Hey everyone, my marketing contact at VMware informed me of a video contest that they are putting on for VMworld 2009. The grand prize is $5000 cash and four other lucky people will win $1000 cash. Not to mention the fact that the 5 will be played at VMworld and the crowd favorite will win an additional $1000!  So you better enter now, entries must be received by July 20th, 2009. Even if you do not win, you do get a cool Run it with VMware T-Shirt. The only down-side I see is that you must be a US Resident.

Contest Name: Run It with VMware
Contest Website: www.vmware.com/go/runitwithvmware
Submit Videos by: 7/20/09
Eligibility: Open to ALL U.S. Residents (Don’t have to be a VMware customers)
Prizes: One $5000 Grand Prize, Four $1000 Prizes, One $1000 VMworld Favorite Prize, free t-shirt for all qualifying participants.
Topics: VMware is the best platform for business-critical applications.

Some key things:

1)      You don’t have to be a VMware customer to participate.

2)      You don’t have to run VMware vSphere in the datacenter to talk about it.

3)      You don’t have to represent the company you work for and talk about your experiences there if you’re not allowed to or don’t want to. There are many other ways to creatively show why VMware is the best platform for business-critical applications.

Posted under VMworld

During an upgrade of vCenter 2.5 to 4.0 at a customer site I decided it would be a good idea to record the steps required.  In this video you will see how to upgrade VMware vCenter 2.5 to vCenter 4.0 that uses a Microsoft SQL database.  The steps are trivial and I have done more than a handful of these on customers production servers.

The most important thing is to follow the best practices, give your ODBC user db_owner privledge on the MSDB and vCenter database prior to any install or upgrade - then remove the privledge after the installer is complete.  Also make sure that IIS or any other webserver is disabled.

Posted under vCenter, vSphere

I have finally retreived the video from my Sony HD Cam and converted it for view online!  Boy this was a long process…the video is 80 minutes long and features my POV from the launch event on April 21st.  I’m sorry that the video just cuts out, after 80 minutes of HD recording my camera just died. Be sure to check out my other candid videos and photos.   Enjoy the show!

Posted under vSphere

The time has come, the official VMware vSphere 4 Launch Event. Special Thanks to TrainSignal and NetApp for making this possible. For those of you who have not registered for the chance to Win a FREE TrainSignal VMware ESX Training Kit, please go do so now! Registration to Win will end around 2:00pm PST and the winners announced on this page around 6:00pm PST.

This will be the page where I post all of the up to minute information and videos as I have them available. I will also include my Twitter feed below for easy access.

Video Broadcasting

I have a lot of footage I need to go through, roughly 2 hours spread across two cameras….not mentioning still photos which have been uploaded to TwitPic.  More videos and photos will be posted here as soon as I edit and publish.

Notes

The event has been great, the information however wasn’t as exciting as I would have hoped. John Troyer said it best in a Twitter though, this launch was to target a broad range of audience, typically those who have no clue what vSphere is….for those of us internal to the product it wasn’t going to be anything special. However, VMware CEO Steve Herrod showcased an awesome “Olympic Torch” style video showing the Golden Image of vSphere 4.0 - which is complete! This means that vSphere will be released to market (RTM) sometime this quarter!

I posted a ton of pictures on TwitPic, and some comments on Twitter, check those out below. A lot of big names in the industry were present; Michael Dell, Joe Tucci, Steve Herrod, John Chambers and a few others were all up on stage at one point in time with Paul Maritz. All in all, the launch has been a great marketing tool for VMware to get the annoucement of vSphere and the Cloud vision — and you know what, I’ve always been skeptical about “The Cloud” but with vSphere, it really makes sense. Great Job VMware.

I will also work on getting all of my TwitPics into a Flickr group soon too.

Twitter Updates

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Posted under vSphere

My boss asked me today to provide a list of things I’ve done the past year for my upcoming performance review.  I typed up all I knew off the top of my head, but I decided to do a Google Search on my name to see what it comes back with.  To my surprise I found a interview that Gartner did of me a few months back in regards to virtualization and storage. What’s funny is that it feels like I did this years ago and that everything I mention is such old and outdated technology! 

Check it out for yourself, hope you enjoy it!  Here is the abstract and link to view it;

http://www.itbriefingcenter.com/programs/gartner_644_netapp.html

DataCenter Virtualization: Why You Need It and Best Practices for Success

In this program you will learn how server virtualization:

• Can save you money
• Help with server sprawl
• Free up data center space
• Support your x86 server architecture
• Enhance disaster recovery
• Provide dynamic flexibility
• Allow for rapid deployment

You will hear experts from featured analyst firm, Gartner, Inc., and industry experts from NetApp, and San Diego Data Processing Corporation discuss:

• The reasons your organization should choose server virtualization for storage.
• The benefits server virtualization can bring to your company.
• The objectives your company can achieve with server virtualization.

Plus you’ll have access to a number of case studies, white papers and other supporting materials, which will be interesting and useful to you as you make the move towards virtualization.

See for yourself. Check out this new program now and learn more.

Posted under Backup & Recovery, NetApp, Storage

In a clever marketing video NetApp produced (in house), NTAP takes on DD and e2 in an 8 Mile style rap battle. This was quite entertaining, thanks for the 4 minute break from a stressful day NetApp!

Read More…

Posted under NetApp

A very cool video was sent over to me by an employee of VMware, it shows in a demo of Hyper-V an application failure because Hyper-V did not check the CPU compatibility prior to migration.  The origin host had the SSE4.1 instruction set, the destination did not.  Once migrated the application failed and crashed.  Later in the demo it shows a vMotion attempt of the same style, the CPU compatibility checking done during the vMotion process denied it to complete.

See it for yourself: Click here to Launch

Posted under Good Reading, Hyper-V, VMware

VMware has released a nice highlights reel from VMworld 2008. I have included it in this posting for your viewing pleasure.  To view it please click the Read More link below.  Enjoy!

Read More…

Posted under Conferences, VMworld