Demitasse

This show is about to get very very real. In a week’s time VMworld will be in full swing,  the first Tech Talks will be in the can and available in recorded form for those who couldn’t be there.

Here’s what to expect next Wednesday from the Community studio:

As always we start the day with Mike Letschin hosting the vExpert hour.  Wednesdays vExperts are: Bilal Hashmi, Ron Singler, James Bowling and Tony Foster. I met Bilal at VMworld last year, full of enthusiasm and I’m looking forward to meeting up with him again.  James is a recent addition to the AutoLab team having written the Fusion setup guide that is now in the AutoLab document, I need to buy this man a beer.

The Lightning Tech Talks in the morning start with Shmuel Kliger asking whether there is still a place for troubleshooting in a modern datacentre. Keith Norbie promises Kung Fu for your end user compute needs (I don’t think we will be Kung Fuing the users, however much it appeals). Edward Shen makes AutoDeploy better with a serving of vCentre Orchestrator.

The Super Star hour has none other than John Troyer and Alex Maier hosting the 200th episode of the VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast. Can you believe it’s been 200 episodes?  And that the 200th episode coincided with VMworld?

To continue the Super Star theme from 1pm until 2pm Duncan Epping will be in the house, then from 2pm until 3pm William Lam will be getting Ghetto for the Unsupported session with Randy Keener.

The afternoons lightning rounds kick of with Tim Antonowicz giving some tips and guidance on sitting your VCAP5-DCD exam, you should already know that exam technique is an important part of the VCAP exams. Shimon Hason will look into Virtualizing Systems Management then  Dan Barr will address testing to make sure thatthe SRM recovery plan actually produces a working application, not just powered on VMs. The final lightning session of the day will be Ben Scheerer using vCenter Infrastructure Navigator to expose applications in your virtual infrastructure.

To round out the day the vBrownBag crew will conduct a review of the days announcements and sessions before heading off to freshen up and hit the party or the unparty.

The schedule doc has been released for Mike Letschin’s vExpert hour, Randy Keener’s Unsupported sessions and the vBrownBag Tech Talks. Now you can decide whether to go to the sessions you planned or hang out in the community space to watch these sessions.

Head on over to the page on the communities web site and start making more plans.

By the way we still have a few slots available for the TechTalks, you can still submit a session using submissions form, we welcome anyone to present so long as it’s not a product sales pitch.

After a couple more months work AutoLab v1.0 is released, now with View, vCloud and Veeam.  Details on the announcement post on Labguides.com as well as some information on ProfessionalVMware.com

Also don’t forget the APAC Virtualization podcast tonight which will walk through a case study of an Enterprise virtualization backup project with de-dupe, replication, and multiple locations. Matt Wiessing has been the Infrastructure Architect in charge of designing & overseeing implementation of the backup solution and will talk about the technologies and some lessons learned

That’s right, you heard it here first.  I am delighted to announce that Veeam has agreed to sponsor the AutoLab.  This is great for the development of the AutoLab and ultimately the users of the AutoLab. Please head over to Veeam’s site and take a look at their awesome products, if you weren’t aware recent releases include more free functionality than ever before as well as awesome reasons to buy the full licensed product.

One of the results is that I didn’t need to choose between going to VMworld and buying a new AutoLab development system, I can do both.  While I’m thinking about Veeam and VMworld they are doing a heap of cool stuff. Take a look at their VMworld 2012 with Veeam page and definitely check out their Dream Home Lab giveaway, that would definitely be worth the excess baggage charge to bring home.

Very shortly the AutoLab v1.0 build will be released, this is a huge increase in the capability of the AutoLab with Veeam products as well as View and vCloud being added to the list of things you can test, trial, learn about and demonstrate using the AutoLab.

Once again, thanks to my friends at Veeam for supporting the community and the AutoLab.

It’s less than a month until VMworld in San Francisco and there’s some serious excitement building. 

This morning was the first allocation of tickets to the VMunderground party, this was one of my two favourite parties at VMworld last year. A opportunity to talk to several hundred VMware enthusiasts while in a room with beer and food sounds like a great evening to me.   The other party was Christopher Kusek’s which was much further under the radar.

My selection criteria for parties is fairly simple, I want to be able to talk to people.  I’m not worried about the band or the other entertainment and oddly I don’t want to stay out all night drinking free cocktails.

Another thing that’s getting exciting is the Tech Talks powered by vBrownBag.  These are short sessions broadcast from the communities lounge and recorded for future generations.  The aim is to allow more people to have their material heard, particularly those of us whose VMworld session proposals didn’t make the cut. I will be spending a lot of time helping the rest of the vBrownBag crew to make these happen and learning a huge amount along the way.

The final thing that’s getting exciting about VMworld is the ProfessionalVMware and vBrownBag swag that we will be giving away.  Cody Bunch has been organising this and it’s shaping up to be the “must have” swag. Be sure to find a vBrownBag crew member to get yours, if we haven’t already given them away.

Ever since the VMworld session acceptance and rejection emails came out we’ve been working on helping people whose sessions were rejected an opportunity to present.  Today the vBrownBag team are delighted to announce that together with the VMware communities team there will be TechTalks at VMworld USA.

We will be recording these in the studio in the hang space and broadcasting them live as well as posting them for viewing later.  The main sessions will be a Lightning talk format, ten minutes long to distil the essence of your chosen topic.  This way we can get a lot of sessions into the limited time. 

The signup form is here on Google docs  and we’re really hoping to be able to give a platform to everyone with good technical content.

Like the vBrownBags we’re looking for technical content that will help other people with something virtualization related.

It’s not too late to signup and attend the new series of the APAC vBrownBag webinars. We start tomorrow with Virtualizing Business Critical Applications.  Michael Webster will present, he’s warming up to delivering VMworld sessions on making happy DBAs and automating security and Compliance.

In the coming months we’ll cover VMware products in real life use as well as covering some VCAP5-DCA and VCP-IaaS blueprint areas.

I’ve started a series of articles in ProfessionalVMware.com that delve into the automation inside the AutoLab. Starting with the overview article and then looking at the Windows builds in the second article. I will keep going through the automation parts until I’ve uncovered the whole piece of work.

We will talk about the issues and benefits when all you have is one virtualization host.  Dive in and have a chat with us on Wednesday night.

All the details at the podcast blog www.apacvirtual.com

Last night I posted the V0.8 release of the AutoLab on labguides.com

This release is mainly to support Windows 2008R2 SP1 and vSphere 5.0 Update 1 along with improvements to the automation.

Speaking of the automation I also posted  here on ProfessionalVMware about the automation in the AutoLab, more detail of each stage to follow.