My London 2011 VMUG Experience

Today, I have been lucky to get the chance to attend the London 2011 VMUG. It has been arranged by a great team of VMware enthusiasts (Martyn Storey, Mark Stockham, Alan Renouf, Scott Vessey, Gabrie van Zanten, Simon Long, Chris Dearden). The arrangement was great & I would say over 100 people were in the room & participating in the sessions. Alan has pulled a great session about PowerCLI, which I expected from the PowerCli legend. I am glad I attended the PowerCli session as that got me started. I am really thankful for the UK VMUG team to allow me to attend while they were over-booked.

Few quick interested notes I heard during the session and might be of interested to others:

– VMware engineers are already testing the performance of 64 vCPU VMs!!! wow that is too many vCPUs. With that I don’t see any application not being apple to fit in a VM due to high processing. That is a crazy amazing amount of processing power for a VM. It’s important to mention the time frame for releasing this is not known. Will it be a part of ESX 5 or not is in the unknown till now. Lol, no don’t ask me to look at the road map for an answer as that can not go public.

– Two days back VMware Rolled out the long waited vCloud Connector. vCloud Connector as known by many of you is a big step toward the Hybrid cloud. It will allow VMware vCloud Director administrators to manage their virtual machines in their premises & in the cloud from a single interface.  Its a great advantage for VMware over competitors, as customers can have the freedom at a click of a button to shift their work load from their datacenter to the cloud & backward. This is a mind blowing capability & was not easy to imagine just a year back.

– vCenter Converter has a new feature where it can keep track of the data that has not been copied during the conversion, stop the service on the source then copy the difference which ensure having a conversion with up to date data & without having a long downtime that would have been required to get an updated copy without this feature.

– Veeam who has thankfully sponsored the event has shown some mind blowing features in their latest version of Veeam backup & replication that is really worth checking out. They can have instant restore, which allow you to power on the compressed de-duped copy of the backup without wasting anytime restoring then it move it to a normal format using storage VMotion in the background while the VM is running. This mean you can restore your VM in a mater of a second!!! This sound crazy and worth trying. Further, they have got their replication to be near instantaneous CDP (Continuous data Protection) like thanks to VMware Change Block Tracking feature.

That’s few of the things that was discussed. It was really a fantastic event & worth stopping by. I would recommend it to anyone living in UK or visiting when it take place. Again thanks for the VMUG Team and have a good evening everyone. Ah yes, I missed the vBeers as I had to travel but I am sure the rest of the team has enjoyed their evening at the pub.

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