Supermicro Build Day Live Wrapup

Another, very educational, Build Day Live event completed, and I still find that each event feels different. The Build Day Live with Supermicro felt like I was learning a lot about the company and not so much about the specific product that we deployed. I already knew that Supermicro is a server vendor in their own category, not an all-encompassing behemoth like some of the other big vendors but not just an assembler of components like some lower cost vendors. I knew that Supermicro designs and manufacture their servers and that their engineering is top notch. What I didn’t realize was that the engineering and manufacturing happens in San Jose for products shipped to US customers. I didn’t know how good Supermicro is at re-using engineering across product families using modular designs. I also had no idea that there are a complete range of Supermicro data center network switches.

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vBrownbag TechTalks at VMworld, thank you Supermicro

It seems that Supermicro is our new best friend, hot on the heels of last week’s awesome Build Day Live event, we have Supermicro sponsoring the TechTalks at VMworld US and EMEA. I was amazed to find that Supermicro designs and builds their products in San Jose, California as well as that they have a huge support
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Announcing the Oracle Ravello Build Day Live. To the cloud…

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
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Datrium DVX Build Day Live Wrap-up

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

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Datrium DVX Open Converged Build Day Live on 11-16-2017

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
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HPE SimpliVity Build Day Wrap Up

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
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LIVE BUILD DAY Oct 26 9AM PDT vBrownBag Build Day with HPE SimpliVity

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
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vBrownBag Build Day with Datrium

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
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Pure Storage supports vBrownBag in the Schedule Builder

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
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HC380 Build Day Wrap Up

What an amazing week. My first time getting out of the airport in Houston. The first vBrownBag Build Day. Also, my first hands-on time with HC380. We used YouTube live streaming for the first time and even used FaceBook live video too. I was reminded how long it has been since I was in a datacenter after midnight. I also had Fuzzies tacos for the first time and went to the NASA space center Houston.

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It All Happens Next Week, vBrownBag Build Day With HPE HC380

As you may know, next week is the very first vBrownBag Build Day. I will be heading to HPE’s offices in Houston and spend some time in one of their labs. The purpose of the Build Day is to show you the experience of deploying the HC380 platform into an existing customer. Once it is
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The First Ever, vBrownBag Build Day Will Feature HPE HC380

It is time for some new ways to learn with vBrownBag in 2017. One of the new ways is with some live streaming of whole product deployments. We are calling this a vBrownBag Build Day and planning to do a few each year. The basic plan is to show you what it is like to
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