On September 27th 2012 we had another great VMUG Meeting. In total we had about 40 Members attend. At this meeting we had the great pleasure to have David Davis join us from TrainSignal, and Keith Aasen and Neal Martyniuk from NetApp.
TrainSignal – David Davis @davidmdavis
David joined our meeting with the use of a Skype Call. It worked out very nicely with only a few issues related to Internet quality. He presented on “VCP – Why You Should Get it and How to Pass the First Time” It was a great session and had information related to the Certification change made by VMware at VMworld 2012. He spoke about all the great resources you can use to pass the first time, and outlined the Blue Print for the exam and basically said use that as the bible.
Below are some of the resources he mentioned in his presentation, they are great and not just for your VCP they can be used to stay in tune with what is happening with Virtualization.
SLOG by Simon Long – www.simonlong.com
This place is a great resource! He has practice exams that will help during your VCP journey. It helped me pass my VCP4 and VCP5.
ProfessionalVMware BrownBags by Cody Bunch – http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/
This is the place where you get to hang out with amazing and smart people and get to learn while you are there. You can join live on Wednesdays, and even watch it offline at your leisure if you can’t make the show. Available over iTunes.
APAC Virtualization Podcast by Alastair Cooke – http://apacvirtual.com/
Another place where you can watch live or download a podcast to view later. Either way a place to listen to everything Virtual from astounding people.
VMware Community Roundtable by John Troyer – http://blogs.vmware.com/
VMware experts talk about virtualization live every Wednesday at noon CA time. I always listen to this one on my drive to work! You can subscribe from iTunes to get the latest podcast.
vChat – http://www.vmwarevideos.com/
vChat is a regular virtualization video chat covering VMware vSphere, Cloud Computing, Virtualization News, and maybe some geeky humor. Regular contributors are 3 vExperts– Simon Seagrave (TechHead.co), Eric Siebert (vSphere-Land.com), and David Davis (VMwareVideos.com).
vNews & Chinwag – www.rtfm-ed.co.uk
Join Mike Laverick and learn some more great things. You will now have to visit him over at Blogs.vmware.com for the newest information.
Local VMUG – www.vmug.com
Head over to your local VMUG for help, there are people there that are certified and will be more than willing to help
VMware Documentation – http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/
All the information you will need from the Vendor
NetApp – Keith Aasen and Neal Martyniuk @keith_aasen
This was an amazing presentation that kept you involved at all times. Neal was the first to get up and do the introductions and get the ball rolling. Next Keith came up and did about 1 Minute of PowerPoint and the rest was the Keith Aasen and Whiteboard show! The presentation was talking about the NetApp Release of OnTap 8.1 and Cluster-Mode, it was a deep dive into how this has been designed. He started with a couple of Boxes on the board that before you knew it there was no whiteboard space left, and this was a full wall whiteboard! He drew the controller design and how that all interacted with each other controller in the Cluster and how the vServer would extend across all controllers in the cluster and hide all the changes from hypervisor level. I really wish I had to record this session, and share the full experience.
To learn about Cluster-Mode head over here, better than I can do to explain it http://www.netapp.com/us/communities/tech-ontap/tot-fas6200-running-dataontap8-clustermode-1112.html
Now once he was done with Cluster-Mode he built Flash Cache on top of that. With this is talked about 3 Types of Cache.
- Controller Flash Cache
- Flex Cache
- vSphere Host Cache (Not sure this is released yet) it will use a agent inside the VM to make this happen. It uses a sync process to make sure the Host Cache is kept in sync with the Cache on the controller level
To learn more about this have a read of http://www.netapp.com/us/communities/tech-ontap/tot-1008-intelligent-caching-flash-cache-hk.html
During Keith’s entire presentation he was up for Q and A, then after the presentation he stayed around for an hour or more answering questions.
Keith also did a great presentation at VMworld 2012 and was in the top 10! View the session http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us/learn/top10
VMUG Housekeeping
At the VMUG meeting this time we also talked to the members about where they would like to head with VMUG. As a Leader I am here to do the heavy lifting with the Team of Avram, and Donald. We will get the times squared away, the location, the vendors, but we would love to make this a community where we have our local members giving the presentations, I want to see what my peers are doing in their environments and the things they have learned. Our Local community has all the answers we need. We just need to start sharing with each other. I see great things for the VMUG in the upcoming months. I look forward to meeting more and more people each event. Please feel free to reach out to us at any time.
@EdmontonVMUG
The Cloud Eh!? 