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I’m headed back to MSTechEd NA 2011 at the GWCC in Atlanta, GA again, and here’s another CoveritLive Ticker for Tuesday’s live comments, pics, videos, etc. I also regularly add other attendee’s tweets to get a bigger perspective on things as they happen.

05.19.11 – moved CiL Ticker after page break
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MSTechEd 2011 kicked off this morning from the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta, GA. I attended the Keynote session, and the following are my summary impressions and thoughts.

If you would like to follow my live Monday CoveritLive stream of comments, tweets, photos, videos, and audio tune in here:

http://vmetc.com/2011/05/16/msteched-2011-live-monday/

Cloud Power
There is no doubt that the primary message for today and the rest of this week is Microsoft’s private and public cloud offerings, tools, and integration. Whether from a phone, tablet, notebook, or desktop, and of course in the datacenter, Microsoft plans on a future dependent on cloud applications and services.

By the way, Microsoft mentioned that Apple IOS and Android based devices would be supported in the MS cloud. We listened to hints about using System Center via an iPad and Office via a phone, but I did not get an impression that anything actually exists for these devices today. Personally, I’d be happy with IOS or Android Apps for the Office Suite, but we’ll see where this ends up soon enough.

Just like VMware’s messaging, Microsoft spoke for a brief period about the future of server deployments and viirtualization’s impact on server hardware sales and implementation. The gist of this part of the talk was that virtualization leads to more server deployments without significant impact to server hardware sales, and that IT Pros will eventually shift to either higher level functions while their physical infrastructures are no longer as important or even in their own control. This line of speaking has always made the guy in the trenches shutter, but it is a reality of the cloud. SLAs and contract guarentees will soon become the new configuration tweaks for today’s private datacenter admins who migrate to the hybrid cloud of the future.

Cloud Manager Read the rest of this entry »

Tune in for Monday live coverage from TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, GA

05.19.11 – moved CiL Ticker after page break
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Join me as I wander around the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC), the site of Microsoft TechEd NA 2011, today. Even though the official conference does not start until tomorrow, there is plenty happening between the Georgia Dome, Phillips Arena, and the GWCC

I will occasionally ad some live comments, audio, video and photos throughout my day.

Experience Sunday at TechEd 2011 vicariously through VMETC.com!

05.19.11 – moved CiL Ticker after page break
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I’ll be covering Microsoft Teched North America 2011 from the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA next week. Look for a combination of live posts and session summaries. As in the past, I am going to try to use Coveritlive.com as much as possible.

Join me live NOW (for a parctice session) by logging in below with your Twitter, Facebook or OpenID account!

05.19.11 – moved CiL Ticker after page break
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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 »

Like everyone else, I have been reviewing the Release Notes for the latest Update 1 release of vSphere 4.1, but I decided to point out specific fixes that will make full image VM backups better for everyone. Note that I work for Veeam Software, but the fixes I am referring to are all VMware resolved issues that surface from time to no matter what backup solution you use. There are numerous other fixes and impovements in the U1 release, but, since most of my world is backup these days, these particular items “popped out” at me.

For a great overview of the entire U1 release check out Rick Vanover’s post vSphere 4.1 update 1 released from his Rickatron Blog and via his Servers and Storage Column/Blog at TechRepublic.

The rest of this post contains cut and pastes from the Release Notes and some commentary about them from me. I want to stress again that these are issues that have now been fixed!

Finally, I’ll point out the one huge VM backup issue (that I can think of right now) that still does not appear to be resolved.

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