Have you ever wondered what the world of work would look like in 2020? I have. With the huge technological progress, it’s hard to imagine what we will be doing and how the world around will look.
If you look at the way we do our jobs today, it seems to be a lot like factory, blue collar labour. It is somewhat cleaner, but the way we do our work today is just like in the early 1900′s in the Ford factory at the treadmill. The industrial revolution made it possible to automate almost everything with machines. Only the parts that could not be automated, were filled by people. Still we treat them as if they are just a mechanical part of a larger machine.
With 2009 behind us, we look forward to a new and intense 2010. Personally, I think 2010 will be a very interesting year. With the world economy leaving the ruins of the crisis and alot of new trends and technology introductions ahead, we are in for quite a treat. Also, we are eagerly looking forward to VMworld in Copenhagen, later this year. We hope to see a lot of you in Denmark!
However, a quick look back is in order too. (more…)
This week a colleague called me with a VMware ESX problem. He’s doing a Exchange 2007 implementation and he configured a virtual machine which should function as the Mailbox server. He was complaining that the virtual machine took 13 to 15 minutes just to boot and he suspected a storage issue as they had been struggling with the storage for a few days.
I asked him to check the virtual machine performance tab and asked him if he saw anything strange. Nothing! The server had plenty of memory left and was not using very much CPU.
When I asked him how many resources he assigned to the virtual machine his response alerted me. He configured the virtual machine with 16GB of memory and 4 vCPUs!
When I asked him why he gave the virtual machine so much resources his response indicated that he hadn’t read the Virtual Infrastructure best practices and applied the ‘MS, I might use those resources just once during my lifecycle‘ sizing. When we checked the%CPU ready performance statistics the values were astronomical.
So I explained the behavior of the CPU scheduler to him and asked him to reduce the number of vCPUs to 1 or 2 and try again. When I called him the next day he told me that the virtual machine now booted within a minute.
So bottom line: Give a virtual machine the resources it needs for normal every day operation and be very modest. Monitor the virtual machine and adjust the resource settings according to your findings. In this case, less definitely is more and it’s very easy, especially in vSphere 4, to (hot) add resources. And if you do need 4vCPUs, it can be more effective to deploy two 2vCPU virtual machines instead of one 4 vCPU virtual machine.
Earlier this week the following message popped up in my twitter: ‘@Microsoft: Amazon says Windows 7 is the biggest pre-order product of all times, even over Harry Potter in the UK’.
Comparing Harry Potter to Microsoft? Hmm, this got us thinking, what if we compare Harry Potter to VMware, what if Harry Potter lived in the VMware era.
It’s 1995, Paul Maritz (Harry Potter) lives with Microsoft (his aunt and uncle) in a small village. Paul (Harry) spends most of his time locked up in a closet under the stairs. One day Paul (Harry) starts receiving daily messages from the APIs (owls) asking him to come to Palo Alto (Hogwarts) because Mendel Rosenblum (Dumbledore) and Diane Green (McGonagall) have left.
Last Tuesday was a very good day for me. First of all because the VMware Partner Forum 2009 was very interesting and we got a lot of valuable information but most of all because I won an XBOX360 at the SBK08 competition at the stand of CDG.
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After taking the XBOX360 home and explaining that I won it and did NOT buy it I set it up and of course I had to prove that I was really that quick. After a few practice laps I succeeded and I even managed to improve my time I recorded Tuesday (1.49) by 2 seconds.
Thursday at a Citrix event CDG had the same competition and a colleague almost won the XBOX360 that day but unfortunately he became second.
I’m enjoying myself very much and I definitely know what I’m going to do this weekend.
The hosts were oa Andre Pieterse and Dinesh Raghoenath and not the famous Xzibit but nevertheless……..
So has anyone come up to you to wish you a Happy Sysadmin Day today? No? Why not? You deserve it! Even if you are a Virtual Sysadmin!
Like most Virtual Sysadmins, you spend your days (and sometimes your nights and weekends) installing hypervisors, creating virtual machines, having virtual (coffee) breaks, dealing with virtually angry employees and virtual managers when virtual equipment fails, troubleshooting difficult virtual problems under intense virtual pressure, and setting up the virtual systems that keep your virtual organization running.
Your organization lacks respect? Do you know the feeling? System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year.
The VMGuru.nl-crew congratulates the VMGuru.nl founder and his family with their beautiful new home.
After receiving notice the founder of VMGuru.nl got the keys to his new home, we urged to apply a street name change to the local government. Unfortunately the request to change the street name sign to reflect VMgurulane was declined.
So we had to think of a new plan to show the world a VMGuru.nl founder and vExpert had landed. So a new offical street sign was released today.
We wish Erik and his family a pleasant and healthy life in their new home and hope the soil is fertile in numerous ways but ofcourse one of them being a basis for some new great blog posts after he gets tired decorating and finishing the house.
This morning I received a tweet from Duncan Epping, Duncan works at VMware Benelux and is the owner of Yellow-Bricks.com. In the community it was a public secret that Duncan was in the USA to defend his case to become one of the fist VCDX (VMware Certified Design Expert) certified professionals worldwide. And this morning he twittered that he had received his VCDX award at the VMware Award dinner last night.
So Duncan, from the crew of VMGuru.nl, congratulations!
Duncan is the 7th VCDX professional worldwide and what a cool number to have, VCDX007.
From now on you can pick up the phone saying, ‘this is Epping, Duncan Epping‘
It is now April and in October 2008, 6 months ago, we started our own virtualization blog. I registered a funny domain name when applying for a private domain name and Anne Jan, Edwin, Alex and I started this website just for the fun of it.
In the beginning the blog was intended to share our knowledge and experiences with colleagues who work throughout the Netherlands but very soon we attracted the attention of VMware enthusiasts all over the world.
At the end of December the number of hits grew from 80.000 (October) to almost 200.000 hits per month and we started getting positive responses. We then decided to try to walk and talk with the big boys like Erik Sloof, Gabrie van Zanten, Mike Laverick, Scott Herold, Duncan Epping, Richard Garsthagen, etc. The plan is/was to post our real life experiences and bring you as much VMware related news as possible. A part of this was to do a live report from VMworld Europe in Cannes with photos and videos.
As virtualization freaks on this planet we sell virtualiziation solutions to clients with the motivation that it will save on power, cooling, space, etc and therefore we reduce the CO2-emission (we should receive government funding ) If you support this motivation you will also like ‘Earth hour‘.
In short, on March 31, 2007 people in Sydney decided to take a stand against climate change and 2.2 million people turned off their lights for 1 hour.
This caught the attention of the world and went global. In 2008 the world united and in 400 cities in 35 countries around the world, 50 million people turned off their lights for 1 hour.
Last Saturday I read an article in a well known magazine in The Netherlands. The article talked about that people in the IT/ICT branche lack good communication skills. I often wonder when reading articles: Who’s the author? Is he or she biased in any way?
The same was true for this article. I quickly found out (the names of their businesses were in the article ) that the people interviewed worked for companies that gave “soft skill” courses. Don’t get me wrong. I totally agree that employees benefit from some form of interrelational training, especially when you work with people (don’t we all?).
Most of the time when I’m frustrated it helps to play some squash, ride my bike or vent my frustration on this blog. As all walls in the area have been smashed to bits due to frustrations in the past and it is too cold to ride my bike, I will try the last one.
Yesterday I attended a seminar from work together with Edwin, Anne Jan and Alex. The subject was virtualization with Citrix and we were invited to keep a good balance between Citrix and VMware but we could not give a presentation due to time constraints. The people who organized this event know us pretty well and know (and share) our love for VMware so we were asked not to mess up the presentation and bash the Citrix guy. And so we did………
Today I got some great news! Our employer, Centric, has been promoted to VMware VIP Premier Partner! This is great news as there are only 3 other Premier Partners in the Netherlands, SLTN, PQR and Imtech ICT Brocom. This is a great acknowledgment of our hard work so VMware and Maurice thanks for this ‘award’.
VMware Premier Partners have made a commitment to invest in the VMware partnership through dedicated technical, sales and support resources, and have demonstrated this consistently over time. VMware rewards Premier Partners with the highest level of enablement, support and rewards benefits.
Premier partners are authorized to sell the full VMware product line. Taking a solution-oriented approach, Premier Partners engage in complex solution offerings and demonstrate high levels of skill in areas such as:
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.
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.
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.
The process of blogging is through several means from making notes during the session the old fashioned way or by using new technology. (Got the laptop charging again). Also lots of photos or video are shot during the process and we will have to run through them all to filter out the high lights and the remarkable things we noticed. Also seeing my collegues hard @ work translating the handwriting to a nice blog post feels good. The first day is running into the late afternoon and after several sessions today we have picked up lots of new ideas and opportunities for 2009. The head is spinning already but its worth it. SO stay tuned.
We just enjoyed the General Session for Partner day 2009 and the message is ‘the virtualization business is still growing’, ‘2009 is all about client virtualization’ and ‘get up, register opportunities, close deal, dig deap’.
The keynote was presented to us by Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware. He stated that we can achieve change by two means, evolution and revolution and that evolution is the best as it tends to stay longer. VMware is the platform to achieve this evolution. He revealed a few public secrets, VMware vSphere, vShield zones and VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat. VMware vSphere is the new name for ESX but we knew, and blogged on that, already. VMware vShield zones a security initiative based on VMware Safe. VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat is VMware’s new feature to create a high available vCenter Server, mostly for implementations where vCenter is still on a physical server.
Last year when I attended VMWorld Europe 2008 my wife was 9 months pregnant. As a souvenir I brought a little VMware teddy bear and a VMWorld bib with the text ‘Embracing your Virtual World – VMWORLD 2008‘. He is now 8 months old and this weekend I couldn’t resist to take his picture wearing the bib as proof that the love for VMware starts at a very young age. We can’t help it, it is congenital!
Strange thing is that these children still don’t know what a virtual machine is.
As you may have noticed, the VMGuru crew will attend VMWorld Europe 2009 in Cannes at the end of Februari and we recieved a special bloggers invitation. This invitation gives us access to special bloggers seat, the bloggers lounge and an video/interview room. Here we can interview VMware employees and staff.
So here’s our proposal: Do you have any (non technical) questions for VMware? Do you want us to get answers directly from VMware? Send us you questions and preferably the person we should ask it and we will try to get your answers at VMworld Europe 2009.
Have you ever wondered what the world of work would look like in 2020? I have. With the huge technological progress, it’s hard to imagine what we will be doing and how the world around will look.
I set it up and of course I had to prove that I was really that quick. After a few practice laps I succeeded and I even managed to improve my time I recorded Tuesday (1.49) by 2 seconds.
congratulates the VMGuru.nl founder and his family with their beautiful new home.
Most of the time when I’m frustrated it helps to play some squash, ride my bike or vent my frustration on this blog. As all walls in the area have been smashed to bits due to frustrations in the past and it is too cold to ride my bike, I will try the last one.
Today I got some great news! Our employer, Centric, has been promoted to VMware VIP Premier Partner! This is great news as there are only 3 other Premier Partners in the Netherlands, SLTN, PQR and Imtech ICT Brocom. This is a great acknowledgment of our hard work so VMware and Maurice thanks for this ‘award’.
