Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

ESXi Quiz (#VSP1956) – The Teams! (#vmworld / #epic)

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I guess most of you have been waiting for this moment… the moment for the three teams to be announced. I can assure you that you will not be disappointed. All of the people on these three have an excellent reputation and are eager to have their shot at the title of all titles. Who will take back that championship trophy home? First let me announce the teams:

vExpert Team – The Raging vBulls

  • Chad “Warrior-Monk” Sakac
  • Jason “vTerminator” Boche
  • Maish “vBeliever” Saidel-Keesing
  • Eric “Link Master” Siebert

vExpert Team – vPredators

  • Vaughn “Sgt NFS” Stewart
  • Tom “VDI Warrior” Howarth
  • Mike “Axel” Foley
  • Scott “VMGuru” Herold

VMware Team – vRaminators

  • Frank “distributed” Denneman
  • John “VCDX 001” Arrasjid
  • Kit “VC Ops” Colbert
  • Massimo “Hybrid Cloud” Re Ferre

The vExpert Teams will battle each other in the first round… The team who wins will take on the VMware Employee Rockstar team and believe that will be a tough challenge, but I count on the vExpert team to win! I cannot say often enough how excited I am about this show, I guarantee that it will be epic. The show will be hosted by no one less than Mr John “the quiz master” Troyer himself and will have a judges panel with Eric Sloof, Duncan Epping and a special guest!

Have a Question? Ask the Expert vBloggers! (VSP1425)

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This year at VMworld I have the honor to part of a panel discussion moderated by Rick Scherer. Of course I am not the only person on the panel. Next to me the panel will feature my fellow bloggers and virtualization experts: Frank Denneman, Scott Lowe and Chad Sakac. For those of you attending VMworld be sure to register for VSP1425 – Ask the Expert vBloggers today!

So now here is your chance to be part of this great session!  Do you have a question that you’d like the experts to answer? Simply fill out the form below and your question will be added to the queue! We expect you will have great questions during the session but just in case the room goes silent we would like to have a couple of questions to get us started… although I don’t doubt for a second that during the introduction Chad aka “Chat” Sakac will get started right away 🙂

See you in Vegas, make sure to attend this session as panel sessions like these don’t happen often!

VMworld Session: vSphere Clustering Q&A

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We need your help for our VMworld session “VSP1682 – vSphere Clustering Q&A”. In order to ensure we can fill up the full 60 minutes we want to have a couple of questions ready in case no one in the audience has a question. Although I doubt that will be the case, it is better to be prepared than to stare at each-other for 50 minutes. So please help us out and submit some questions about HA, DRS and/or Storage DRS.

Our session is on Monday morning at 08:00 so if you haven’t yet, register today. By the way, Frank has another session which is DRS/Resource Management Deepdive… definitely worth attending, it is VSP3116 and on Monday at 11:30 and Thursday at 10:30 (sold out). Make sure to attend one of those. I’ve seen a preview of the slidedeck and it will be worth it. Another E P I C session will be VSP1956 on Monday at 13:00. It is the ESXi Quiz, yes… Death to Powerpoint. At this session you will see vExperts taking on VMware employees and in a knowledge quiz!

Project: Massive Array of Inexpensive Servers aka MAIS

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I was part of the voting committee for VMworld and one of the sessions which I voted for unfortunately did not make it. However with over 350 submissions there are always some excellent topics that don’t make it. I did feel it was worth sharing. So here’s the outline of the session and some additional info. All credits to Richard Stinton (VMware Cloud Architect, EMEA) and his Team for coming up with the concept and allowing me to publish this!

Remember Simon Gallagher’s vTARDIS project? Now for something different. This is the Massive Array of Inexpensive Servers or MAIS (pronounced MAZE). We’re going to build an array of 32 (or more) $150 servers and show the power of vSphere and vCloud Director. Using the new(ish) HP Proliant Microserver, we’re going to build a wall of vBricks!

So it wasn’t just a submission, but these guys actually started working on it. They managed to get their hands on 32 HP Microservers. That gives a total of 64 cpus, 256Gb RAM, 8Tb storage, all for $9,000. They loaded it up with the latest vSphere and vCloud Director versions and it ran great, unfortunately we will never see the results but I did want to share one more thing;

Is that cool or what?

VMworld Sessions announced, must see!

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The VMworld Sessions have been announced and as always I wanted to list a couple which I felt are worth calling out. In the past I’ve heard people complaining that sessions were not technical enough or not exciting. I have listed all sessions which I will add to my schedule as soon as I can as I know they will solid technical sessions and they are hosted by great presenters! Note that any sessions containing “futures” are not showing up yet. As soon as they will show up I will update this list.

**EDIT: 3/August, added 1 new session**

Must See!

  • BCO2479 – Understanding vSphere Stretched Clusters, Disaster Recovery, and Planned Workload Mobility – Chad Sakac (EMC) and Lee Dilworth (VMware)
  • BCO2874 – vSphere HA 5.0 and SMP Fault Tolerance – Keith Farkas (VMware Engineering) and Jim Chow (VMware Engineering)
  • CIM1264 – Private vCloud Architecture Technical Deepdive – David Hill (VMware)
  • CIM1302 – Active Directory considerations in a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure – Deji Akomolafe (VMware)
  • CIM1600 – vCloud Networking Finally Explained – Mike DiPetrillo (VMware)
  • CIM2452 – vCenter Operations Tech Deepdive – Kit Colbert (VMware Engineering)
  • EUC1547 – ThinApp, So You Think You Know Everything There Is? – Peter Bjork (VMware)
  • EUC2866 – View Troubleshooting – Matt Coppinger (VMware) and John Dodge (VMware)
  • TEX1928 – Implementation of Application Awareness within the Web Client – Tom Stephens (VMware)
  • VSP1700 – vSphere 5.0 Storage Features – Cormac Hogan (VMware)
  • VSP1883 – PowerCLI Best Practices – Alan Renouf (VMware) and Luc Dekens (Eurocontrol)
  • VSP1882 – Manage ESXi with PowerCLI – Alan Renouf (VMware) and Luc Dekens (Eurocontrol)
  • VSP1933 – Storage IO Control for NAS – Ajay Gulati (VMware Engineering)
  • VSP1999 – Esxtop for Advanced Users – Krishna Raja (VMware Performance Engineering)
  • VSP2376 – Performance and scalability enhancements in VMFS-5 – Mostafa Khalil (VMware)
  • VSP2447 – Understanding Virtualization Memory Management Concepts – Kit Colbert (VMware Engineering) and YP Chien (Kingston)
  • VSP3067 – Mythbusters Goes Virtual – Eric Sloof (NTPro) and Mattias Sundling (Quest Software)
  • VSP3205 – Technology Overview: vStorage APIs for VM and Application Granular Data Management – Satyam Vaghani (VMware Engineering) and vijay ramachandran (VMware) **NEW**
  • VSP3255 – Storage vMotion Deep Dive and Best Practices – Min Cai (VMware Engineering) and Ali Mashtizadeh (VMware Engineering)
  • VSP3116 – vSphere Resource Management Deep Dive – Frank Denneman (VMware) and Valentin Hamburger (VMware)
  • VSP3305 – Upgrading to ESXi – Kyle Gleed (VMware)
  • VSP1823 – Storage DRS – Manish Lohani (VMware Product Management)
  • VSP1926 – Getting Started in vSphere Design – Scott Lowe (EMC)
  • VSP2757 – A deepdive on vDS and Nexus 1Kv – Jason Nash
  • VSP3307 – Deployment Considerations for ESXi – Charu Chaubal (VMware) and David Day (VMware)

My Sessions:

  • VSP1682 – vSphere Cluster – Q&A, Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping
  • VSP1425 – Ask the Expert vBloggers with Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Frank Denneman and I. Moderated by Rick Scherer.
  • VSP1956 – The ESXi Quiz with John Troyer, Pablo Roesch and Duncan Epping **NEW**