Looks like Veeam are not the only people running a competition at the moment. Greg Stuart from vDestination.com is running a great giveaway on his site – for the chance to win a smorgasbord of goodies from some of the top vSphere booked signed by the authors , to a complete set of vSphere trainsignal videos ( for a review of the videos ,check out my post here )to some bumper stickers and t-shirts !
To enter the competition , follow the link below.
It seems that barely a week goes by without one of the better known bloggers in the Virtualisation world announces that they’ve been snapped up by a major vendor , be it VMware themselves or part of the major vendor coalitions.
I wont be making such an announcement ( for a few years at least ! ) but I am happy to say I will be changing roles with my current employer , moving a little further back from the operational coalface and working closely with other parts of the organisation, helping them progress their technology roadmap. My experience in operations ought to give me a helping hand in terms of interpersonal relations , but its a fantastic way for me to evolve from a purely operations mindset to that of a more design / advisory stance.
The best practices I’ll be guiding people down might not always be those passed down directly from a vendor as I personally feel they have a tendency to be a little bit “one size fits all” – our groups will benefit more form a more tailored approach to their estate. This does lead me down the route of thinking about best practice and who its best for–but that’s a post for another day 🙂
On a different note , it does leave a little bit of a hole in our technical team , so if you are interested in working with an Enterprise level infrastructure with a good selection of technologies , you don’t have to be a VMware Guru , just be happy to take a technology and make it your own. Living near Milton Keynes would be a bonus too. Still interested ? drop me a mail chris AT jfvi.co.uk
My copy of “Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4” arrived yesterday as a result of the mini twitter competition I won a few weeks back.
Its one of the smaller volumes (just over 100 pages ) on my Virtualistion Bookshelf , but size most defiantly isn’t everything. Especialy when you look at the calibre of its authors. John Arrasjid (@vcdx001 ) , Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) and Steve Kaplan (@roidude) are all very well known in the VMWare community for the quality of their whitepapers , blogs and even comics!
The book isn’t designed to give you a how-to form start to finish of building your own cloud solution but it is a fantastic overview , starting off with the Virtualisation basics , essentially the “what” , “why” and “how” of Virtualisation at a reasonably high level. Common use cases for virtualisation are covered from branch office , to server consolidation and test labs.
The book then focuses a little on how various products form VMware can fit into the environment , what benefits they bring and a very brief description of how they are deployed.
A virtual infrastructure is not much without workloads to put on it , so a whole chapter is devoted to methodologies and approaches to moving your existing workloads from physical or legacy virtual environments into your VMware vSphere 4 environment. Once those workloads are in place, the book covers some of the things to look for when optimising that environment be it via resource pools or additional vSphere 4 features such as DRS. High availability , Disaster recovery and Security are also covered. The final chapter coveres VMWare View , the Virtual Desktop component of vSphere 4.
That’s a lot to cover in 100 pages , but I felt thats the book achieves what it sets out to do , and thats give someone a good foundation in vSphere 4.It would be an excellent aid to explaining to colleagues and managers what we can and what we can’t do with our environment. Its going to stay within arms reach of my keyboard , ready to pass to anyone interested in virtualisation for a good time to come!
If you’d like to obtain a copy for yourself ( though yours won’t be signed like mine is ! ) then you can do so from here:
http://www.sage.org/pubs/21_vSphere4/
The first National Vintage Computer fair is going to be held at The National Museum of Computing in June. If you’ve not paid a visit there then Its well worth heading over – plenty to see there including all the attractions of Bletchley Park .
So if you are at a loose end in June , get yourself over there , see the worlds first digital programmable computer and pick up enough retro gear to ensure you have to sleep on the sofa for at least month till the wife calms down! for more info , click the logo.
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