a single click, anyone can find and fix old, broken or invalid snapshots. Through system wide monitoring of the VMware vCenter systems, Snapwatcher monitors all VMware snapshots and sends progress reports to notify you of how much space it was able to free by repairing or removing the snapshots.

 

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You can download and try Snapwatcher here on the opvizor website by clicking “Try Snapwatcher by opvizor.”

If you’d like a video walkthrough please follow this Link

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….

Speculative thoughts on 2014 – Cloud, Hyperconvergence & Me…

Its been a while since my last post and I’ve been keeping tabs on all the IT Tech news, blogs,  and the local VMUGs that have past including the UK National Conference which was very well attended and had some excellent presentations by Jason Langone, Joe Baguely and Brian Gammage to name a few. The recent Danish VMUG was very good by all accounts and some very good presentations including an interesting one from LEGO on moving from 1 datacenter to another. But enough of news – let’s focus on the headline.

So what will 2014 be the year for ? » Read more

VMworld 2013 – Day 0

Monday saw the first day of the Vmworld conference featuring Hands on Labs, TAM day and Partner Day and a chance for people to come and register ahead of the kick off on Tuesday.

The HOLs were particularly well designed and much improved on last years version and I can honestly say that I found them to be very engaging. Having been through the Mirage, vCHS and the vSAN labs I found that the screens were fluid and it was good to play with products to gain some familiarity with areas I hadn’t seen before.

As I’m neither a partner or qualify for TAM I had to miss out on the events and speeches that I’ve heard were very well accepted by the crowds.

It was good to meet up with VMware staff and fellow bloggers alike in the bloggers lounge and talking with some recognisable names in the vCommunity.

So onto the next day and some exciting keynotes with a few surprises I hope. Looking forward to walking a lot (not) and learning/networking some more for the next few days. More thoughts and experiences to follow so stay tuned.

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