Toronto VMUG – May 7th Event Recap

Today was not just another day in the world of me and DiscoPosse. I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at this morning’s Toronto VMUG session at the Toronto Convention Center. We had a great room of participants as always, and thanks to Angelo Luciani and the VMUG crew for putting together a great event.

The session opened with a Veeam presentation titled Five Ways Smart vSphere Backups May Surprise You. For those who are not already familiar with the Veeam product lineup, this was a great way to introduce them. The virtualization environment adds complexity and lots of potential bottlenecks into your operational, and particularly your backup environment.

Today’s presentation of their backup, snap and lab mode restore capability was really cool. I highly recommend that you look at the Veaam tools and get in touch with some folks there about how it may come into play with your environment. Take a look at http://www.veeam.com for more information. You can also visit Mike Preston’s blog at http://www.mwpreston.net for some really great articles on configuring and managing Veeam products.

Our second session today is is from Arista Networks and VMware – Delivering Bandwidth and Data Centre Scaling Requirements Associated with Virtualization. This was my first exposure to Arista Networks so it was exciting to see what they have to offer.

With the drive to 10GBE and upcoming 40GBE this looks like a potentially great fit into the core of storage networking, and particularly VMware virtualized environments. They have a wide variety of products available to match your specific needs. It was more of an overview today so I would have to dive a little deeper to know how well I can fit the Arista product line into the data center now or in future. Interesting hardware, and I like that they subscribe to open standards and steer away from “black box” configuration. The Linux folks in the room were quite pleased to see that the EOS platform is built on a standard RedHat kernel.

Then came the final session of the day which was my presentation about Scripting for VM Admins. This was my first presentation to the VMUG community, so I was in an interesting spot for choosing the detail level to come at this with. I chose to do a broad and moderate depth presentation with the focus on methods and techniques rather than a deep dive into actual code. It is always an adventure to present to your peers who have deep technical skills. Especially when talking about coding and scripting as most of the attendees have their own particular styles and level of exposure.

I hope that everyone enjoyed the presentation and that it touched on some good details. I plan to have a specific deep dive session as a follow up at another event, or potentially through Ustream if there are no time slots available. I find that the coding sessions work best with lab examples and I particularly like the interactivity which helps to steer the content as needed.

Please feel free to add your comments on the session and I look forward to making future appearances.