IT and Business hopefully a little different way..

The time has come again to beg and plead for votes to present at the annual VMware User Conference VMworld.  Each year thousand of people submit abstracts to speak with less than 200 sessions being available.  I have had the good fortune to speak at lots of VMware User Conferences and numerous other conferences but not VMworld so please take a few minutes and vote for my sessions.  Just go to VMworld.com and click on the link in the middle to vote for sessions.  You will need a VMworld.com account but those are free.  Then click the filer options and type “Letschin” into the keyword box.  Heres what you should see

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Those of you that got to make it out to the VMware Partner Exchange probably got to see the demo in the Nexenta Booth.

Alot of the common social media geeks around virtualization got to swing by.  Chris Wahl from WahlNetworks included.  This was not an overly complex demo, but I wanted something fun to show off VDI sessions.  Using the real time performance metrics that are shown in NexentaVSA for View, we can actually see the systems running.

The install was rather easy, with one caveat.  VMware View does not recognize the Retro USB Nintendo controller that we picked up from Amazon.

The great part is on the Lenovo Thinkpad I was using as a client I can make just a quick registry change and View will recognize.  This process is detailed here, very similar to restricting access, this allows you to add unknown USB devices to share to your View session.

The hardware was not very intense for the servers.  A couple Dell 1950 running ESX5.1 and using a Supermicro server with Nexenta installed as shared storage presenting 1 TB of NFS storage.  For the VDI hosts I put in 2 Cisco UCS C200 M2.  By adding in a single STEC ZeusIOP and a single spinning disk to house the desktops, and 96 GB of RAM we are able to build a rather robust VDI setup.  Allowing for about 100 desktops all being deployed with NexentaVSA for View..

By adding in the JNes Nintendo Emulator to the Windows 7 base images and VMware View Linked Clones, we have our own mini arcade.

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a side project with one of the Nexenta partners to prepare for the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco this week. The partner Cirracore based in Atlanta works with Equinix and Telx pretty heavily and offers a few managed private and public cloud solutions. One of these solutions is based on the Intel Modular Server Chassis(IMS). If you have not checked out this chassis, it is probably one of the most engineered but least publicized piece of hardware I have seen in years. First to give you an Idea of what the chassis is made of, then two solutions we release this week, vCloud in a Box and VDI/SMB in a Box. Read more

For the second year in a row, I have been given the distinct pleasure of anchoring the VMware Communities TV lineup at VMworld.  If you are not able to make VMworld, why not spend less than an hour a day and hear from some of the leaders in the virtualization community talk about everything that is announced and all there is to see at the conference?  If you have more time keep watching for some great tech talks throughout the day.  Our format is simple, a very casual conversation each day starting at 10 AM PST with myself and then 3-4 VMware vExperts.  The topics will be varied and will probably cover everything from the latest VMware releases to the best releases from vendors to how the welcome reception and evening.  Take a look below at the listing of the vExperts currently signed up and make sure to click on their names to follow them on twitter.  You never know who else might stop by though.

To follow along with all the VMworld Communities TechTalks bookmark http://vmwaretechtalks.com/ , the redirect will be edited as soon as the site goes live

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I am hosting a live podcast in a few weeks (blog announcement upcoming) and I wanted to find a way to let people add the date and time to their calendars with just a simple click instead of having to enter the information themselves.  After alot of searching, all the post seem to say you had to add the event calendar plugin and then it would be a new plugin to the wordpress page and things like that.  Not exactly what I was looking for.  I wanted something as simple as

Heres a reminder to read TheSolutionsArchitect.net when the podcast announcement comes out:

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Each year VMware puts on a 20.000+ person conference.  This year it is in San Francisco and like the last couple years, there are sessions just waiting for you to vote.  The more votes, the better chance that yours truly will get to present.  I submitted a single presentation this year with Theron Conrey and I speaking together.

1776 vCloud Director: Training Labs for Virtual and Physical Solutions

Wondering what that means.. well lucky you we also have to have an abstract so here goes.

Deploying training environments for companies can be not only time consuming to create but also expensive to build and maintain. vCloud Director allows for automated self provisioning for virtual lab environments the challenge is integrating these virtual environments with physical devices and systems. This primer demonstrates the physical architecture and virtual configurations needed to connect a virtual datacenter to physical network appliances or systems. The environment consists of a shared authentication strategy with individual vApps per user connected to individual physical device. An architectural example will be dissected to include virtualized vCenter, View and physically attached ESXi hosts being managed through NexentaVSA for View

Please go to VMworld.com and vote for my session.

There are alot of other great sessions out there by all the names you have heard of an probably a few you have not so make sure to read through them all!

VMware has released a mobile client for their newly released MyVMware page.  For years one fo the biggest issues with VMware has been the confusing licensing and user management.  With the release of MyVMware, many of these issues have been resolved.  One thing I will enjoy is the ability to grab a license key directly from my phone when I need it.  After working for a reseller and now a vendor, both big VMware partners, I often need to test software that it can be a pain to go grab a license key from the portal only to not be able to use cut and paste and have to type the key in.  Now I can open my app, grab a key and still type it in, but it is much quicker.  I took a few screenshots of the app and listed them below so you can get an idea what the app can do.

1. Start by logging in:

2. You then have to approve the EULA (Surprise!)

3. You will then see your profile

4. You now have to pick your folders (whatever ones you have created on the MyVMware website)

5. Once you go into the folder you can see the products under it.

6. The select the product and click next (you have to do that each time, that is kind of annoying) and you will see the license keys

Click on the power icon on the top to logout, or the gear to set your refresh and timeout time

This weekend I got the great news that I was selected again as a VMware vExpert for 2012.  Sounds impressive right?  To some people in the VMware community and IT as a whole it does, but many people have no idea what the vExpert designation means.  As a second year vExpert, I have been lucky in that I got to be part of a rather exclusive group.  For 2012 there have been 382 vExperts announce globally.  I wanted to break that down a little more and found that of those 149 are first time vExperts.  216 are returning from being a vExpert in 2011 and only 74 have been vExperts since the first year in 2009.

This is a group not made of technical experts, although many if not all of the vExperts are very knowledgable about VMware and the related products, but rather more of an ambassador program.  One that is leading the charge to further virtualization in all industries.  Many of these vExperts have been the consultants that pushed virtual machines out of R&D and into the mainstream.  Others have been internal staffers that “saw the light” and helped their companies move to the cutting edge.  Regardless of what the vExperts do for work, they all go above and beyond when it comes to their outreach.  Many are very active in the social media space.  You can look up the announced 2012 vExperts on Maish Saidel-Keesing‘s twitter list. (https://twitter.com/?category=people#!/maishsk/vmware-vexpert-2012).  Others have led VMware User Groups for years and you can find them on the newly created user workspaces on myVMUG.org or organized and ran local vBeer events.  Others have written books or maintained podcasts, some have even spent countless hours helping others on the message boards as users and moderators.

It goes without saying that I am humbled to be included in a fantastic group.  And for those of you who are not yet vExperts, know that while technical knowledge is always very important, there is a reward for being outgoing, helpful and social.  The vExperts have been able to be ambassadors and often trend setters by gaining access to previews and betas thanks to the great support team at VMware.  Alex Maier has taken charge of this motley group and given direction and guidance and the godfather of the group John Troyer has given many days and nights evangelizing the cause.  Thank you to them for their help and I hope I can continue and be able to announce a 2013 vExpert designation as well.

Last week I took and passed the VMware Certified Professional 5 exam at the local Pearson Vue testing center in DC. As most of you know I have spent the last few years as a solutions engineer, pre-sales engineer, or architect depending on what you want to to call the positions. Since most of my time was spent in pre-sales and design work I was rather apprehensive about taking the VCP test. The test seems to be more geared towards the everyday admin than those of us who have been working with VMware since the GSX days. The great thing is there are lots of study guides and things designed to help people pass the exam. There are some great new things about this test. The biggest I believe is there was nothing on my exam and from talking to others it seems consistent that the minimums and maximums are no longer part of the test. I always thought that was a part that was not really needed. If I need to know the maximum number of virtual machines per LUN and host, I can just look them up. The test is much more situation based. If you want to get an idea of the question style, take a look at either of the question links below. Be forewarned though that unlike previous VMware exams, the braindumps are just for a gauge of questions. There was probably only 10-12 questions on my exam I recognized and there are 85 questions and I think all of those were from the official mock exam. I used a few great resources for studying and hopefully it will help a few of you out before the February 29th deadline to take the class again, or for those of you taking it the first time.

Study Guides

• Jason Langer’s VCP5 Blueprint – virtuallanger.com/vcp5/
• Damian Karlson’s VCP5 BroanBags – http://www.professionalvmware.com/

Questions

• Official VCP5 Mock Exam – MyLearn.vmware.com – This is a really good one to do over and over. Just make sure to always get 1 question wrong or you wont be able to take it again
• aiotestking.com – This is a braindump style site. It changes on a consistent basis and the newest dumps are the highest numbers.  These are not actually on the exam (in my experience)

The study guides are all great but make sure you really spend sometime in a lab working on the actual product. You can do just about everything on VMware Workstation with demo licenses.  If you are trying to cram I would spend the most time on the blueprints.  If you understand it then you should have a good chance with that and the time you spend working on a lab.

Good Luck to you all and I hope it helps…

In today’s enterprise, applications are king. With bring you own desktop, an influx of Apple systems, and more remote users, the focus for enterprise systems is no longer on the operating system. This application focus led me to do a comparison of Citrix XenApp, the leading application publishing method, and VMware Horizon Application Manager, the latest product to provide centralized managed application to a domain. Each of these products has more features that could possibly be compared in a short presentation and since this test was built to present at the DC and New England VMware User Groups, I had to limit the feature set comparison. Horizon has a great SAAS presentation ability, and XenApp can be accessed from a plethora of devices that Horizon currently can not, but for this comparison I look at desktop presentation within a domain with the standard out of the box deployment. The systems were built to provide a minimum level of high availability and were not tweaked for performance. I was able to do the presentation with another of VMware’s products, SlideRocket and since most people were not able to see the presentation live I have embedded it below. Please add comments and suggestions as I will continue to develop the comparison and probably expand to show the other features. (Make sure to watch the side by side video comparison on Slide 16)