Demitasse

One of my little projects for the Easter break has been playing with the Windows 8 consumer preview.  I installed in on my netbook, an HP Mini-311 which has an Atom CPU, 2GB RAM and a 128GB SSD.  This is my laptop for travelling light and fast but the netbook is pretty slow, with Windows 7 installed there is a lot of waiting.

I won’t go into Windows 8 too much, suffice to say that start-up time is awesome and I’m pretty impressed with Metro as a basic UI.  I’d like Metro to allow smaller non-live tiles, without touch I don’t need what are essentially large icons.

The problem I have is that most things I use aren’t Metro apps, so there is the jarring switch to the desktop when they are launched.  The switch is so jarring that it feels like moving to a different computer, much like moving to a VDI session.  So I’m testing the VMware View client from the Windows 8 netbook back to my Windows 7 pool in my datashed. Right now the View client runs in the Windows 8 legacy desktop mode rather than native metro. When VMware release a metro enabled client the experience could be very good.  Imagine having a live tile on the home screen that showed a miniaturised screen from the desktop, or better yet pushes notifications from the desktop into the tile.

It starts me thinking about what applications I want locally on the device and what applications I want in my VDI desktop.  The VDI desktop is always Internet connected and is a powerful machine.  The local device needs to operate disconnected and sync data.  In the end the main things I need when I don’t have an Internet connection is Evernote for writing and a document viewer for documents, synchronized with DropBox.  I’m not sure I need to have Office on my local device, complex document editing needs a powerful processor, lots of RAM and fast disk.  I’d be happy with a review and annotate application that syncs with my editing machine.  The main thing I’d do with the local machine is what my iPad does well, reading books and newspapers, watching movies and keeping up with social media.

For me the main thing that stops me from taking only my iPad when I travel is the inability to use an external mouse, particularly when I’m accessing a VDI desktop. Apple are happy to have a keyboard attached to an iPad bat a mouse is too PC like. If the new high definition iPad had mouse support then I would have stood in line all night when it was released.

Now I get where Microsoft is going with Windows on ARM (WoA). An iPad like portable device that is good for consuming media and viewing local copies but which allows me to connect to a remote full desktop for content creation tasks and enterprise applications.  All day battery life plus peripheral device support, lets hope the delivered devices match the promise. Will WoA devices have high resolution screens?  I hope so and I will be shocked if they don’t support external keyboards and mice.

Less that 24 hours after installing the Windows 8 preview I’m looking forward to the devices it will bring, colour me surprised

Today is the fifth birthday of this blog!  Around 150 posts have gone up here and it’s grown from nothing to around a hundred subscribers and hits a peak of 1500 page views per month. 

The last couple of months I’ve been quiet on this blog, not because I have less to say, no chance of that. Rather because I’ve been saying more in other places I’m writing for other web sites, so far I’ve had five articles published by TechTarget and I’m hoping to start writing for some other web sites soon.  The articles are linked of my Other Publications page, since they are paid articles you will need to go to the original location to get the content. I’m enjoying writing for the different audience with TechTarget, which is more management and decision maker focussed, while this blog is about making life better in the trenches for the implementer.

I’m also working on a community project that is aimed at making it easier to setup your own vSphere lab, mostly for training and certification preparation.  I’m pretty excited about this, I think it will be a big help to a lot of people. Setting up a lab to test in or train on is very time consuming, there are a lot of Yaks to shave before you get to the real work.  Part of this project is a “Yak Shave-O-matic” for vSphere lab setup, I’m planning a beta with some friends soon followed by a full launch in the next couple of months.

I’ve also put together the content for a few sessions of the VCAP Brownbag series. We’re nearly complete with the VCAP5-DCD blueprint, just in time for the exam to launch. I’m hoping for more guest presenters for the VCAP5-DCA Brownbag series that will follow when we complete the DCD series.  This is an invitation to you to take part. The DCA sessions are going to be much more live demonstrations and there’s a huge potential for you to share some experience in operating a vSphere 5.0 environment, let me know if you’re keen to take part.

Keep an eye out for future vBeers events, hopefully I’ll get to Wellington soon to run another one there.  Don’t wait for me though, go right ahead and organise your own vBeers event.  Choose a time and place and then start telling people about it, that is all I do.

Thank you to everyone who reads the blog, takes part on the podcasts and especially to those who take the time to comment.

This week is all things Microsoft and virtual. Including Windows 8, HyperV v3 and Dynamic memory.

Details on the Podcast web site as usual http://apacvirtual.com/

My fifteen year old daughter feels let down by a New Zealand song from my youth.  The song is called “History Never Repeats” by Split Enz.  Of course we know that nothing is more certain than repeats of history.  So it was with some amusement that I saw the HP X5000 G2 at the recent HP Storage Tech Day. 

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The eagled eyed will have spotted a rash of excitement over the virtualisation twitterverse.  The VCAP5-DCD exam enters it’s beta phase this month. Current VCAP4-DCD holders who have also completed the VCP5 certification have been invited to take part.  Since I fall in that category I have an invitation, so I’ve been reading through the exam blueprint.  Usually the first rule of Beta club is don’t talk about Beta club but I didn’t notice an NDA attached to the beta exam invite.  Even so I won’t be linking the blueprint although I do have some comments.

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It’s 2012 and we’re back.  Time for vBeers in Auckland.  Come and talk geek with a beer in your hand.  Looks for the vBeers sign and say hi, we don’t bite newcomers.

All the details on vBeers web site

One of the hardest parts of designing a virtual infrastructure for VDI is getting the storage right.  This is where the price of doing VDI can become very obvious so it’s tempting to try to cut costs.  Unfortunately not having enough performance in your VDI storage leads to unusable desktops.  Below is an example that I was involved in, the root cause of the inadequate storage wasn’t poor design so much as poor communication.  The result was the same, unusable desktops and unhappy users.

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It’s Sunday evening in New Zealand and I’m looking back over a somewhat surreal week.  The whole thing began just over three weeks ago with a tweet from Calvin Zito asking for independent bloggers who might want to know more about HP Storage.  Having met and liked Calvin at VMworld 2011 I immediately asked to be considered.  The event he invited me to was in a week I was booked to teach, I’ve never been so happy when a course was cancelled.

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I’m in Ft Collins Colorado for an HP Storage Tech Day.  This is my first sponsored community event and when Calvin Zito invited me I jumped at the chance to be here.  Getting to spend a couple of days surrounded by other people involved in the Tech community as a wonderful thing, throw in some access to specific tech and hands on time and you’ve got a winning formula.

I won’t go into the people, take a look over the list on Calvin’s blog post but as I have found the community are the people I like to hang out with.  One that I did want to call out was a great concept I heard at breakfast.  Derek is part of the team organising Tech on Tap, advanced technical training sessions that happen on the weekend at a Brew pub.  What could be better than a group of tech guys learning advanced tech whilst drinking craft beer!

Hopefully I’ll be able to tear myself away from the conversations in order to post some more of my experiences, now it’s time to head for the bus to the HP site.

Disclosure: HP paid my travel and accommodation expenses for me to attend Tech Day.  Thanks HP.

If you follow virtualization blogs then you will have seen that Eric Siebert has opened voting for the top virtualization blogs.  This year I have entered both my blog and the APAC Virtualization Podcast.  Please cast your vote at vSphere Land

While you’re at vSphere Land take a moment to check out the vLaunchpad for a very condensed list of resources, a great start to a long session of discovering new information.