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.

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 announced today at VMworld Europe the vCenter Operations Management Suite. Those of us who are familiar with the product set will see lots of significant changes including the addition of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.0 and a new user interface. vCenter Ops Suite delivers an integrated performance capacity and configuration management solution for your vSphere environment. You are able to continuously monitor for compliance and health. This release is the first integrated suite and allows seamless upgrades between Standard(Ops Manager Only), Advanced(includes Chargeback), and Enterprise(includes Configuration Management). The suite is scheduled to be available for deployment in Late 2011 or Early 2012. Read more

I have hated traveling to the west coast, not because of it being the west coast.  The weather is beautiful normally and people seem nice enough, but my calendars on my phone seem to be messed up all the time with the time zone changes.

I keep multiple calendars on my iPhone, my corporate exchange calendar and my GMail one being the most used.  It seemed as though everytime I would travel my time zones were off but only on some appointments.  I have found a few reasons for you to check.  You might need to try some or all of these and depending if you have “fixed” some appointments, you may need to put them back to the original. Read more

If you are anything like me, when you travel around for meetings and conferences you end up collecting a stack of business cards and they never end up in my contacts.  You could go out and buy a CardScan scanner and scan them all in when you get back to your office, but in all reality who has the time.  Worry not, there is a solution out there for all of you with smartphones.  Welcome WorldCard Mobile.  I first came across Worldcard on my Windows Mobile phone a few years back and when I first switched to an iPhone I was disappointed it did not exist.  Lucky for you, times have changed and the development team has built iPhone and Android apps along with the Windows Mobile app. Read more