Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

VMworld Europe, where can you find me?

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I have a couple of sessions schedule for VMworld Europe, as it stands right now all of those still have availability. If you are going to VMworld Europe and haven’t registered any sessions yet I would urge you to do so today, you don’t want to show up and find the session is full. I have one more session which isn’t listed below, which is the Quick Talk on VSAN Use Cases which is being rescheduled as we speak due to a conflict. I hope I can add that one soon to the list.

VMworld Virtual SAN slidedecks up on slideshare

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I just posted the slidedecks that I presented at VMworld on Virtual SAN up on slideshare. The recording and the slides will probably at some point also show up on vmware.com but as I had many requests from people to share the material I figured I would do that straight after the event. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.

Building a Stretched Cluster with Virtual SAN 6.1

Five common customer use cases for Virtual SAN

Project #vGiveback

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It is VMworld again, and just like last year VMware decided to give back to the community. No I am not talking about the virtualization community, but I am talking about charity, the great thing is that just like last year you can get VMware to give away an X amount to a charity cause of your choice (health, children, education or environment). As a friend of the VMware foundation I would like to ask ALL of you to help. So what do you need to do, what is the goal?

Well it is simple. Publish a picture on either Instagram or Twitter. Make sure the picture represents the cause and of course you need to tag it, use #vGiveBack and copy in @vmwFoundation. Your message should look like something like this:

(Causes can be: #health #children #education or #environment)

The goal is 10,000 photos between Monday, August 31st and Thursday, September 3rd, out of which a mosaic will be crated. The final image for the mosaic symbolizes our community impact, and once complete, unlocks a donation that will be divided in proportion to the causes you select.

So what am I asking?

  1. Post a picture on twitter or instagram with the right hashtags and make copy in @vmwFoundation (it doesn’t need to be in front of one of those signs by the way, it can be a different pic…)
  2. Ask all of your friends to do the same, we need to hit that number lets make this go viral!

Every little bit will help. Each tweet or instagram post will bring us one step closer to unlocking our collective impact. If you don’t have twitter or instagram, ask your wife/son/daughter/friend to post for you!

Awesome fling: ESXi Embedded Host Client

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A long long time ago I stumbled across a project within VMware which allowed you to manage ESXi through a client which was running on ESXi itself. Basically it presented an html interface for ESXi not unlike the MUI we had in the old days. It was one of those pet-projects being done in spare time by a couple of engineers which for various reasons at the time was never completed. The concept/idea however did not die fortunately. Some very clever engineers felt it was time to have that “embedded host client” for ESXi and started developing something in their spare time and this is the result.

I am not going to describe it in detail as William Lam has an excellent post on this great fling already. The installation is fairly straight forward, basically a vib you need to install. No rocket science. When installed you can manage various aspects of your hosts and VMs including:

  • VM operations (Power on, off, reset, suspend, etc).
  • Creating a new VM, from scratch or from OVF/OVA (limited OVA support)
  • Configuring NTP on a host
  • Displaying summaries, events, tasks and notifications/alerts
  • Providing a console to VMs
  • Configuring host networking
  • Configuring host advanced settings
  • Configuring host services

Is that cool or what? Head over to the Fling website and test it. Make sure to provide feedback when you have it as the engineers are very receptive and always looking to improve their fling. Personally I hope that this fling will graduate and will be added to ESXi by default, or at a minimum be fully supported! Excellent work Etienne Le Sueur and George Estebe!

My top 15 VMworld sessions for 2015

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Every year I do a top VMworld sessions post. It is getting more complicated each year as there are so many great sessions. In the past years I tried to restrict myself to 20 but it always ends up being 22, 23 or even more sessions. This year I am going to be strict, 15 at most and in random order. These are the sessions I would sign up for myself, unfortunately as a VMware employee you can’t register, but I am sure going to try to sneak in when I have time, or watch the recording!

I did not include any sessions of my own, if you are interested in my sessions, look at the below:

See you guys there!