VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

life is hard.. one minute you’re at the french Riviera (Nice/Cannes,17 degrees Celcius, sunny) and the next minute you’re struck by reality (Amsterdam, 5 degrees Celcius, drizzle). Grissa and myself went to Schiphol Airport to pick the boys up. Fortunately they had a good flight, but the weather was very confronting when they got out of the plane . On our way back home we even ran a flat tire, but we made it safely after all.

For me, I’d like to say to all of you a big thanks for the huge amount of interest in our blog! I must honestly say that I’d never expect that so many of you would follow the comments and postings from VMworld 2009. I hope we can keep you hooked to our site, now VMworld 2009 Europe has ended.

Stay tuned for new postings and news from the world of virtualisation as there is much more to see!

Last night we finished publishing the last two videos and now it’s Friday Febr 27 8:15, we are eating breakfast and getting ready to leave Cannes. Our flight leaves at 12:05 and we hope to touch down at Schiphol Airport at 14:20. We had a great time, it was hard and very exhausting but it it was worth every minute of sleep we missed to keep you informed and keep VMGuru.nl up-to-date. We very much hope you enjoyed it. We hope the post were good, the videos were entertaining and your experience was as if you were in Cannes yourself. The website statistics looked very promising, 250.00 hits in the last week, and we hope we can keep you interested in the future.

As I already said, we hope you have enjoyed it, we certainly did. If you have any questions, comments or compliments , please feel free to drop us an e-mail.
We collected all VMworld Europe 2009 videos on a new ‘Videos page’, so check it out.

From the VMGuru.nl-crew @ Cannes, thank you for you support!

Some of our colleagues ask us what we do in Cannes all day long. It’s easy to explain what the sessions are, presentations sometimes supported by a product demo. But with the Solution Exchange and Hands-on-Labs some still have huge question marks on their faces. Maybe they don’t understand the term or the setup so we created a video compilation to give you an idea. Maybe now you will understand why we, at some days, didn’t follow any sessions because we were ’stuck’ at level -1 of the Palais des Festivals.

Yesterday there was a session called VMware ‘unplugged’, here you could ask all kinds of questions to a panel of VMware CxOs. The panel constisted of Steve Herrod, Paul Maritz, Mauricio Carli and Tod Nielsen. Anne Jan posted an article on this yesterday and now we have a video with the highlights of this ‘unplugged’ session.

Yesterday Scott Herold gave us a demo of VESI, a free VI toolkit from Vizioncore based on PowerShell. With this toolkit it is very easy to automate task in your virtual infrastructure without any knowledge of powershell. Just browse the tool, select the desired actions and build a powershell script. The free toolkit will be available at the end of March and can be downloaded at the VESI website.

It was an excellent party again. Just look at all the pictures already published by various people. You could hardly tell that there were that many people in the Palais to party.

Like someone said “VMware engineers know how to party” (If you own this line, please contact me, I totally forgot who it was and I can’t find it anymore. Perhaps I should have gone to bed a little earlier). Here’s the link to the gallery with a couple of pictures.

This year the VMworld organization organized a ‘VMworld Unplugged’. The idea was to let the attendees ask questions to a panel. The members of this panel were: Paul Maritz, Maritizio Carli, Tod Nielsen and Steve Herrod.  You could ask questions by microphone or send them before the session.

There were a couple of very interesting questions. Below is small selection of those questions.

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Earlier we had an interview with Rob Bloemendal, Dell EqualLogic storage expert.

Rob knows a lot about storage, not only from Dell EqualLogic, but also from the other distributors in their marketplace.

You never hear Rob making negative comments about their competitors. The way he explains the difference between framework and frameless architecture is refreshing. He reconfirms that the discussion shouldn’t be on 8Gbit FC versus 3Gbit iSCSI, but about I/O per second and data characteristics.

As you probably read earlier VMware started a new program, vExpert. Today both Erik and me got the mail from John Troyer with: “Congratulations. You received a vExpert award!’ This is great news as there are only 25 vExperts in the Netherlands and 300 worldwide.

VMware.com says about this:

At VMware, we are always grateful that our work has inspired the community to work with us to spread the word about virtualization and the benefits of using VMware’s products. From the very beginning, news about VMware has been spread via word-of-mouth from one excited customer to another. As our product platform grew and became VMware Infrastructure, the community grew along with it into one of the most remarkable enterprise software community in existence. Now, the virtualization conversation goes on 24-7, online and offline, all over the world. We’re grateful for all the support over the years, and we’re excited to start this VMware vExpert program to publicly thank some of the people who have helped us.

At the booth of Vizioncore Scott Herold gave a presentation and demonstration about the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI).

The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI) is a new Vizioncore-sponsored community initiative being led by virtualization expert and author Scott Herold. The goal of The VESI community is to further enhance the administrative experience of virtual infrastructures with automation using Windows PowerShell through an extensible freeware toolkit called Virtualization EcoShell, scheduled for beta release end of March 2009.

Be sure to visit TheVESI.org today to find out more about the initative aned upcoming freeware product Virtualization EcoShell!

Later on today we will post a the video of one of the presentations Scott did.

VMware uses the name vSphere for their Virtualisation Infrastructure product also known as ESX. Here in Cannes in the hands on labs I have used the new interface and some of its nifty features. You have to get used to the new interface, but when you are used to it it works nicely and you can find your way around quickly. Did you have to search for some deep hidden options in the VI3 suite, here with the new look and feel around vSphere its almost effortless.

Yesterday I tried out the VMware vCenter Data Recovery Appliance in a hands on lab. It’s a disk-based backup and recovery solution that enables quick, simple and complete data protection for virtual machines. I didn’t have to load an agent on the virtual machines since vCenter Data Recovery has no knowledge of the guest operating system itself. After selecting a LUN as a destination for the backups, I marked some running virtual machines to be back upped.

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Still not tired I finally found the time to check out the Flickr version of Roy Tancks cloud widget. It shows photo’s from a Flickr RSS feed in the same way as it shows tags in a cloud.

Looks funny. Just hover over the photos and see them move in all directions.

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Veeam sure knows how to promote their backup product. They had a magician doing all kinds of tricks at their booth. Check out the video for a great performance from Robert Strong.

http://www.StrongEntertainment.com

info@StrongEntertainment.com

Duncan Epping was a bit disappointed with the number of people who turned up at the VMTN meet & greet at the Community Lounge. So as a incentive he will give a free t-shirt to everyone that comes and drops a question to the Experts or even starts a discussion!

Duncan wrote:

If you’re scared to asks question just head over and vote for the best of the VMworld show poll, we will also be giving away shirts for that during the day. Just come and visit the booth during the day or during the VMTN Experts Session / Meet and Greet… who doesn’t want to have a cool looking VMworld Community shirt? I know I want one so I might just ask the famous Tom Howarth a question!

In addition to our post this morning hereby the highlight of this session in a video.

Today after the Keynote we descended to level -1 of the Palais des Festivals, better known as the VMware Solution Exchange. We knew that this was not a good idea as this is the level you will never leave. The Solution Exchange is a large exposition with over 100 VMware technology partners, from AMD to Xsigo and from BT to Veeam. Even the competition is welcome as Microsoft and Citrix have their own booth.

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Today we did our first Hands-on-Lab. Last year these labs were fully booked so we decided to hit the lab early this year.

This lab was based around the Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch, which brings back network administration to network administrators.

Erik did the Cisco Nexus 1000v lab today. Since we didn’t receive any beta material yet this is our first real experience with the new virtual switch by Cisco.The switch is based on NX-OS so network administrators can use it just like they configure their other switches.

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Maritzio Carli,  GM for EMEA, opened the keynote today. He gave a lot of figures to reflect the grow in virtualization despite the hard economic times. These figures show that virtualization, and VMware in specific, is here to stay and invests heavily in people and resources.

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After talking to Eric Sloof we realized that we needed another pass for accessing the press lounge and locations like that.

An e-mail to Richard Garsthagen made it all possible. When we arrived at the desk for bloggers there was one bloggers code not used. The nice lady at the desk took the responsibility and gave us our passes.

The first change was when getting to the room for the keynote: ‘Press, please follow me’. That was nice. I could get used to it

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Hello all! I noticed a dramatic increase in the website’s traffic yesterday! That is a very good sign! It seems that you out there, like what we present here and that motivates us to keep up the flow of news and inside info’s.

Let’s see what the boys @ VMworld bring us today!

Although I wasn’t able to join the VMGuru team to Cannes I can still blog about newly released products from VMware.

One of those newly released products is the 4th update for VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 containing:

• Customization support for Windows 2008 server VM’s
• Performance overview charts which gives the system administrator a overview of CPU, memory, hardisk and network usage in a single chart.

More information can be found here.

Last, but certainly not least, we attended the Partner Award Ceremony at the end of our day. This is the place where VMware awards its Partners for a year of hard work. We knew that Centric was nominated so we were a bit nervous but at the we did not receive an award

We already wrote about it but here are the highlights of the 2009 Partner Day @ Cannes on video.

Eric Sloof showed us the fun in taking and posting video’s, so here are our first videos from VMworld Europe 2009, the trip to Cannes.