Tag Archive: vmworld


I got wind of a new project launched by Veeam from one of the many, many, many tweets that flooded by tweetdeck during VMworld US week – when my fellow vExpert, Blogger & Colleague Rick Vanover hinted that Veeam was due to launch another free community resource, I was keen to discover !

 

Having made the transition to vendor world, finding content as a blogger can be a little bit more of a search. For some reason, many of Veeam’s competitors don’t seem to want to give me a sneak peak of their products Winking smile ,however in this case the product in question isn’t one that Veeam will be selling !

 

When we shifted into virtualisation, many of us from the physical server world had to make a little bit of a leap of faith into the new mind-set around virtualisation, now that we’ve made it, its is almost second nature to us. If you cast your mind back to those days of 7u file servers, imagine how alien the concept would be that they could be represented as a handful of files running of a single half height blade. Fast wording that concept to today and many people have yet to make that similar leap of faith when it comes to image based backup of VM’s

 

The Backup Academy as developed by Veeam to provide administrators with the foundations and fundamentals of Virtual Machine level backups, no matter who you choose for the solution. Veeam are by no means the first vendor to produce “neutral” training, EMC for example have paved the way with  Their Cloud Certifications last year.

The solution consists of a series of Videos produced by well known community contributors and trainers, such as David Davis, Eric Siebert & Greg Shields . The Academy Professors will be an ever growing list of subject matter experts around the backup and management of virtual machines.

Users of the site will be able to take an exam based on the content and even get a certificate for passing. I personally see the academy as a great way for current backup admins & virtualisation specialists to move to the next level – now that you have made game changing strategies to your production infrastructure, why not do the same for your backups ?

 

to find out more, head to http://backupacademy.com

I’ve finally recovered from the non stop week that’s been VMworld Europe 2010. My feet no longer hurt, I’ve come down from the caffeine rush , and I can purchase a pint of beer for less than a week salary.

Its been a very different experience this year for me. I think that because its the first year that I’ve been more active within the community and as a blogger ( with the badge to prove it ) So the list of people to talk to has also snowballed.

Id badge with various "pins"

I attempted to compensate for this by extending my stay slightly to arrive on Sunday and leave on the Friday , giving me what I thought would have been more than enough time to meet , speak to and listen to what people had to say. I think I could have been there another week and still missed someone ! I was also able to spend a little time with some of my colleagues from around the world , which I’m sure will pay dividends both in the short and long terms.

I left my planner pretty open this year , having made the mistake from previous years of trying to fit too many sessions in , instead concentrating on the things that I wouldn’t be able to catch up online a few weeks later , such as the interactions at the solutions exchange, bloggers lounge & lab sessions.

 

 

There are 1001 other reports of what people did during their time in Copenhagen, so I wont dilute the blogosphere with yet another one but will leave you with a few things that I saw that hopefully will be worthy of some further investigation. 

 

Cisco UCS Express – the branch in a box issue is one that crops up time and time again. This could well be the perfect solution. I really want one to have a play with and if it comes in at the price point mentioned I’ll be impressed !

VAAI Integration – since the 4.1 release , the major storage vendors have been working hard to get this into place and working. Some great demo’s of this from IBM , EMC and 3PAR.

Veeam Backup Version 5 – I usually get a little annoyed at marketing of stuff you can’t actually buy yet , but with an announced release date of 20th of October, I’ll let them off. If you’ve managed to be on the web for more than a month without hearing about these guys , you probably don’t have your router switched on.

 

As well of plenty of things that got me excited , a few things left me baffled , confused and a little irate. They can be summed up by the Infrastructure Center from http://www.mysoftit.com/

I’m still a little bit confused by what this actually offers over using vCenter & a decent backup product. It claims to be able to manage Xen and Hyper-V in the next release but not under the same pane of glass. “in the next release” was a phrase used almost every second sentence , leaving me to wonder what actually was in the current product. The Guys on the stand were not native English speakers, but I have a hunch the pitch makes just as little sense in German as it did in English. Sorry to single you out guys , but perhaps you just accosted me at the wrong time Smile

 

The Party as ever was immense on its scale though like others I felt the venue was a little on the monolithic side – the Palais at Cannes offered the multi level , multi room experience that added the wow factor that the Copenhagen Party was slightly lacking in. I was impressed by the various acts , including a good old fashioned breakdance-off. As fellow bloggers have said, its the people that make the party and there were plenty of opportunities for networking with the other attendee’s

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I’m happily killing 2 birds with one Stone during my time at VMworld. In addition to the conference itself , I’m taking the opportunity to catch up with work colleagues across the world, to share war stories and compare solutions to see the excellence in each others endeavours.

In a typical office , the helpdesk is seen as the script based staff on the end of a phone who tells you to turn it of and back on again. What really impressed me about my hosts was that their helpdesk was the polar opposite. It could not have been put in a more prominent position if they’d tried.

Between the reception desk & canteen were a serious of booths , organised more along the lines of a Genius Bar , where users are encouraged to drop equipment off on the way to lunch. Loan kit is easy to obtain , from projectors to printers and above all an atmosphere of the IT function working with the business , not against it. I wanted to pinch myself and make sure I wasn’t in the middle of a Utopian dream. To put things in scale , this not a tiny SME – This is an office with 1000+ staff. I hear operations people these days complaining so much about a culture where IT felt they were on the back foot and had to “push back” against the business. This was a perfect example of how an IT function can operate when its had that light bulb moment of working with the business to enable them to do what the business does , which is make money !

I’d love to see a little debate around this – do you see IT as a function to accelerate the business , or do you see end users as a necessary evil ?

Its Less than a month to go before VMworld Europe at the Bella Centre, Copenhagen. The buzz on twitter / the blogosphere is working its way up , possibly not to the level of the recent VMworld conference in San Francisco , but I’m sure the event will be just as good , with its many many breakout sessions and mammoth cloud based lab infrastructure.

This will be my 3rd year of attending the European conference and I have to say I’m really looking forward to it – mainly as it’ll be my first year where due to my interactions within the online and user group community, I’m actually going to know people going 🙂

Given the great number of bloggers that’ll be attending the show , I thought of an idea that would be a bit of fun & generate some traffic for each others sites, a shirt Exchange.

 

Here’s how I see it working – I’ve had a batch of tshirts printed up with the wonderful logo below. While I will be giving a couple away in the run up to VMWorld , I thought that like we often do a link exchange, we should do a low tech version and have a shirt exchange. If you as a blogger get some shirts printed to, I’m sure we can arrange a mini swapshop in the bloggers lounge!

 

So once again if you would like to sport one of these , then get some shirts printed up and come find me! If you’d like to do a swap but are not coming to VMWorld, mail me at chris@jfvi.co.uk and we’ll work something out. I’ll advertise yours if you advertise mine 🙂

tshirt2

image 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.

 

http://vdestination.com/2010/08/08/win-the-ultimate-vsphere-reference-library-and-more/#contact-form-398