A few weeks ago - I gave a session about how to deploy a full environment starting from a bare rack to a fully functioning environment with deployed applications.

Firstly about the VMUG event. I was fortunate enough to be invited by the VMUG organization to present at this years VMUG. I would like to extend my thanks to the VMUG organization for their hospitality and the effort they made to help feel at home (including kosher food)

There were approximately 400-500 people at the Event, the location was very nice and the the organization of the event was very well done.

The lineup of speakers, sponsors and vendors was very impressive, the local VMUG leaders and VMUG organization did an outstanding job.

Community was a big part of the event, just the way it should be.

I got to chat a bit with Joe Baguley, the VMware CTO, EMEA - about competition, "co-opetition" and what will happen in the future. We can never be prophets, but even if only half of what we talked about does actually come to be, then amazing things will happen.

I highly enjoyed the keynotes, both from Joe Baguley, and Greg Ferro - who surprised me with the amount of information he knows about ducks, and agriculture. They are both outstanding speakers.

Back to the session. Firstly I would like to thank the brave souls that attended my session. There were not many of you, because the slot I got was the same as three other VMware speaker sessions, one by Massimo Referre, the other by Cormac Hogan, and the last was a panel with Mike Laverick and Joe Baguley.

It not uncommon that one has to stand up an environment - of 8-50 hosts and 50-250 virtual machines. But is not quite common that you have to do this - when you have no existing infrastructure at all. This was the case I was presenting. Standing an infrastructure from complete zero to a fully deployed virtual VMware environment - in the most automated fashion possible.

There are a lot considerations that you have to take into account, for example - Autodeploy is more or less out of the question - seeing that you have no vCenter environment up and running yet.

How do you get vCenter up? How to deploy VM's? How do I configured the underlying storage array, the network switches, so many questions and dependencies.

The process is not ideal, not fully automated, but it will become so - not too far in the future.

In the meantime - here is the slide deck from my presentation.

Hope to see you all at another VMUG event soon!

For those of you in Israel (Yes I know you are all dying to be here…), next week
the local Israel VMUG meeting will be held.

When: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - 08:30 - 13:30
Where: Habayit Hayarok (The Green Villa), Tel Aviv
How to attend: Register here 

The Agenda:

Hope to see you there!!!

Last Thursday I participated in the Israeli VMUG meeting. The following are my thought and observations from what was presented at this meeting. (The product release dates mentioned below are not mine, but were presented at the event).

First up was someone from the Systems Engineering group from VMware who talked about:
Cloud Vision

It was mentioned that ESX 4.1 will be released in not to distant future.

VMware are working on the options of raising the Maximum number of vCpu's for a VM from 8 per VM. This will assure that there is no CPU workload - whatsoever - that cannot be run as a VM.

From a VMware Customer survey from 2008:

The application is that is most customers are virtualizing is SQL - 56%, followed by SharePoint - 53%, IBM Websphere 50%, Oracle Middleware - 41% and Exchange 36%

The average Oracle DB Server uses 2-4vCPUS, utilization is approximately 6%
Average disk I/O 2000 IOPS

VMware are going to push cloud this upcoming year, and in order to embrace this you should treat your VM as a server - it should be a service - that way it will be easier to define the financial cost for this service as opposed to the single server.

VMware is looking for Service providers for Cloud Services in Israel.

Project Redwood - Middleware - Common service model for  Infrastructure clouds, which will allow for use of services for a user centric perspective - will include API that can communicate between clouds, the focus will be on this for the upcoming year

Next up was a presentation about capacity IQ, I was surprised to see that not many of the 60-80 of the participants knew of any of the other vendors that provide these similar services. I did not receive a satisfactory response regarding what the added benefit that CapacityIQ has over these 3rd party products.

Thereafter was a presentation about AppSpeed. At present, the product is limited to a small number of protocols that it can analyze. Plans  for the future are to enlarge that number for broader application support.

After that was a presentation regarding View 4.0 and the new enhancements - Teradici and PCoIP, a very good explanation was given as to how the graphics rendering works which allows for the better overall user experience using this protocol.

Last  on the Agenda was a session about PowerCLI. The only earth-shattering moment I had in this session was when the presenter asked, "How many of you used PowerCLI for scripting tasks?" , three people put their hand (out of an audience of 80) the presenter, one other person and myself.

I have to really ask, how is it that these people are performing their VI duties efficiently if they are doing everything manually? I mean there were people that manage VMware environments that contain hundreds of Hosts and thousands of VM's. I am wondering how they manage to get their work done - without using PowerCLI.

I do see that the potential for educating VI admins in Israel to use Powershell for management is extremely high - and there is still a lot of work to be done.

I was waiting for these to come in they have arrived, and I think that you all could benefit from these presentations.

vSphere, What's New? - Technical Overview - Ofir Zamir (Team Leader SEs, VMware Israel)

and

vSphere Upgrade and Best Practices - Ben Hagai (VMUG Leader) and Yaniv Weinberg (

Senior Consultant at VMware)

Good presentation from all three of them. Enjoy!