The Virtual Noob: August 2014

Book as early as possible! I realize post is coming too late for this year, but there is always next year. Early booking will get you better ticket prices at VMworld. It also gets you better options for accommodation, usually cheaper and closer to the venue - or both. I found a great place back in May when I booked my accommodation, about 5 minutes walk from the Moscone Center. I found it through AIrbnb.com. I recommend using Airbnb.com, especially in San Francisco, as this is the city from which Airbnb originated and the range and value for money is so much better. Hotels in SF are mostly small and expensive. With Airbnb.com, you get to meet the locals, live like a local and in my experience you can find an awesome loft space all to yourself, as opposed to a tiny hotel room for significantly less money. And of course the money you save from booking early can be used for more important things, like drinks!
If you can, get to San Francisco on Saturday. You will be able to register on Saturday instead of doing it on Sunday with most of the crowd. That way you can spend more of your time on Sunday diving into the Hands-On-Labs. That leaves the remainder of VMWorld for you to attend more sessions or use the time for the Hall Crawl and Hangout Space and meeting people.
Bring an easily carried bag to supplement the backpack you get during registration. This is especially helpful for Hall Crawl. If you are anything like me, the swag and information you’ll be collecting along the way will get unwieldy. And it’s good for keeping your notebook for questions and notepaper, pens, iPads and other gadgetry. Also great for keeping a few snacks and a bottle of water that you might need on the go between sessions to keep you fueled.
Dress comfortably and wear comfortable shoes. This is all probably redundant for nerds but just in case you’re not thinking about it, you will be sitting around in sessions and then on your feet and doing a lot of walking as well so you might as well be nice to the dogs. This brings me to the other clothing issues for SF…
Pack a warm sweater and a light winter jacket or bring your VMUG windbreaker and you won’t be sorry you did! San Francisco is not like everywhere else in the US during August. Mark Twain is often incorrectly credited with the line “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” While the progeny of the saying may be wrong, the quip is accurate. This unpredictable micro-climate has fog rolling in during summer afternoons that can drop the temp 20 degrees in an hour and bring some major chill factor.
Bring business cards with you – preferably your own. With the estimated 22,000 people attending this year (not including vendors and staff) you are likely to meet a ton of people - the card will come in handy so you can stay in touch and email that person you met later on and so they can get a hold of you. If you don’t have business cards, order some cheapies for $10 bucks for 200 before you go from somewhere like Vista Print and include your name, what your title is (or what you think it should be) your email, your phone number, twitter account, and anything else that you think is vital. Despite being nerds on the very cutting edge of tech, it's still the easiest just to hand someone a business card.
Attend the special events by vendors. Vendor parties give you the chance to have your say and to ask the vendor questions you may have either from your work or from one of the sessions at VMworld. Here is where you can get real answers as the vendor’s engineers are attending as part of the team. And perhaps more importantly, the drinks are free!
Spend some time planning your sessions before they happen so you don’t get caught in the “Damn I missed that session I really wanted to attend” situation and so you can time your exit from one session and make the next one you want to be part of.
Presenters will be answering questions after sessions so if you have a question, write it down so you know it makes sense and keep it brief and to the point. This is just polite so everyone gets their questions answered and you look like you have your shit together.
Plan on having a great time! Come expecting to learn a lot. Be safe, be social, be polite, be open and be kind! After all, it is San Francisco. And if you see me there among the throngs, please come and say “Hi” to me. Thanks for reading my BLOG!

You can follow my “Adventures at VMWorld2014” on twitter, @VirtualNoob, for the instant play-by-play and game highlights and witty comments almost as they happen!

Yep, that's me, John Mendoza

Twitter: @VirtualNoob
BLOG: http://virtual-noob.blogspot.com/

For more information about VMWorld, click here.

For more information about VMUG, click here.

For more information about VMWare, click here.

McCormick & Schmicks - Downtown Los Angeles

VMUG, Los Angeles: Thursday, August 7, 2014.

This was my second VMUG experience. The location this time was McCormick and Schmick’s Seafood Restaurant on Hope Street in the center of Downtown Los Angeles. The meeting room was perfect for the number of people attending (about 30 or so of us from my rough estimate). This VMUG was handily co-hosted by Dawn Armstrong and Martin Perez, LA’s VMUG leaders. This informal and informing event was sponsored by Nimble Storage who provided a classy atmosphere including our own small bar with free drinks (vBeers and vWine) from our own bartender, a nicely catered buffet and a setting intimate enough for everyone to be able to talk with one another, and interact with the presenters, still with enough room so that everyone felt relaxed and comfortable.

Downtown LA

Speakers were, respectively, Brian Remken from Nimble Storage and Tony Okwechime from VMware. More on what the speakers said is summarized below. Leanne Jones from VMware closed the get-together after the speaker’s presentations with a brief summary about this year’s annual VMworld conference in San Francisco. What I heard that excited my inner wannabe cool nerd was “18,000 participants, nerds take over SF for four days, cool parties every night and hands on labs” The fact that the Black Keys are playing VMworld made it all the more exciting.

If you are thinking about going, or if it piques your interest, get more info on it here: http://www.vmworld.com/index.jspa . If you can’t make it, or want to compare notes if you are in attendance, I will be officially blogging the experience for VMUG for you here and tweeting the info and highlights as they happen over the four days. Keep an eye out for my posts on this blog and follow me on twitter @VirtualNoob for the play by play.

For those of you who are not familiar with VMUG, it is a VMware User Group that is a global, customer-led group-community helping engage, expand and improve members use of VMware products and their partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration and events. Membership is free and who doesn’t like free? More information and a membership application can be found on www.vmug.com.

Events are generally a mixture of sponsor and vendor based sessions. VMUG, being VMware’s community outreach program, bridges the gap between the users (or anyone interested) and the vendor itself. VMUG is run by the users themselves and receives the backing not only from VMware, but also from related vendors such as Symantec, Nimble Storage, Veeam, and others who provide sponsorship of the events. These events range from User Group Meetings, (Online) Virtual Training and the big User Conferences to name a few.

If you want to step it up, a paid membership ($200 for an individual package) gives you the title “VMUG Advantage member.” Some of the most practical advantages, in my experience, would include receiving a significant discount on VMware certifications, exams, books, software, and to the aforementioned events like VMworld. It might be just be worth becoming a paying member of the VMUG community if you plan to attend any VMware event, or further your VMware skills and training.

VMUG Los Angeles

Meeting Highlights:

· - VMUG Intro

· - Nimble Storage Presentation

· - VMWare Presentation: Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity

· - Dinner Break

· - Giveaways and Send-off to VMWorld / Networking

Learning from the last VMUG meeting I attended I arrived early. I was able to register, put my name in the two giveaways drawing jars, find seats, grab some nosh, down a glass of wine, chat with some colleagues, meet some new people and find a seat for the presentations to come.

The first session was presented by Brian Renken of Nimble Storage. Along with Brian was a small legion of Nimble Storage engineers: David Gotlieb, Che-chyl Cortes, Chris Zamora, and Richard Adams.

Brian Renken

Nimble CASL Pre

Brian’s Nimble Storage presentation started with introducing the attendees to CASL or Cache-Accelerated Sequential Layout. CASL is the foundation for Nimble Storage’s high performance and capacity efficient, integrated data protection and simplified lifecycle management.

Some benefits of CASL include simple seamless scaling at the lowest incremental cost, ability to scale up by adding more CPUs and/or expand cache by adding SSDs and ability to scale out by increasing capacity to a storage group. The following lists some of CASL’s featured technologies:

· - Dynamic Caching
· - Write-Optimized Data Layout
· - Application-Tuned Block Size
· - Universal Compression
· - Instant Snapshots
· - Thin Provisioning
· - Efficient Replication
· - Zero-Copy Clones
· - Application-Integrated Backups (MS SQL, MS Exchange, VMWare)

Brian navigated through the web based interface and walked us through a couple of examples of real-world tasks. Brian also demonstrated and explained the InfoSight and ProActive Wellness abilities of the product.

“If you can use Outlook, then you are certified to use our array (interface)” -- Brian Renken

For more info on Nimble Products visit: http://www.nimblestorage.com/products/architecture.php

The second half of the session was VMware’s Solutions for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity presented by Tony Okwechime. Tony Okwechime is a Systems Engineer working for VMware in the Enterprise division in the United States.

Tony Okwechime

Topics covered include SRM (Site Recovery Management) and VDP (vSphere Data Protection). For those who aren’t familiar with these, SRM & VDP are product offerings from VMware for Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery.

SRM provides CDP (Continuous Data Protection) by replicating blocks of data/VMs (Virtual Machines) marked-for-protection from a primary site to a secondary site.

VDP does not offer CDP but can protect Virtual Machines at a site by backing up VMs. VDP maintains recovery points for PIT (Point-In-Time) recovery of VMs.

Tony’s presentation provided a high-level overview of features you may or may not already own; depending on the vSphere version you have. VDP and SRM come bundled with Essentials Plus or above. For pricing and licensing options, please contact your TAM (Technical Account Manager) or VMware.

Although Tony’s presentation was unaccompanied by hardware we can all drool over (which the Nimble Storage guys presentation had), it was pretty snazzy and had some cool graphics.

Towards the end of Tony’s session he was able to squeeze in some discussion with the attendees of methods to expand disaster recovery options with Virtual SANs used with vSphere replication and VDP replication.

Next up was the VMWare Send Off to VMWorld 2014, which I mentioned earlier, from Leanne Jones from VMware. VMWorld US 2014 returns to San Francisco August 24 through August 28 at the Moscone Center. There you can join other business and technology professionals, VMware experts, engineers, sales people and executives who come together to share their successes and advancements over the last year and to learn from each other with a view toward greater achievement in virtualization.

VMworld, hosted by VMware, is where you'll find the newest knowledge and tools you will need to leverage virtualization and the cloud to deliver results. VMworld offers attendees informative Breakout Sessions and Hands-on Lab training along with access to a wealth of technology partners. Virtualization best practices, building a private cloud, leveraging the public cloud, managing desktops as a service, virtualizing enterprise applications and more are explored. And worth another mention, this year’s VMWorld official party features The Black Keys!

For LA VMUG members who are attending VMworld, we will be meeting up at the beginning of the conference at the LA VMUG reception on Sunday night at the Moscone Center on the 24^th August. For more info follow @losangelesVMUG. The email address is los_angeles@vmug.com

The close of this VMUG ended with drawings for some nice swag including VMUG advantage memberships, VMUG embroidered windbreakers, a $50 Amazon Gift Card, and some VMUG t-shirts.

In closing if you have not been to a VMUG, get yourself to the next conference and see what it’s all about. If you're willing to walk up to someone and say hello, they are likely to respond and it’s those networking conversations which can help answer questions and provide solutions to your own particular challenges. This is where the hidden value of the VMUG really lies.

Thanks to the Los Angeles VMUG committee for putting on another great meeting. See you at the next Los Angeles VMUG conference scheduled for a day and a place yet to be decided, but likely sometime in November. Keep an eye on this blog or join the twitter feeds mentioned for notification.

Special thanks to Martin Perez for helping new VMUG attendees Carlos Quintanar from the Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL), Gerald Villanueva and Nelson Lopez from AEG Worldwide, feel welcome at their first VMUG. A very special thanks to Dawn Armstrong for “driving the bus." Dawn facilitated the presenters, kept time and without her magic, the show would have stopped.

John Mendoza

Twitter: @VirtualNoob
BLOG: http://virtual-noob.blogspot.com/

Additional photos taken from the event: