VM /ETC

Archive for April, 2011

Start your Cinco de Mayo 2011 celebration with one of the largest VMUGs in the Southeast US! The 2011 Carolina Summit is at the Charlotte Convention Center (in Charlotte, NC) on Thursday May 5 from 7:30 am until 4:30 pm. If you are a VMware admin or architect within driving distance be sure to plan to attend. You can register here. I’m particularly excited about the 2:30 pm Panel Discussion on the state of cloud computing, but more on that session later in this post.

Everyone will be there!

Why should you attend? Check out the following samples of featured speakers, sessions, and labs:

Panel Discussion on Cloud Computing
(Rich Brambley, Mike Laverick, Jason Nash, Scott Lowe, Mike Dipetrillo)

Pros & Cons of Stretched Cluster Designs
(Scott Lowe, Industry Speaker)

Cloud in the Real World
(Mike Dipetrillo, VMware)

vCloud Director and VMware View
(Varrow Lab)

Automating vSphere with PowerCLI a Primer
(Aaron Miller, VMware)

VMware View Reference Architecture
(Mac Binesh, VMware)

Of course there will be various VMware and sponsor keynotes and presentations mixed throughout the day. Be sure to catch our Veeam Software session at 10:00 am. The event’s full agenda can be reviewed here.

Panel Discussion – The Sequel

I’m once again honored to get the invite to moderate the Carolina Summit’s featured Panel Discussion at 2:30 pm. I’ll be participating in an open and unscripted “state of the union” conversation about real world cloud computing with Mike Dipetrillo, Scott Lowe, Jason Nash, and Mike Laverick. Like last year, I view my role in this session to be like a co host of a live podcast. The entire VMUG audience, however, is real discussion driver. So, bring your questions for this expert panel!

Can’t make it in person?

Train Signal has partnered with the VMUG organizers and will be interviewing speakers and videoing sessions for those that can’t make it. They will also be live streaming the Keynotes at 8:45 am and 12:45 pm (EST). Find out more be checking out this post:  2011 Charlotte VMUG: Coming to You May 5th. Hopefully Train Signal will decide to live stream the Panel Discussion at 2:00pm as well! I assume vExpert David Davis will be in attendance? Help me reach out to him to include the Panel in Train Signal’s coverage!

Other Coverage

For more great coverage of the 2011 Carolina Summit VMUG also check out:

2011 Carolina VMware User Summit Coming Up – Scott Lowe

On the Road Again: Charlotte, North Carolina Summit – Mike Laverick

VMUG Carolina Summit: Be There or Don’t…See if I Care. No Really. Do Be There – Dustin Pike

VMware Regional Summit in Charlotte, NC! – Jason Nash

Let me know if you can make it!

Veeam recently published a Veeam Reporter Quickstart Guide that can be downloaded here: NEW! Quick Start Guide: Veeam Reporter Dashboard

In short, It was written (by me!) in order to help Veeam customers, evaluators, and free version users understand how to create and save useful VMware reports and use the output of that dynamically updating content for day to day VI Management. This new guide helps you get up and running fast, and provides a primer for building valuable dashboards (click image to the right for a sample dashboard) from those saved reports!

This post contains information for building one of the reports from the new guide – VM Report (By IP Address)

TiVo For Your VMware Infrastructure

The Quickstart Guide gets right to the point by explaining how to create an agentless collection job that constantly updates your reports. Much like if you had a premium subscription with your cable TV provider,

Read the rest of this entry »

Because of the prevalence of virtual infrastructure these days, I’ll make the argument that virtual machine (VM) replication, both for business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) purposes, is the new P2V (physical to virtual migration) project. Not in the literal migration of physical to virtual, but in the same P2V concepts of infrastructure consolidation and capacity planning. I’m also talking similarity of process and in the frequency in which it is occurring. Simply put, IT shops that performed P2V migrations several years ago are now exploring how they can accomplish their DR site fail over or their BC needs with their virtual machines.

Let’s call these new generation of projects V4DR (virtualization for disaster recovery) or V4BC (virtualization for business continuity).

The comparison

If I rewind 3 to 5 years ago in my career, capacity planning for server consolidation was a weekly project and topic of discussion. Customers were either in the process of converting physical servers to virtual machines or they were exploring the possibility to do so. In both cases, capacity planning scenario spreadsheets and reports were frequent “ground zero documents” to almost every project plan I was involved in.

Just like P2V projects, VM replication today also requires some of the same considerations for job scalability and times to complete – i.e. using multiple hosts as targets and making sure the network can support getting the job done as quick as possible. Not to mention ip addressing, VLAN assignments, and application connectivity after the fact. Thank goodness we no longer have to deal with hardware drivers and other unneeded software a second time. Hopefully, VM alignment is a thing of the past too!

I’m not seeing the same “ground zero documents” for replication projects, however.

Use the same capacity planning tools?

So, I’ll ask the question:  Read the rest of this entry »