Now that the VMworld session acceptance and rejection notices are out, it may be time to sign up for a vBrownBag TechTalk. If your session was not accepted, then you are welcome to present the condensed core on the vBrownBag stage in the VMTN community area of VMworld, just fill in this google form. Keep
-> Continue reading vBrownBag TechTalks at VMworld, supported by Dell EMC
Sponsors who keep supporting vBrownBag year after year makes me almost as happy as community members who keep contributing year after year. Please join me in welcoming Rubrik back as a sponsor of the vBrownBag TechTalks at VMworld US and EMEA. Currently, we have around 50 TechTalks submitted and expect to have space for over
-> Continue reading Rubrik on Board With TechTalks at VMworld
I have been meaning to write about how the vBrownBag TechTalk videos get made. It has taken a few years to get everything together and the setup is still developing over time. We live stream and record video so that the presentation is available to people who cannot attend in person. I have found that our specific requirements are unusual, few other video producers work in quite the way that we do. All of the equipment selection is driven by a set of requirements.
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We have brought you a lot of great video about the Datrium DVXsolution, Open Converged, with the Build Day Live and the AMA. Our friends at Datrium were also the first to say yes to supporting the TechTalks at VMworld US 2018. There is still time to submit your TechTalk, details are on this page. Sessions
-> Continue reading Datrium Sponsors TechTalks at VMworld US 2018
The spring conference season continues with HPE Discover next month, and the vBrownBag TechTalks will make their first appearance at Discover this year. We are starting small, just four hours of TechTalk stage time at Discover US this year, and we would like to invite you to present a vBrownBag TechTalk at HPE Discover. If you already know about our TechTalks and will be at Discover, then drop me an email (alastair@vbrownbag.com) to schedule a TechTalk. If you are less familiar, then read on, and I will explain all.
We will be live-streaming the TechTalks, the schedule will fill out on this page.
I know it is early, but we need to fit with the VMworld team’s schedule. Submissions are now open for vBrownBag TechTalks at VMworld 2018 US and EMEA. If you already know about vBrownBag TechTalks then go right ahead and fill out this form.
Now that we have completed five Build Day Live events, there are a few patterns that have emerged and a particular area where we have steadily improved our game. If you have watched the live streams, you will know that it is always the network that gives us the most trouble. On one Build Day, I had to use my manager’s voice and say that we were not going to troubleshoot the network any further but needed to do a field expedient temporary configuration. The core of the problem is that we bring some network in the vBrownBag traveling lab and need to integrate that networking with the vendor’s lab equipment. I try to make the vBrownBag a little like a production environment, so there are VLANs that separate different networks for management, storage, and workload VMs. Most vendor environments are labs where networking is kept simple. The solution has been to expand the traveling lab network and use less of the vendor’s network. The current lab provides 10 x 10Gbe ports and 10 x 1Gbe ports for the vendor’s equipment.
The first vBrownBag AMA (Ask Me Anything) will be with Datrium on Thursday the 26th of April at 12:00 noon Pacific time.
You can watch the stream live on YouTube or sign up through FaceBook and get reminded. If you cannot make it live, we will post the recording to YouTube, just make sure to fill out the form below if you want a question asked.
The Oracle Ravello Build Day Live was our first event without a hardware product. That made travel easier for me as I didn’t need to bring the vBrownBag mobile lab to Israel. Instead, we used the cloud, also known as somebody else’s computer. This is a central part of the Ravello value, not needing to
-> Continue reading Oracle Ravello Build Day Live Wrap-up
The last vBrownBag Build Day of 2017 will be our first Cloud Build Day. Jeffrey and I are headed to Tel Aviv to spend some time with the engineering team at Ravello. The one line summary for Ravello is that it is a cloud management platform that aggregates public clouds. They have their own hypervisor
-> Continue reading Announcing the Oracle Ravello Build Day Live. To the cloud…
The Datrium Build Day was different from other Build Days in that we were live almost the whole time. During the Build Day live stream, we use pre-recorded videos so that you don’t need to watch the progress bar’s slow progress. The pre-recorded videos are usually interviews or demos of things that we don’t do during the live stream. The only time we needed the pre-recorded for Datrium was when we had to wait half an hour for VMs to migrate. We did also play the usual unboxing video, that was more to give the crew a break than because we were waiting for anything. So, does this mean that it takes three hours to deploy the Datrium solution to a four-node vSphere cluster? No, we could have done the deploy quite a bit faster. In a real deployment, the slowest part will be getting two SSD devices available in each ESXi server. The initial configuration of the storage node is a few minutes and the deployment to each ESXi server a few more. You can see the whole live stream in this video on YouTube. Over the next week we will get the remaining videos added to the DVX Build Day Live playlist.
Lakshmi and I discussing latent sector errors and RAID rebuilds
Today is the Datrium Build Day, live from 9 am Pacific time on YouTube. There are a few resources that you might want to use: A white paper on converging primary and secondary storage Some great insight into the Datrium split provisioning model A white paper on blanket encryption, where no unencrypted storage data crosses
-> Continue reading Datrium Build Day Live
November is upon us and so we are getting close to the Datrium Build Day. The vBrownBag mobile data center will be making another trip to Sunnyvale in Silicon Valley. On Thursday the 16th of November, starting at 9 am Pacific time, we will live stream the process of deploying the Datrium Open Converged platform
-> Continue reading Datrium DVX Open Converged Build Day Live on 11-16-2017
What a week, the HPE SimpliVity Build Day was a whole week of work in the data center. Our third Build Day showed you what it is like to deploy a SimpliVity HyperConvered Infrastructure (HCI) into an existing vSphere environment and migrate workloads. We implemented two SimpliVity clusters, migrating workloads into the first and adding
-> Continue reading HPE SimpliVity Build Day Wrap Up
Now that the dust has settled from VMworld, it is Build Day season again. On October 26th, we will be live streaming from HPE in Houston as we deploy SimpliVity into an existing vSphere environment. I am really looking forward to this one as it was working with SimpliVity that helped form the idea of
-> Continue reading LIVE BUILD DAY Oct 26 9AM PDT vBrownBag Build Day with HPE SimpliVity
The last quarter of 2017 is going to be busy for the vBrownBag Build Day team. In November, we will be in Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley) at the offices of Datrium. Datrium is the pioneer of “Open Convergence” which aims to deliver the value of Hyperconverged without some of the scaling limitations of putting persistent storage
-> Continue reading vBrownBag Build Day with Datrium
It is always nice to welcome new sponsors and I am delighted that Pivot3 has chosen to support the vBrownBag TechTalks at VMworld EMEA. Pivot3 is a hyperconverged vendor with some very interesting policy based management, including storage QoS. While I’m talking about TechTalks, you can find all of the VMworld USA 2017 TechTalks in this
-> Continue reading Pivot3 supports TechTalks at VMworld EMEA
Build Day number two is in the can, we had a great week in Silicon Valley with Pure Storage. We initially thought we wouldn’t have enough content for a Build Day with Pure. The array deployment is a 30-minute task, and from there it is simple to operate. Happily, we realized that we could show more than day 1, we could show a lot of the day two operations. We got to see some radical simplicity in the management of the Flash Array and did a whole lot of lifecycle operations on the array. You can see the live part of the build day in this video, and all of the Pure Storage build day videos in this playlist.
Today is a huge day for vBrownBag TechTalks at VMworld. For the first time, our TechTalks are in the Content Catalog and the Schedule Builder application. The US sessions are live today. I would also like to welcome Pure Storage as a sponsor of the vBrownBag TechTalks at VMworld US and EMEA. It is great
-> Continue reading Pure Storage supports vBrownBag in the Schedule Builder
The vBrownBag Build day is happening again this month (20 July 2017) with Pure Storage as our hosts. We will be bringing a new vSphere cluster to silicon valley and migrating a bunch of VMs onto a nice All-Flash-Array. The plan is to have a couple of heavy workloads that are constrained by the existing
-> Continue reading Pure Storage Build Day