Demitasse

My thirty six hour travel to Barcelona has begun, I’m at Auckland airport waiting for my flight via Los Angeles and London.

I’ve been looking at a few of the HP Discover tweets, there’s some messaging around a new style of IT, I wonder what new style will be unveiled. It is hard for a large company with an extensive portfolio to make wholesale direction changes, evolution rather than revolution is favoured by corporate structures. Having spent some time with startups in converged infrastructure I’ll be looking out for what HP is doing with it’s converged infrastructure.

If you’d like to follow along with the official live stream of the announcements here: http://hpstorage.me/1buyzV4

I’ll be doing my best to report what I think, but looking at the schedule of briefings for the bloggers it looks like a pretty packed schedule, maybe I’ll get a chance to write about it later.

I am very happy to have been invited to attend HP Discover in Barcelona as a guest of HP. This follows from attending HP’s Storage day in Colorado and a Cloud briefing in Sydney in 2012 as well as the HP Tech @ Work event also in Sydney, this year.

The event is pretty huge, hundreds of sessions in nine tracks. I’m expecting to spend a fair bit of time with the Converged Cloud track, hopefully with some time left for the Converged Infrastructure and Mobility tracks. Maybe this show will also be the one where we see a mainstream use for the MoonShot scale out servers. I wonder whether massive scale out will prove to be the next revolution in IT Infrastructure, possibly combined with a lot of automation and developers working better with infrastructure teams. Of course I’m also interested in the all-flash 3Par array and anything that makes a fleet of thin or zero clients easier to manage. I’m also expecting that all my plans will go out the window as soon as we start the conference.

There is an interesting list of blogger attending Discover in Barcelona, including a fellow Kiwi and a few friends from other events. There should be lots of interesting conversations, I will try to capture a few of those.

The vBrownBag TechTalks are back at vForum in Sydney, allowing community members another opportunity  to share their experience and learn from one another. The sessions will be recorded for posting to the vBrownBag YouTube channel and hopefully live streamed on this page, they are happening live in a back corner called Parkside Foyer Level 1 on this map.

Great news, the vBrownBag TechTalks are coming to vForum Sydney. For those familiar with TechTalks you can go straight to the signup form here.

Tech Talks originated at VMworld 2012 where they provided an opportunity for community members, whose presentation submissions were not accepted into the main catalogue, to present the core of  a topic. TechTalks are a ten minute presentation by a community member for the benefit of the community. Since almost everyone working in technology has solved problems and learned something almost everyone could present a TechTalk. The format can be a slide deck or simply talking, they are usually about how to solve a problem or get the most out of a product. The TechTalk is captured on video and published on all of the vBrownBag distribution channels, on YouTube and Vimeo.  If the conference Internet connection allows, the talk is also live streamed from the show.

TechTalks are for community members to reach other community members, any topic that will help other people is good.  The one thing that TechTalks are not is an opportunity to present the corporate slide deck about a great product you would like us to buy. TechTalks are about up skilling and education, the only marketing should be from the TechTalk sponsors who help make the whole thing happen.

If you will be at vForum Sydney and you have learned something on the job then you should share your knowledge, signup to present a TechTalk, the audience is friendly and supportive.

By the way while you are signing up make sure you also register for VMDownUnderground, the community party before vForum.

I’m very please to thank Veeam, NetApp and VMUG for sponsoring the VMDownUndergroud party which aims to get virtualization folk to talk together before vForum in Sydney.

The format is the same as the last two years, although the venue has changed. The format is drinks and snacks for a couple of hours, letting you mix with other people who are going to be at vForum.  Catch up with old friends you meet once a year or make new friends, we encourage the sponsors to also send their tech people so bring questions for the sponsors. The venue is Cohibar, which is closer to the vForum venue and has view of Darling arbour.

Head over to EventBrite and register, we will see you there.

This week Gabe, one of my friends in the VMware community, received the bad news that cancer is touching his family again.  The same touch has been on my family so I feel for Gabe and his family. Some of Gabe’s other friends wanted to help, so have setup a crowd sourced fundraising campaign on Indiegogo which benefits the American Cancer Society.

Please join me in supporting the Podcasting for Cancer fundraising campaign.

Tuesday morning was another busy round of vBrownBag TechTalks, gettng more videos in the can. In the afternoon I was in front of the camera for a few comments with Colin Steele of TechTarget. Then off to take part in Tech Field Day with presentations from Simplivity and Commvault filling the afternoon. Straight from TFD to the vExpert and VCDX party where a trophy was presented to the first VCDX to hold two VCDX credentials, both Datacentre and Cloud. Like so many of the things I like about VMworld this was a place to meet people and talk to people I haven’t seen for a while.  The rest of the evening was spent at the Veeam party, which was huge and fun as always.

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One of the important tasks in optimizing a master image for a VDI deployment is working out how to do updates. If the desktop VM is going to be disposable we don’t want the VM to do it’s own updates.  LifeHacker has just highlighted a useful tool to turn off some automated updaters Update Freezer looks like a simple way to turn off automated updating just before making the desktops. You  then turn it back on next time you need the applications updated in the master.

My main activity for day 1 was the VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) day.  Having been a VCI for seven years I still know relatively few other VCIs, so it’s always good to meet up and get to know some of them. It was also good to get some outlines of what is going on with the certification and training businesses at VMware.

The evening event on Sunday is VMUnderground, a great place to catch up with people I only see at VMworld but communicate with on twitter all year round.  It’s also one of the places to talk to people around you that you’ve never met, often very interesting people. When the party was shut down at 10pm I took the mature option of going back to the hotel and sleeping.

Day 2 was Monday, and it was a packed day. Full coverage of vSphere 5.5 new features from the unstoppable Chris Wahl on his site, the WahlNetwork, a 9 part series based on Chris’s work with the private beta. Straight after the keynote we were into vBrownBag TechTalk sessions, with all the chaos that comes with the first time use of new gear. There were a few hiccups but we got into a swing of using the gear.  We got ten or so sessions in the can over the day, these will get onto YouTube in due course.

The evening was again very social, first at the Nutanix party which was themed with the 80’s, lots of neon colours, old posters and music from my youth. This was a pretty good vendor party, full of people having fun and I met up with a few more people I see infrequently.  After Nutanix I went to a much smaller and quieter party organised by Christopher Kusek, the CXI party is definitely a party to go to to talk. As I walked in & looked around there were a heap of people I knew and who were great to talk to, but Christopher’s aim is that you talk to new people, so a did and met a heap more people who are great to talk with.

After a busy Saturday morning in Tauranga I took the shuttle to Auckland to start my journey. For me VMworld is all about meeting up with people, the rare in person part of my involvement in the VMware community. This started at the Koru lounge in Auckland where around eight of us were on our way to the conference and met up in the lounge.

I’m trying out Stephen Foskett’s jet lag avoidance method, so didn’t eat from lunchtime in New Zealand until lunch time in San Francisco, about 19 hours later the same day. So far it’s working great but the real test comes at 4am tomorrow morning, if I’m asleep then it’s better than every other USA trip I’ve done.

Once in San Francisco I checked into my hotel, which is a cheap place on Powell Street where the famous cable car runs. Then registered for the conference and got an escort to take me past the security to where the community area was being setup.  This is where I will spend much of my time here, making the vBrownBag TechTalks happen. At both registration and waiting to get access I ran into people from the VMware community, something that seldom happens on the streets in New Zealand.

The big event for Saturday was vBeers at the Chieftain. Just like last year this tiny Irish bar was jammed with twice the number of people it ought to hold. I knew about half the people there and met about half the others over the five hours I was there. Lots of people who make lots of awesome for the community as well as lots of people who get the benefit of the awesome that’s created.

My Saturday ended about forty hours after it started, had a great sleep and woke up with my 6:30 alarm feeling like Stephen’s method might be as good as he says.  Today is VMware Certified Instructor day for me, hanging out with other instructors and learning about what’s in store for the next year with the training and certification programs.  Then VMunderground in the evening.