#SNLDD Episode 2: Rise Ye Unicorns

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Gabriel

tumblr_lgraky3EYi1qzamioo1_500So given that I’ve yet to edit/convert the first one of these things, I figured in the spirit of doing instead of thinking about doing, I’ll be hosting another Episode of Saturday Night Live Deep Dive. This week, I’ve invited 40 of my closest friends to hop aboard. This will be an exercise in discovery as I figure out how to manage a Google Hang out. For the record, the Google based instructions for things like Linking your G+ to your Youtube account are chock full of ass when it comes to readability. I had to “google” the results and even then the results were equally crappy. Go figure.  Oh well you get what you pay for.

Tonight’s agenda: Rise Ye Unicorns. Following the awesome discussion on the latest episode of Geek Whisperers, I figured I would invite a bunch of people who are social in nature and rockstars by trade to discuss what its like to be recognized in the community, how they deal with “success” and “e-fame”, as well as anything else they find compelling to discuss.  Now, apparently if you follow this link you can watch it live. If you follow me on G+ and didn’t get an invite and want one, just holla!

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vExpert Weekly Digest – January 13th 2014 – Death Stars!

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Gabriel

vexpert1-13-14Continuing with updates for the year 2014, this week brings us a fine collection of links and discussions, and Death Stars!. Of special note, the VUPASS podcast asks “Do you have to be Monogomous?”, David Davis and Scott Lowe are giving away a Deathstar, I’m still trying to find out what Hypervisor everyone is using, and vCHS just got a lot less expensive.

As always comments, constructive or otherwise are welcome. Enjoy this weeks edition.

 

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Do you use KVM ?

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Gabriel

ibm-red-hat-linux-q110-fig1So in my haste to get the Hypervisor survey up and running, I left out KVM as an option. To note, I have really zero experience with KVM but have been meaning to start working with it this year.Thanks to  Theron Conrey and Maish Saidel-Keesing for the inspiration for what is to follow.

My personal take has been that the KVM and specifically the community around OpenStack have brought on a significant push for adoption rates in the Enterprise space, but I still am not encountering it much in the customer space. Now part of that could be that the platform I work with is primarily VMware based (selection bias), the other could be that I’m not involved with shops of significant scale where KVM has become the prime platform. Of course knowledge is power, so getting my learn on in this space is to my benefit as well as others.

This all said, I’d like to get a Google Hangout scheduled to discuss KVM and its use in your organization.Interested in the following:

  • What were the factors in choosing KVM over another Hypervisor
  • Was there a significant learning curve associated with implementation compared to other systems you have used
  • Barriers or gotcha’s that you didn’t see coming during implementation
  • Specific workloads being leveraged
  • Support experience, and if/how you had to engage
  • Hidden costs associated with implementation and deployment
  • Which Distro did you standardize on and why?

I think those are a good starting point to get the discussion going. The KVM HowTo Page is helpful for a list of links and primers, but I wanted this to be a give and take discussion. If you are interested please hit me up. I’m going to be looking to schedule this in the next week or two. Let this post serve as a place holder.

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Survey Two: Which Hypervisor are you using in production?

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Gabriel

ESX1So I’m late to listen to the older VUPAAS podcast episodes (which you should be listening too) and in Episode One, there was a quick discussion about upgrade path for ESXi, do you hop on the latest release right when it comes out, do you wait for U1 (ala the MS route of nothing is solid until service pack 1 is out) or are you still using older software in your production environment?

So survey number two for this week is Which Hypervisor are you using in your production environment? (Can you tell I just added the survey tool to my wordpress).

Oh and knowing that you may have more than one production environment, you can have multiple votes for each item.

Edited to add ESX 4.1 because @BobbyFantast1c has 800 hosts running it 🙂

Edit #2: I totally spaced KVM, so now its an option. This started out primarily as a VMware thing, but input from the community has expanded the scope, so there are some late additions. 

[yop_poll id=”3″]

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How are you managing vSphere – C# vs WebGUI

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Gabriel

TrevorPer a tweet put out by Trevor Pott. This got me thinking as well. The WebGUI has been out for a while, We all know that the new feature functions leverage it in 5.X, yet when I talk to a lot of people in the field, many are still using the C# client, and flipping over to the WebGUI when they have to leverage one of those new functions. The general understating for all involved is that the C# client is going away, that its going to be all WebGUI moving forward with the next vSphere release. I still think there will be some pushback on that (as well as vSphere Appliance as well). So I’m curious, how are you using it?

 [yop_poll id=”2″]

Posted in VMWare, vSphere 5 | 3 Comments

OMG! Learn about vSAN and Hyper-Converged Offerings, win the Deathstar!

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Gabriel

omg-lego-death-starOMG indeed, if you didn’t see the tweet by David Davis or Scott Lowe (aka OtherScottLowe) they are doing a vendor neutral webinar on vSAN as well as Hyperconvergence and the Datacenter of the Future.

 January 30th, 2014 – 2:00pm – 3:00pm EST Even while in beta, VSAN has become an overnight sensation thanks to its promise to eliminate the SAN from the data center. But, VSAN is hardly a silver bullet when compared to offerings from Nutanix, SimpliVity, and Scale Computing. This free webinar is a must for CIOs, Virtualization Administrators, Storage Admins & IT operations managers.

**Note: This is an unsponsored, vendor-agnostic webinar.**

So not only will you get some great information, you might get a chance to win your very own Deathstar. Scott wrote a really excellent piece on the Hyperconverged space for Wikibon a few weeks back that I would highly suggest reading if you are looking at where the datacenter is headed in the future. Its always good to see all the options that are being promoted in the marketplace and then making informed decisions. As always if any of my readers have any questions around what SimpliVity is offering, feel free to ping me.

If you want a jumpstart on what SimpliVIty is doing in this space with, check out our Tech Field Day presentation from VMworld 2013.

Posted in HyperConvergence, SimpliVity, Storage & Virtualization, Tech Marketing | Leave a comment

vExpert Weekly Digest – Happy New Year 2014 Edition

Posted on January 5, 2014 by Gabriel

1-5-2014 8-25-03 PMSo this week finds us in a New Year, with a good collection of year end review posts to run through. Hope you enjoy the content, and remember to share with a friend. 2014 will find me running around the globe spreading my message of C3 aka Convergence 3.0. I think I’m slotted for 10+ VMUG’s this year so I hope you stop by and say hi. As always comments, suggestions are welcome.

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SNLDD Episode #1: Saturday Night Live Deep Dive

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Gabriel

saturday_night_live_cast_season_one_image__1_Crazy idea came to mind while listening to GS and Discoposse on the VUPAAS podcast this morning while out hiking, Saturday Night Live Deep Dive. Not sure what will come of this,but my thought was to do a simple tech presentation for a live audience on a Saturday Night. So tonight I’m going to setup a tech preview on some stuff I’ve been working on. It will be live, and interactive, and open to anyone who wants to attend, just fill out the form below and it will shoot me an email.Then I can send you an invite.

 BRIGHT RED TEXT DENOTES CHANGES:

Well this idea has changed quite a bit since the original idea came into my brain. In the spirit of spontaneous combustion, this will now be a live call in show. I envision a mashup of Love Line, Jerry Springer, and Oprah but for technology people. Now the functional format of the show may change over time, but this week I’m going to try and use TalkShoe because its free, and can support chat and call in guests. Apparently this will be recorded as well and put into some form of podcast. God help us.

This Weeks Special Guests: Andy Banta, and Matthew Brender

Register for the show by clicking this link.

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The Mother of All Demos

Posted on January 3, 2014 by Gabriel

images

I came across this today and it was simply fascinating. For those of us who work and present on technology what is presented is essentially the birth of the “Demo” along with the beginnings of what we might equate as a “webinar”. More amazing is that this was done  45 years ago  by Douglas Engelbart and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The number of concepts presented in this piece are pretty astonishing: the keyboard and mouse, bootstrapping, hyper links, the fledgling internet, etc. all presented by Mr. Englebart and his supporting cast of dozens.What I do today in my home office presenting to customers and partners took a team of around 30 people to do 45 years ago with countless man hours dedicated to simply capturing a demonstration of technology we all take for granted today.

I wonder if at the time, this team understood exactly what they had hit upon, and that what they were presenting would be the foundation for how user interactions with compute platforms would be normalized over the next 45 years.

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vExpert Weekly Digest – Santa Claus is Coming to Town Edition

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Gabriel

xmasHo ho ho, and this weeks Digest is ready for your review.. Santa’s coming and that means that you are either knee deep in end of year deal closings or software/hardware updates with the down time, or sitting around in you PJ’s if you were smart and took some time off. Either way, you don’t want to miss all that technical goodness that crossed the tubes.

Posted in vExpert-Weekly, Virtualization | Leave a comment