APAC Virtualization Podcast

Rodney and I were joined by Matt Lesak from VMware’s End User Computing division, despite Matts current position in marketing he was a great source of technical information due to his previous years as an engineer.

This week I have invited some of the folks from VMware’s End User Computing team to join us and talk about what’s going on.  There were new versions of View, ThinApp and Workstation this month so there should be lots to talk about.

Start Time: 28 September 2011 9:00pm Sydney
Duration (minutes): 45

Call ID: 75046

or click the link below

Other Time zones:
EDT (USA) – 7AM
PDT (USA) – 4AM
Perth (Australia) – 7PM
Hong Kong (Hong Kong) – 7PM
Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) – 7PM
Tokyo (Japan) – 8PM
Auckland (New Zealand) – 12 Midnight
London (UK) – 12 Noon

In this second instalment I got to meet Chip Brodhum from CORAID and have a chat with him about what has happened for CORAID since I first had him on the show after vForum Sydney in 2010.

I’m delighted to announce the first sponsor for the party, Veeam have again shown that they care for the people who install and operate their products.

I doubt Veeam needs any introduction to those who’ve been in the Virtualisation industry for a while, they have a range of products that enhance the manageability and enable backup and recovery of virtualised environments as well as bridging the gap between vSphere and other management products.

If you are a VCP then Veeam have a special offer for you, a free two socket NFR license for their leading products that you can deploy for your lab.  Request your license keys at the web site http://www.veeam.com/nfr/free-nfr-license 

The party now has it’s own page on the APAC Virtualisation podcast blog where you will find sponsor information.

Registration is still available at http://vmdownunderground.eventbrite.com/

Inspired by the VMUnderground party and the vBeers movement I am organising a community party the evening before vForum Sydney.

The aim of the event is to allow people who are involved in virtualisation to meet up with like minded souls.  I know I have met a lot of talented and interesting people though the courses I teach and the conferences I’ve been to and I’d like to extend the opportunity to others in the industry.

At this stage the event is vBeers format, that is turn up and chat, pay for your own drinks.  I am still hoping to get some sponsorship to take the whole thing towards the VMUnderground level of awesome.

Please register for the event at the web site as I need to know numbers and may have to cap them if we get too large, also if we do get sponsorship it will be registered guests only.

Hope to see lots of you there, I’ll be the tall guy with very little hair on his head (or at least one will be me).

Upcoming Events

Wellington VMUG meeting 21 September Register Here

vForum Sydney 19 & 20 October Register Here

vForum Sydney community party, 18 October Register Here

TechTarget are running the Best of vForum 2011 awards to honour end-user organisations in Australia and New Zealand that have excelled in their approach to virtualisation, cloud computing and IT as a Service

Links to more information

AppBlast collection of links

Project Octopus collection of links

Horizon Mobile, on the EUC Blog and the marketing site

VXLAN, information from Cisco Citrix and VMware

Nutanix, Tintri and Pure Storage were mentioned.

Links to the guests

Simon Sharwood, govtechreview.com.au and searchstorage.com.au as well as @SSharwood

Rodney Haywood, rodos.haywood.org and @Rodos

Alastair Cooke, demitasse.co.nz and @DemitasseNZ

In this episode Rodney Haywood and Simon Sharwood will join me to discuss the very interesting announcements from VMworld 2011.  VMware’s Project Octopus and Appblast were standouts along with Horizon Mobile  showing a strong end user compute focus at this VMworld.

Start Time: 14 September 2011 9:00pm Sydney
Duration (minutes): 45

Call ID: 75046

or click the link below

Other Time zones:
EDT (USA) – 7AM
PDT (USA) – 4AM
Perth (Australia) – 7PM
Hong Kong (Hong Kong) – 7PM
Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) – 7PM
Tokyo (Japan) – 8PM
Auckland (New Zealand) – 11PM
London (UK) – 12 Noon

While I was at VMworld I spoke to some vendors in the solutions exchange about interesting products, I’m assembling these into half hour podcast sessions.  The first of these is now on Talkshoe, like the other offline recorded sessions.

In the first instalment I have a chat with Teradici about their Apex 2800 server offload card which should be available before the end of the year.  For a video demonstration of the offload card take a look at David Wakeman’s video.  The big surprise for me was the projected cost, around $2000 for the card!  It will be a no-brainer for enterprise deployment.

The next vendor in the podcast is Gale Technologies who I initially mistook for a cloud vendor, but their product is for building your cloud.  Gale Force is the product that automates all of the provisioning for a cloud provider, it looks pretty cool.  My inspiration to stop and talk to Gale was Greg Shulz, talking about manageability and cloud operations when we met on the vDestination podcast recording.  Gale Technologies also got named in the Virtualization Review Best of VMworld 2011 Also in the list was Tintri that we’ve spoken to in the past an Nutanix that I wanted to get recorded on the podcast but didn’t quite manage to time right.

The final vendor is one I have talked about a lot but never seen.  Texas Memory Systems make extremely high performance SANs, historically using RAM as the primary storage, not just cache and called RAMSAN.  The current products have moved to using enterprise flash, in capacities as high as 10TB in a 1U case and delivering 320,000 IOPs.  In addition they have a PCIe SSD that could be fitted in an ESX host delivering a vast amount of IOPs for caching vSwap or View 5.0 Composer images.

Watch out for the second episode in a couple of weeks.

You may also notice that there’s been a leap in production values in this podcast, let me know what you think.  Also thanks to Kelly who was on reception at the Holiday Inn Old Sydney last night and provided the voice for the introduction.

I will also be documenting my thoughts and impressions from VMworld on by personal blog as they become fully formed.

Due to a scheduling error on my part we didn’t go ahead with the live session.
On the positive side I was recording some material about what has changed with a past guest, I’ll be posting a series of shorter pieces when I get back.