Conrey.org

Initially I was going to post this article as part of an install and configure series that I’m writing, but quickly realized that it’s going to be a probably going to be a reference article for other stuff as well. Hopefully, as I continue to learn and pick things up, this article will expand as well.
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I’ve spent the last few years working at a service provider working on client facing VMware projects, rolling out out a VMware vCloud environment, and helping shape how VMware can be leveraged internally. One of great things for me professionally was a chance to get my hands deeper into VMware’s product catalog from about every angle imaginable.
It was awesome getting a look behind the curtains at how a really great datacenter and internet company works to constantly deliver solid solutions to their customers. With this year drawing to a close soon, I’m eagerly looking forward to new projects and new challenges to tackle.

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Ubuntu to me is still the best OS to use for virtual appliances. It may not be for the reasons that you’re thinking about so here’s my short list.

• it’s wildly successful

to me this means lots of updates and support for packages both from the vendor (canonical) as well as the community.

• support available from ONE install

What other distribution has one install for the community AND commercial support? Yea. I can’t think of one either. This allows users to choose how much support they want/need from one virtual appliance/installation.

• small minimal virtual machine footprint

The ovf will fit neatly on a 512M usb drive when complete.
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It’s been a few weeks and the dust has (mostly) settled from this years open storage summit and I wanted to get my thoughts down on paper as a first year attendee.
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I’m talking to you vmware people. It’s time you downloaded and starting testing/deploying/building/breaking/hacking on cloudfoundry. This may be the coolest vmware project I’ve seen since ESX. seriously. I won’t go into how it could change application deployment on servers moving forward, or how it’ll help reshape the idea of application development altogether, there’s enough folks that are talking about that. I just want to see more of you getting your hands dirty with it.
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Let me start by saying thanks to all of our amazing sponsors. This year was hands down the best party we’ve thrown. It’s hard to top the thirsty bear in SFO, but the Nine Fine Irishman in LAS was a roaring success. Thank you to everyone who helped out and I’ll be posting some pictures over at the VMunderground site as soon as I can.

I’m not sure there could have been a better way to kick off VMworld, and now that the event is over, looking back, I’m not sure it could have gone any better. Now to start planning a way to top it next year!

Cheers!

While I was on the docket for Tech Field Day 6 attendance AND a co-sponsored VMunderground Party my appendix decided it wasn’t going to play nicely. I made an example out of it and had it removed. I’m hoping that’s enough to keep the rest of my organs in line while I attend Tech Field Day 7. For those of you not familiar with Tech Field Day, here’s a blurb from TechFieldDay.com:

Our Field Day events bring together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format. Independent bloggers, freelance writers, and podcasters have a public presence that has immense influence on the ways that products and companies are perceived and by the general public.

Tech Field Day 7 is being held in the grand city of Austin, TX. and will be sponsored by Dell, Veeam, Symantec, and Solarwinds.

I’m thrilled to be a part of this event, and looking forward to meeting my fellow delegates as well as the presenting sponsors. This event is going to be awesome and I’m bringing a little something special to share from IA. I hope someone from Alaska is coming with quality ice.

What is LVM?

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) provides a (virtualized would be a stretch) logical presentation of storage to the OS rather than physical devices. With LVM, logical partitions can span across multiple physical volumes. A single physical disk can divided into one or more physical volumes. This allows for a layer of mgmt above the base disk, before it get’s presented to the base os, for accessing and using physical storage.
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Since vmware view 4.5 was released I’ve been spending more and more time looking at ways to deploy virtual desktops out to customers. Now that we’re dropping 4.6 in POCs and customer deployments, I’ve tried wyse thin clients, 10zig, and a couple of other brands. I’m still building my own custom view client bootable usb drives and cdroms.

The addition of PCoIP to the vmware view arsenal was a watershed moment (or so I thought) as the ability to effectively stream audio and video to the device is critical.* As most people in the vdi arena I’ve talked to say, but don’t always say out loud “If you can’t watch youtube, some decision maker is going to claim vdi is a non starter for your environment”. Continue Reading

For the longest time I had effectively removed most of the lab equipment from my house*. I was down to a laptop and a thin client, with most of my test gear either moved into a datacenter, or services moved over to a xenkibbutz guest. As a vExpert for 2010 I’m grateful that I have the chance to really dig in and test the breadth of vmware’s software offerings. While I could use a gear here and there at work, there were quite a few things that I needed a different environment for or where I couldn’t use work gear. Continue Reading