My first VMUG

Last week I attended my first VMware User Group meeting, the meeting took place on 25th February in central London. The agenda for the day was as follows.

1100 – 1200 (Optional) PowerCLI / Powershell workshop – Alan Renouf. Please bring your own curly brackets.
12:30 – 13:00 Arrive & Refreshments
13:00 – 13:20 Welcome & News – Alaric Davies
13:20 – 14:00 Sponsor Presentation – Chris Hammans, Pano Logic
Real world vSphere deployment experiences – Stuart Thompson
(Mostly) Zero downtime DC migration for Dummies – Jonathan Medd
15:00 – 15:20 Refreshment break
ESX home lab update, virtualizing Terminal Server workloads – Simon Gallagher
Thin provisioning and capacity planning in a virtual world – Chris Evans, ‘The Storage Architect’
Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth – Stuart Radnidge, vinternals
16:45 – 17:00 Close
17:00 – Pub!

I didn’t really know what to expect from the day but hoped I would meet up with a lot of the community members and pick up some tips and tricks. I wasn’t disappointed by the contents of the day!

I joined in from 11am and saw Alan Renouf’s PowerCLI workshop that was focusing on automating the configuration of ESXi! A copy of Alan’s presentation can be found here >> http://www.virtu-al.net/2010/02/26/london-vmug-my-presentation/ as when ever I read one of Alan’s blog posts or meet up with him it inspires me to learn more with PowerCLI! Also loved Alan’s presentation he made it  using http://prezi.com/ and it was very refreshing compared to the usual Powerpoint presentation!

I enjoyed listening to Carter Shanklin’s (Vmware product manager for PowerCli) presentation, I was pleased to learn that VMware View 4.5 would feature PowerCli cmdlets and that there is a PowerCli training course coming! (whether I will be able to persuade work to put me on it is another thing 🙂 )

Simon Gallagher’s home lab update made me realise that an SSD drive was probably the way to go for my home lab. I like Simon have began to feel my system get sluggish when multiple VM’s are booted on the SATA disks. I have just purchased two faster SATA disks so will see how I get on with them first! Blog post about it here >> http://vinf.net/2010/02/25/8-node-esxi-cluster-running-60-virtual-machines-all-running-from-a-single-500gbp-physical-server/

Both Jonathan Medd and Stuart Thompson’s real world experience presentations were very insightful and glad to hear people are experiencing some of the issues that we all face on a daily basis. Stuart Thompson’s design surrounded vSphere and HP C7000 blade chassis with SRM which was of huge interest to me as I have a similar project coming up soon.

The final presentation was by Stuart Radnide (@vinternals) and was surrounding considerations and planning aspects on a cloud deployment. This was very thought provoking session and was good to hear all the aspects that had to be taken into consideration. Presentation here >> http://vinternals.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/vinternals.london.vmug_.20100225.pdf

My favourite part of the day was meeting the people of the VMware community, catching up with a few people I had met before Alan Renouf, Matt Roblin and Stuart Radnide and meeting some for the first time. I finally met Tom Howarth, Mike Laverick!, Carter Shanklin Simon Long, Simon Gallagher, Chris Dearden, Daniel Eason, Jonathon Medd and Michael Poore plus many more as usual they were all top people willing to chat virtualisation and Tom Howarth even saving my life as we walked to the pub (must remember not to stand in the middle of the road!)

Below are a few picture I tweeted from the event.

Alan Renouf’s option session on configuring ESXi with powershell

The witty banter starts “More Power CLI to come from"Carter, The unstoppable sex machine"

Many Thanks to Ricky, Veeam and Jason Boche for my calendar!

Ricky from Veeam for keeping quite about Surebackup!

Alaric kick the day off

Simon Gallagher, home lab update.

    Stuart Radnide (@vinternals) Bringing the cloud down to earth.

A big thank you to all those that put time into organising and presenting on the day, VMware for the beers, Pano Logic for sponsoring and presenting (will blog a bit more about Pano Logic specifically when I learn a bit more about their Zero Clients and software!) but most of all to all the VMware community members! I hope to be able to make it to some more VMUG’s in the future work permitting!