Italian VMUG User Conference: Speaker’s Spotlight

March 15, 2013 ≈ No Comments ↓

As the date for the first Italian VMUG User Conference is approaching I want to shed some light on our incredible special guests, some of the most knowledgeable experts in the VMware world: Cormac Hogan, Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping and Mike Laverick.

Here’s a special speaker’s spotlight that we put together for the user conference.

Cormac Hogan

Cormac HoganVMUG-IT: Hi Cormac, could you please introduce yourself?

Cormac: My name is Cormac Hogan. I was one of the first VMware employees at the EMEA headquarters in Cork, Ireland, in April 2005, which is almost 8 years ago. Previously I worked at Sun Micro, DELL & EMC. I am married with two children, and live close to Cork city on the south coast of Ireland.

VMUG-IT: What is your current role inside VMware?

Cormac: I am currently a senior technical marketing architect within the Cloud Infrastructure Product Marketing group at VMware. I am responsible for storage in general, with a focus on core VMware vSphere storage technologies and virtual storage. I have written a number of storage related white papers and have given numerous presentations on storage best practices and new features. I have been in technical marketing since 2011.

VMUG-IT: What are the latest technologies you’ve been working on lately?

Cormac: The technologies I am working on are those which we tech previewed at VMworld 2012, namely Distributed Storage, Virtual Volumes and a new Flash feature for vSphere.

VMUG-IT: What do you think about VMUG in general?

Cormac: I love presenting at VMUGs and meeting customers and partners. This is an opportunity for customers to let us know directly how products and features can be improved upon, and we certainly take that feedback on board, and relay it back to our product and engineering teams for consideration.

VMUG-IT: What are you going to talk about at the Italian User Conference?

Cormac: The latest technologies that I am working on – Distributed Storage, Virtual Volumes & vFlash, and how these are setting the stage for software defined storage.

VMUG-IT: Any thoughts you would like to add?

Cormac: While my break out session is only for 45 minutes, I will be spending the whole day at the conference. If you would like to discuss anything storage related, whether it is best practice advice or some feature you would like to see added or indeed improved, please come and find me for a chat.

For those interested in the latest VMware Storage news, I blog on http://cormachogan.com and http://blogs.vmware.com/vSphere/Storage. You can follow me on twitter via @VMwareStorage.

Scott Lowe

scott_loweVMUG-IT: Hi Scott, could you please introduce yourself?

Scott: My name is Scott Lowe, and I’m a blogger, speaker, and author. I currently have four published books to my credit–Mastering VMware vSphere 4, VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference, VMware vSphere Design (with Forbes Guthrie and Maish Saidel-Keesing), and Mastering VMware vSphere 5. My fifth book (written with Forbes Guthrie), VMware vSphere Design 2nd Edition, is due very soon (or might have been released by the time of the Italian VMUG Conference). I’ve spoken at VMworld for four consecutive years, and have presented at VMUG conferences all around the world. This is, however, my first time at a VMUG in Italy!

VMUG-IT: What is your current role within VMware?

Scott: I came to VMware (from EMC) in early February, joining the Networking and Security Business Unit; this is the former Nicira group responsible for delivering a network virtualization solution. My role within the group is to help educate others about network virtualization as well as to work very closely with customers to shape VMware’s network virtualization solutions.

VMUG-IT: What are the latest technologies you’ve been working on lately?

Scott: Before I joined VMware, I had transitioned away from focusing on vSphere specifically and was looking at a number of open source technologies, such as Open vSwitch (OVS), OpenStack, and others. That move was quite fortunate, as these are key open source efforts led by VMware to help further the development and adoption of network virtualization as a key component of the software-defined data center. So, my focus continues to be on OVS, OpenStack (especially OpenStack Quantum, the networking component), and related open source technologies and efforts.

VMUG-IT: What do you think about VMUG in general?

Scott: I’m very thankful for the efforts of VMUG worldwide to support its users, and I’m appreciative of the opportunity to help in some way. It’s great that VMware’s customers have an organization like VMUG to help provide ongoing education and awareness about VMware, VMware partners, and the solutions that customers need to solve their business problems.

VMUG-IT: What are you going to talk about at the Italian User Conference?

Scott: The title of my session is “Understanding Network Virtualization.” There’s a great deal of information in the industry today about software-defined networking (SDN), controllers, overlay protocols, and similar topics. What I’m hoping to be able to do is pull this information together in such a way that it will help attendees understand what network virtualization is and what VMware’s doing in this space.

VMUG-IT: Any thoughts you would like to add?

Scott: Only this–the industry is in a state of transformation right now, and it’s important for us as IT professionals to make sure we stay tuned in to the changes that are coming. VMUG is a great way to do that. If you’re not involved in your local VMUG, I highly encourage you do join and get involved.

VMUG-IT: Thank you, Scott!

You can follow Scott on his Blog (http://blog.scottlowe.org/) or on Twitter (@scott_lowe)

Duncan Epping

duncan_eppingVMUG-IT: Hi Duncan, could you please introduce yourself?

Duncan: My name is Duncan Epping and I was among the first VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX 007); I am the main author and owner of Yellow-Bricks.com. I am also the co-author of multiple books including “VMware vSphere 5.x Clustering Technical Deepdive” (5.0 and 5.1).

VMUG-IT: What is your current role within VMware?

Duncan: I am a Principal Architect at VMware (R&D, Integration Engineering). My primary focus is vCloud / vSphere architecture and integration.

VMUG-IT: What are the latest technologies you’ve been working on lately?

Duncan: In the last months I have heavily focused on Software Defined Storage and Datacenter solutions that we at VMware are internally developing.

VMUG-IT: What are your opinions about VMUG?

Duncan: It is great to see that Italy has a large community supporting the VMUG and I hope the Italian community will reward the VMUG team with a sold-out event!

VMUG-IT: What are you going to talk about at the Italian User Conference?

Duncan: I am planning to do a hybrid session, it will be an interactive session but with slides. I will be talking about designing a virtual infrastructure, or should I call it a Software Defined Datacenter? I will discuss some of the design decisions and considerations people typically have to make during architecture projects. This session will hopefully help you make changes to your environment based on your requirements and constraints, and provide a better basic understanding of some core VMware technology.

VMUG-IT: Thank you, Duncan!

Follow Duncan on his Blog (http://www.Yellow-Bricks.com/) or on Twitter (@DuncanYB)

Mike Laverick

mike_laverickVMUG-IT: Hi Mike, could you please introduce yourself?

Mike: I’m Mike Laverick I used to run the rtfm-ed.co.uk website, where I published many blogs, free guides and a weekly podcast. I’m now working for VMware, and I blog at mikelaverick.com. I’ve worked with VMware technologies since 2003/4, and cut my teeth on ESX 2.0 and vCenter 1.0.

VMUG-IT: What is your current role within VMware?

Mike: My official job title is “Senior Cloud Infrastructure Evangelist”. I’ve yet to meet any of my Junior Evangelist to boss around, and make me cups of tea. Being an evangelist means I get to stare into the middle-distance all day long pontificating about the future. I’m joking, of course.

VMUG-IT: What are the latest technologies you’ve been working on lately?

Mike: At the moment I’m stuck into vCloud Director 5.1. I’m planning a whole series of “design” based blogpost based on my recent attendance of the vCloud Director Design course presented by the world famous, Eric Sloof! After that I’m going to get stuck into vCloud Automation Center, which is a very hot product amongst our customers. Finally, I want to work with vCOPs more than I have in the past.

VMUG-IT: What do you think about VMUG in general?

Mike: I’ve been a long supporter of VMUGs – both as former VMUG Leader, as well as being on the speaker-circuit for the big “User Conferences” in the US. The vCommunity is life-blood of Vmware, and its one of my roles to engage with that community, and mentor people – leading that generation of people who initially started learning about vSphere, to learn more about our other technologies.

VMUG-IT: What are you going to talk about at the Italian User Conference?

Mike: I’m hoping to do two sessions – one about how I reshaped my lab environment for vCloud Director – and perhaps a second on some thoughts about DR to the Cloud.

VMUG-IT: Any thoughts you would like to add?

Mike: I’m really pleased to see nationwide VMUG event spring up in Italy. I’m hoping that along with the UK we see more of these national events bring together the vCommunity on a yearly basis.

VMUG-IT: Thank you, Mike!

You can follow Mike on his Blog (http://mikelaverick.com/) or on Twitter (@Mike_Laverick)

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VMUG IT and Nutanix together for the first Hands On Day of 2013

February 12, 2013 ≈ No Comments ↓

Mark March 5th, 2013 on your calendar because the first 2013 VMUG IT Hands On Day will be held at the Royal Garden Hotel Assago (MI), Italy!.

The proven formula, gives a full day of highly technical discussion and first hand interaction with the products and solutions provided by the sponsor. Our first Hands On Day of 2013 will be held in collaboration with Nutanix.

Nutanix enables you to virtualize your datacenter without requiring a SAN. Their mission is to make virtualization simple by eliminating the need for network storage while still delivering the enterprise-class performance, scalability and data management features you need.

Nutanix Complete Cluster is a scale-out cluster of high-performance nodes (servers), each running a standard hypervisor and complete with processors, memory and local storage (SSDs and hard disks). Each node runs virtual machines just like a standard virtual machine host.

Local storage from all nodes is virtualized into a unified pool by Nutanix Scale-out Converged Storage (SOCS). A VM can write data anywhere in the cluster and is not limited by the storage local to the node where it is running. In effect, SOCS acts like an advanced SAN that uses local SSDs and disks from all the nodes to store its data, i.e. virtual machines running on the cluster write data to SOCS as if they were writing to a SAN. SOCS is VM-aware and provides advanced data management features for virtual machines. It brings data closer to VMs by storing it locally on the cluster, resulting in higher performance at a lower cost.

During the day, you will have the opportunity to learn how the underlying technology works, see various usage scenarios live and ask questions to the Nutanix people that will attend the event.

The event is free but requires registration. Seats are limited, we encourage you to register on the VMUG portal, where you will also find more details on the agenda and the logistics of the event:

http://www.vmug.com/e/in/eid=757

See you there!

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More vCenter Operations Manager fun: General SQL Adapter!

February 5, 2013 ≈ No Comments ↓

I’m continuing my work with vCenter Operations Manager and this time I spent time with another powerful adapter available: the General SQL Data Loader adapter.

As the name implies, it’s a generic connector that enable vCenter Operations Manager to pull data from a Database, internally it uses JDBC and the bundled libraries make it compatible with:

  • Mysql (5.0)
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • Oracle
  • PostgreSQL
  • DB2

Basically to get the adapter working you need to specify these three things: an SQL query to retrieve the resources, an SQL query to gather the metrics to be collected and, optionally, an SQL query that performs parent-child relationships with the resources you’re collecting from the DB.

Installing the adapter is quite simple, there’s a document called SQL Loader Adapter Installation and Configuration Guide (available on ftp.integrien.com) that explains step-by-step the installation process.

I decided to familiarize myself with the adapter by creating a connector for Zabbix, a popular open source Monitoring solution that is widely used in the enterprise here, I just scratched the surface with these queries, because there’s probably more info to pull (like events and parent-child relationship), but if you’re looking for a quick and dirty solution for Zabbix, or a real-world example you can use to develop your own custom connector using the General SQL Data Loader adapter, I’m sure these SQL queries will be handy.

DISCOVER_DB_QUERY_1.sql

SELECT DISTINCT 
hosts.host as RESOURCENAME, 
hosts.name as RESOURCEKIND, 
"host.name" as IDENTKEY1, 
hosts.name as IDENTVALUE1, 
"host.key" as IDENTKEY2, 
hosts.hostid as IDENTVALUE2 
FROM hosts
WHERE hosts.status = 0

DB_QUERY_1.sql

SELECT 
hosts.host AS RESOURCENAME, 
hosts.name AS RESOURCEKIND, 
history.clock AS "TIMESTAMP", 
"host.name" AS IDENTKEY1, 
hosts.name AS IDENTVALUE1, 
"host.key" AS IDENTKEY2, 
hosts.hostid AS IDENTVALUE2, 
SUBSTRING_INDEX(items.key_, '.', -2) AS METRICNAME1, 
history.value AS VALUE1

FROM history LEFT JOIN (items, hosts)

ON (items.itemid=history.itemid AND hosts.hostid=items.hostid)

WHERE (history.clock >= %f) AND (history.clock < %t)

UNION

SELECT 
hosts.host AS RESOURCENAME, 
hosts.name AS RESOURCEKIND, 
history_uint.clock AS "TIMESTAMP", 
"host.name" AS IDENTKEY1, 
hosts.name AS IDENTVALUE1, 
"host.key" AS IDENTKEY2, 
hosts.hostid AS IDENTVALUE2, 
SUBSTRING_INDEX(items.key_, '.', -2) AS METRICNAME1, 
history_uint.value AS VALUE1

FROM history_uint LEFT JOIN (items, hosts)

ON (items.itemid=history_uint.itemid AND hosts.hostid=items.hostid)

WHERE (history_uint.clock >= %f) AND (history_uint.clock < %t)

Comments and feedback are absolutely welcome!

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