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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Brian Renken |
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| 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.
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| 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 24th 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
Additional photos taken from the event:
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| Yup, that's me, John Mendoza. I landed a sign-twirling gig. |
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