Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

What is Diane Greene up to these days?

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I am not an expert on networking like some of my colleagues out there are but still I was intrigued by the Cumulus release Wednesday. I liked the whole decoupling hardware from software aspect and how they allow you to buy the switch you want and combine it with their software solution aka Cumulus Linux. I am not going in to much details, as that isn’t the title of this article or what triggered me to write this. (If you want to know more about Cumulus I suggest you read this article by Ben Kepes or hit their website.) What triggered this article was a quote in the Silicon Valley Business Journal which was taken from an article on the Wall Street Journal blog and it made me wonder, what is Diane Greene up to these days?

“They’re taking a lot of the cost out of the system…especially with people building larger and larger data centers,” said Greene, who said she needed a switch and a scalable data center for her own new project. “We invested because of the disruptive nature of the company, and it’s such a smart thing to do.”

For those who don’t know, Diane Greene was one of the founders and CEO of VMware from 1998 until 2008. She’s currently on the board of Google and Intuit, she has invested in companies like Cumulus, Cloudera, Typesafe, CloudPhysics, Nicira, Pure Storage, Rockmelt, Unity Technologies and Nimbula. An impressive track record indeed, but anyway… what stood out to me from this article is “she needed a switch and a scalable data center for her own new project“.

I have heard some rumors about the talent she is recruiting, and I guess time will tell what it is this new company is working on. It must be something big, exciting and challenging if Diane Greene decided to take it on herself. When I bump in to more details, you guys will be the first to know.

Big changes for the Dutch VMUG, show your support!

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Those who follow me on twitter probably have seen me “moaning” about the Dutch VMUG for a long time now. For years the Dutch VMUG was not a VMUG like any other VMUG in the world. Yes we had HUGE event in the Netherland every year with over 700 attendees, but it was a commercial event (my opinion!) and not a User Group event. User groups throughout the world are groups which organize events / meetings, these are organized by VMware users for VMware users, free of charge (or for a minimal fee), independent events, striving to make the life of the user better by sharing experiences and knowledge! In the Netherlands this was different, the VMUG was controlled by a single company but that has changed… finally!

https://twitter.com/NLVMUG/status/346168152528404480

As of June the 15th 2013 there is an Official Dutch VMUG. This VMUG is part of the world wide international VMUG organization and controlled by a board of VMware users called the Customer Council!

So what does this mean? Lets make this absolutely clear, there is only one official VMUG in the Netherlands and that is NLVMUG.nl. Also, the yearly event in December (already announced for the 13th) is not an event by the Official Dutch VMUG. Personally I did not attend the VMUG event in 2012 as I do not want to support an event which is supposed to be a user group event but doesn’t come close to it, at least not what I perceive a user group to be. Both the Customer Council and VMware apparently agree with me on this, as on the announcement they state that neither of them will support or attend the December event that was announced.

Het op vmug.nl aangekondigde evenement is geen officieel VMUG evenement, en zal dus ook niet gesteund en bezocht worden door de Customer Council of VMware. We zullen jullie zo snel mogelijk proberen te informeren over een evenement dat door de officiële Nederlandse VMUG, de Customer Council, VMware Benelux en natuurlijk de community (bloggers) zal worden gehouden.

A couple of things before I wrap up this blog post with a call to action for all of my readers. First of all, I want to thank Ferry Limpens, Joep Piscaer, Viktor van den Berg, Dennis Hoegen Dijkhof, Robert van den Nieuwendijk, Laurens van Gunst, Sander Daems and Arjan Timmerman aka “The Customer Council” for taking this bold step. It is great to see that you guys are not afraid of change and are willing to take a risk. Congrats!

Secondly, I would like to ask every single person who has ever attended a Dutch VMUG event to let all of their friends and colleagues know about these changes and sign up for the official VMUG using the link below! You can read it in Dutch on the official Dutch VMUG website: nlvmug.com. If you are on twitter, make sure to follow @nlvmug, and if you have a question / would like to present at a VMUG / help organizing… feel free to drop these guys an email: customercouncil@nlvmug.com. This is a user event, so try to participate, you are the community!

Last, but not least, I would like to ask all of the Sponsors of the Dutch VMUG to contact the Customer Council to see how you can help taking this User Group to the next level. The official Dutch VMUG can use all the help they can get!

SIGN UP NOW! Join the Official Dutch VMUG!

Contribute: Tweet sized vSphere Design Considerations

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Most of you have probably seen the announcement Frank did yesterday… Frank, Cormac, Vaughn and I are working on this book project called “Tweet sized vSphere Design Considerations” and we need YOU, the community, to contribute! What are you saying? You are writing a book and want us to do the work for you? Yes indeed, but this book belongs to all of us! As Frank stated:

The current working title is “Tweet-sized vSphere design considerations”. As this book is created by people from the virtualization community for the virtualization community, this book will be available free of cost.

So how does it work, let me briefly recap Frank’s blog post, what are the rules:

  • Each design consideration should be tweet-sized like, maximum of 200 characters (excluding spaces)
  • Should fit in on one the following categories:
    • Host design
    • vCenter design
    • Cluster design
    • Networking and Security design
    • Storage design
  • Max 3 submissions per category per person

So what would that look like? I know some folks have already submitted entries, but for those who are considering and don’t know where to start or are not certain of what they are thinking about will meet the requirements here are two examples of what I submitted:

  1. For your “Management Network” portgroup ensure to combine different physical NICs connected to different physical switches. This will increase resiliency and decrease chances of an HA false positive.
  2. Ensure syslog is correctly configured for your virtual infrastructure and log files are offloaded to a safe location outside of your virtual infrastructure. This will allow for root cause analysis in case disaster strikes.

So head-over to Frank’s blog, read the rules a couple of times and start entering those design considerations! You might end-up in this cool book, if you do you will get a free paper copy provided by PernixData. It will also be made available to everyone for free through the various channels as an ebook.

Available now: VMware Technical Journal, Summer 2013

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For those like me who love reading research papers by developers you might want to head over to labs.vmware.com as today a new version of the VMware Technical Journal was released, the summer 2013 edition. You can download it as a PDF on the website, or you can read the individual articles straight in your web browser. Below you can find the Table of Content, and the titles convinced me that these are worth reading. Personally I found the “Redefining ESXi IO Multipathing in the Flash ERA” very interesting… but I suggest you read all of them as it typically gives a good hint of what VMware engineering is working on now / or in the future!

See you at VMworld 2013 San Francisco and Barcelona!

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I just received the news that I have sessions accepted for both VMworld 2013 San Francisco and Barcelona.

  • Session ID: BCO4872
    Speakers: Lee Dilworth, Duncan Epping
    Session Title: Operating and Architecting a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster based infrastructure
    Track: Business Continuity
    Presenting at: San Francisco, Barcelona
  • Session ID: VSVC4569
    Speaker: Rick Scherer, William Lam, Duncan Epping, Vaughn Stewart, Scott Lowe
    Session Title: Ask the Expert vBloggers
    Track: vSphere and vCloud Suite
    Presenting at: San Francisco

So if you are planning on attending VMworld, make sure to attend one of these session and make sure to come by and say hi. It is always good to meet the people reading your articles!