So I finally made it, on Friday night I received an email from Melissa of the VCDX certification team stating:
Congratulations! You have achieved the VMware Certified Design Expert on VI3 (VCDX3) certification.
Your VCDX number is: VCDX58
I exploded with a scream of joy, I felt a mix of relieve, excitement and proudness, I really couldn’t believe that I made it.
I already wrote about my Defense experience in a previous post, I have nothing to add to it so I will just thank everybody who supported me through this journey, especially my wife, @esignoretti, @Andrea_Mauro, @drakpz and all the other guys on twitter!
This is truly the most difficult and rewarding achievement in my whole professional life, I wish the best of luck to everyone who will defend at PEX 2011 which will also be the last chance to become a VCDX on VI3.
So VMworld Europe has come to an end, sadly this kind of events are always shorter than expected, but I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot of interesting people and fellow tweeps.
I enjoyed many sessions, my favorite surely was BC7803: Planning and Designing an HA Cluster that Maximizes VM Uptime, presented by Duncan Epping and Marc Sevigny, this session covered many advanced aspects considered when designing HA clusters in simple and even complicated scenarios, like stretched campus clusters, very interesting.
Another session that I enjoyed was TA7805 Tech Preview: Storage DRS by Irfan Ahmad which is a cool guy and a great presenter (I didn’t fall asleep even if I was in a post-lunch coma ) showed a really cool new feature that can literally disrupt what we do today to ensure storage fairness.
But the killer feature of VMworld this year were the hands-on labs, as I mentioned in a previous post, all the labs were hosted on the “Cloud” which was physically located across the Atlantic in Florida and Virginia (more information about the labs can be found here). All the labs were delivered via Wise Thin Clients using the PCoIP protocol, I completed several labs and never experienced a delay, the end user experience was awesome. Also it’s worth mentioning that every Lab was provisioned using virtualized ESX servers which is just plain cool! (and make me proud of my discoveries on how to run a virtualized ESX 3 back in 2007).
I also hung around the Blogger Lounge and had a quick chat with @plankers (which incidentally runs one of my favorite blogs: The Lone Sysadmin) and the one and only @BasRaayman (who is now part of the vSpecialist army), met the vNinja@h0bbel who took A LOT of pictures during the event (including the one featured in this post). I shook hands with @DuncanYB and @FrankDenneman (if you lived under a rock until today, they’re two of the most respected Virtualization Gurus around) and met a huge amount of Italian people interested in Virtualization, this meeting has sparked the creation of an Italian chapter of the VMware User Group, we created a LinkedIn Group and more than 70 people already subscribed to it.
We’re facing interesting times, let’s see what happens next
So VMworld Europe is finally starting tomorrow, I’m finishing my schedule right now (still too many interesting sessions and so little time ) and I’m really excited to meet many fellow tweeps in person.
As is said in a previous post, it’s been a long time since my last VMworld (it was 2008) but of many vendor events that I attended VMworld is surely the best by far, the labs are going to be awesome (thanks to Duncan Epping which is the mastermind behind them) and I’m sure I will find some new interesting technologies on the showfloor too (In 2008 we chose to become a Compellent partner after we saw a demo at their booth).
Also the VMworld parties are legendary, this year I will attend the VMUG party on Monday, an Italian #vBeers gathering on Tuesday, and of course the official VMworld Party on Wednesday, no Veeam party for me this year but it’s surely one of the best around.
If you didn’t made it to Copenhagen this year be sure to check out twitter for updates on new announcements and products, I’ll try to tweet as much as possible during the keynotes and general sessions, it’s going to be really fun!
DISCLAIMER: I work for a Company which is a Compellent Business Partner, we sell and provide consultancy services on Compellent products.
Given my job, I deal every day with VMware customers, and, at least in Italy, the most misunderstood and mishandled aspect of a virtual infrastructure is the storage part.
VMware introduces another powerful layer on top of the already complex SAN scenario and this often confuse the customers even more, in order to mitigate this several big storage names (NetApp and EMC in primis) created plugins to seamlessly manage storage directly from the familiar vSphere client, hiding many of the repetitive and sometimes complex tasks.
Compellent may not be the first at the game but they surely took an interesting approach, they provide integration at both ends of the storage stack.
In fact you can provision and manage the storage from a vSphere plugin (expected to be GA during Q4) or you can do the same from Enterprise Manager, which is the management interface for your Compellent storage infrastructure (provides a single pane-of-glass on all your Compellent systems).
This approach in my opinion gives you a great degree of flexibility, if you’re a storage guy and you’re in charge to provide storage to your company’s VMware infrastructure you can use your familiar storage GUI to provision storage at the Datastore level and if you’re a multiple-caps IT guy, you can use the vSphere client to do the same with a simple wizard, without getting your hands dirty inside the storage interface.
Below you can find a couple of videos showing the integration at both ends:
Prendendo esempio dagli eventi #vBeers già organizzati in Inghilterra ho pensato di indire una vBeers italiana in concomitanza con il VMworld Europe di Copenhagen.
E’ online una form di iscrizione raggiungibile qui: http://bit.ly/VMworld2010IT dove è possibile iscriversi per mantenersi aggiornati (e anche per sapere quanti saremo .
Ho deciso di ritrovarci Martedì 12 visto che è l’unica sera dove non ci sono eventi programmati (almeno eventi ufficiali VMware), il posto che ho scelto è la “Bryggeriet Apollo”, una birreria nella zona centrale di Copenhagen, dove si può eventualmente anche mangiare qualcosa (per chi volesse anche cenare li).
Il ritrovo è per le ore 20:15 / 20:30 direttamente alla birreria, questo perché non ho punti di riferimento all’interno del Bella Centre, qui potete trovare le indicazioni partendo dal sito del VMworld:
) showed a really cool new feature that can literally disrupt what we do today to ensure storage fairness.
