Demitasse

Like a lot of technical people working in virtualization I have had a home lab for study and testing.  I’ve written a few posts about this in the past but have made quite a few changes so it’s time for an update.

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It’s long past time for another vBeers event in Auckland (Wellington too but I’m not due back there until February).

Next Wednesday, December 5th at the Northern Steamship from 6pm, listed here on the vBeers.org site

See you there for a quiet drink and chat.

This morning I recorded a podcast with Greg Schulz of StorageIO.com, you can find the podcast at http://storageioblog.com/?p=3832

You may know Greg from his regular appearances on the InfoSmack, now superseded by SpeakingInTech. Alternatively from his writing, most recently his latest book

Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking

Greg and I met at the last two US VMworlds and I always enjoy having a chat with him, most recently at the vFlipcup tournament in San Francisco.

As my third VMware conference in three months I don’t think I had a normal vForum. Of course I started the festivities by arranging the second VMdownunderground party.  Veeam and Netapp sponsored the event that allowed conference attendees to start the conference with some socialising. It was great to catch up with so many people there, a lot of people I don’t see more than once between vForums.

My main objective for the vForum conference was to get some Australian and New Zealand input into the vBrownBag Tech Talks that we started recording at VMworld in San Francisco and then carried on at VMworld in Barcelona.  Happily I managed to convince a few people that they could stand up for ten minutes and talk about something.

The first Tech Talk was one that was fated to be trouble, Vaughn Stewart had had to stand me up in Barcelona when he got pulled into customer meetings.  I returned the favour by messing up my travel schedule in Tuesday.  Luckily Vaughn managed to give me a few minutes on Wednesday during the keynote and we got a few of his thoughts recorded.

Later in the day Michael Webster talked Business critical apps in the cloud, Josh Odgers talks about VDI design, Simon Sharwood talked about how to get quoted in and even paid by the IT media and Grant Orchard talked with me about the VMware community.

While I’m talking about recording video there was another videographer working. Craig Waters was interviewing people like Bogomil Balinsky, Vaughn Stewart and Steve Herrod. As the Melbourne VMUG leader Craig has some good contacts to do these interviews and I’m looking forward to watching them when they are published.

On Wednesday evening I was surprised to find that there was no party, although I imagine that the hall crawl in the solutions exchange went on for a fair while.  As a vExpert for 2012 I was invited to join the VCDXs, vChampions and VMUG leaders in a mixer hosted by Steve Herrod.  I knew about half the crowd pretty well as these are the people who engage in the community.  I was very proud when Steve mentioned VMdownunderground and I was able to thank him for taking part in an awesome vBrownBag podcast.

I also had the pleasure of a couple of dinners with Erik Ullanderson who is VMware’s director of certifications and seems keen for me to make the move from VCAP to VCDX.  To be fair it’s not just me, converting people from trained to VCP and VCP to VCAP and then VCDX is a priority.  A lot of our conversations were about how to help that along and how vBrownBag is helping people along the path.

After a long hiatus due to multiple VMworlds and the backlog of things that needed to be done it is time to restart the APAC vBrownBag.

The VCAP5-DCA prep wasn’t lighting me up so I’ve decided to return to what we do best, design. I think that there are a few areas of design that could benefit from a deeper look and I’m starting tomorrow with basic storage design.  I’m hoping to coerce some of my friends into sharing some of their design knowledge too in upcoming sessions. If you have design skills to share please get in touch.

You can register for the APAC vBrownbag series here https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/885241632

By the way if you’re going to be at vForum 2012 in Sydney next week I’m still looking for people to present Tech Talks, more details of that here http://demitassenz.wpengine.com/2012/10/vbrownbag-tech-talks-will-be-at-vforum-sydney/

After the excellent San Francisco and Barcelona sessions in August and October the Tech Talks are coming to Sydney.

Tech Talks are an opportunity for you to present something, anything, that is of interest to the Virtualisation community.  It doesn’t need to be unique and undiscovered but it should be something important to you and useful to others. 

The best sessions are ones where you’ve done something or learnt something the hard way and you can help other people have an easier time of the same problem.

There are plenty of examples of what other people have presented n the LiveStream web site at www.livestream.com/vmwarecommunitytv

If you’d like to submit a session then fill in the form here and I’ll get in touch.

I took advantage of the fact that I’m on the other side of the world to my lab to see what PCoIP is like over a high latency network.  Since I’m at VMworld Barcelona running the vBrownBag TechTalks with Damian and Josh it is a rare opportunity for me to test a real high latency link.

I’m using the VMorld wireless to connect back over the Internet to my Lab in Tauranga.  Speedtest.net reports a 313ms ping time and a 1.71Mbps download speed.  It turns out that without any special optimization the PCoIP protocol works really well, so I recorded a quick video and posted it to YouTube

Thanks to vBrownBag TechTalk sponsors Veeam, Cisco and Nutanix I’ve had an opportunity to test real high latency.

At times it’s hard to believe that these things happen.  It was surreal enough that I got to be part of the vBrownbag Tech Talks at VMworld US in San Francisco and to hang out with Randy Keener doing the Not Supported talks.  Making up and handing out the vBrownbag Swag Bag of Awesomeness was also a pretty cool thing.

Now the unbelievable gets more surreal.  Next Sunday I’ll get on a plane and head for VMworld Europe in Barcelona to repeat the vBrownbag Tech Talks there.  Thanks to Veeam for their sponsorship of the Barcelona Tech Talks and to the invitation from the VMware social media team it’s all on again.

Since everything is so rapidly developing I’m not sure whether any other vBrownbag crew will make it to Europe, it seems that the US vBrownbag crew don’t have passports.

As we did in SF we will have a stage and microphones and cameras, we will have seats for a live local audience and web streaming for a live remote audience.  At the moment it looks like we’ll have four hours of the Lightning Tech Talks covering topics from VDI to designing for operations.  In addition we will have “Not Supported” from William Lam, Duncan Epping and Simon “vTardis” Gallagher.  So far the schedule is full of new material, no repeats of US sessions, so definitely worth watching.  I will have the schedule posted to a document on the VMworld site before the end of the week so you can make plans to take part. Session proposals can still be made using this web page while there are still slots available.

The schedule for the presentations is up on this page, as you will see it’s pleasingly full.  There are still a couple of slots available so there is still time to use the link above.

My friend Michael Webster wrote a great article about the current possibilities, limitations and issues around presenting a disk device over 2TB to a virtual machine on vSphere. He also gave great guidance about how you might work with the current limitations to achieve unusual requirements. I have one thing to add:

I don’t want technical limitations in the hypervisor to limit my design choices.

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Now that I’ve been back for a week and had some time to recover I thought I’d write a little about the whirlwind that was my VMworld.

The first thing was the travel, the flight from Auckland to San Francisco was 12 hours and there were another few hours either end of the trip so it ended up being around 21 hours from leaving home until I arrived at my hotel.  The best part of the travel is that I spent much of the time with some buddies from the ANZ region, even before I got to VMworld the community feel started. Arriving on the Saturday was good, plenty of time to get settled before the main event. Unlike last year where I didn’t get checked into the hotel until after the VMunderground party, so I was carrying all my bags at the party.

The biggest mistake I made this year was with the hotel, it was expensive for no reason and in a poor location.  For next year I plan to find a hotel that is either north of Market Street or within one block of the Moscone centre.  My hotel was neither of these so I had a four block walk to the conference past a large number of homeless people. This was OK during daylight but a little unnerving at night.

Being on the inside of the vBrownBag TechTalks I got access to the Hang Space during setup on the Saturday afternoon , an early introduction to the place I spent most of the rest of the week.  This is where the TechTalks took place, along with the awesome “Not Supported” sessions.  Also around the stage space were the blogger tables, so this was the place to meet the people who contribute to the community.  There was always something happening and someone to talk to around this area and many hours passed without me realising it. The TechTalks and Not Supported talks will filter out onto the vBrownBag iTunes feed over the coming weeks, lots of great content.

The other thread to the week was meeting up at parties.  I started with vBeers on the Saturday then VMunderground on Sunday.  Monday was the vExpert meet up followed by the SolarWinds vMixer, but I got side tracked by Greg Shulz and ended up at vFlipCup which I didn’t expect to get to.  It was a fun event and a lot of interesting people to talk to.  Tuesday is the vendor party night, I started with an HP briefing followed by the customer appreciation dinner, then it was off to the huge Veeam party.  My final party was on Wednesday, it was the Office of the CTO party, this was as awesome this year as it was last year. A personal highlight was shaking hands with Mike Nelson who is the inventor of VMotion among many other things like FT and the new HA agent.  I didn’t got to the main VMworld party and decided not to trek out to the unparty, instead getting to bed before midnight for the first time. 

For me a critical feature of the parties I went to was that I wanted to be able to talk to people, both ones I knew and new people with an interest in VMware. All of the parties I went to had dozens of interesting people and I had to force myself to keep moving to new people.  Meeting people in is the most important part of VMworld for me, especially the ones I have tweeted and emailed with over the year. Having met people in person the electronic communication over the following year is much more personal.  The thing is that I met and talked to more people in one week than I usually meet in months of normal life, so remembering who is hard and by the end of the week I didn’t have the energy to meet another person.  It took me three days after I got home to be able to get enough rest to be able to make any decisions beyond what to have for lunch.

I should wrap up with thanks to my vBrownBag crew, my closest buddies for the conference even though I met two of them in person for the first time on the Saturday.  Cody did a post about the Sunday, when we assembled the vBrownBag swag bag of awesomeness. It was one of those surreal, “are we really doing this?” times and we kept looking at each other and bursting into giggles that we were pulling it together.

VMworld was an awesome event, I wish I didn’t have to wait another year to do it again.  Maybe we can get some real community happenings at vForum in Sydney this year.