vmware

Finding Out Who You're Not Following on vLaunchpad

The vLaunchpad site is a great resource for finding the best virtualisation blogs around and in the upcoming months will once again have a voting opportunity where you can register which ones you like best. It also handily includes the Twitter id of the blogger. I was curious to find an easy way to see who I wasn’t following on Twitter from the list. By using the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet it’s easy to pull down the Twitter links from the web page.

Automation Station at the UKVMUG 2012

How do you provision, manage and decommission your (sprawling) infrastructure? Running around fighting fires while interesting project work falls by the wayside? Spending long evenings and weekends carrying out maintenance tasks while others are tweeting pictures of what fun they’re having in their spare time? Hiding from the bosses while they hunt you down to deploy a private cloud before Friday afternoon? Or even just figuring out what the heck infrastructure you have got and what underlying issues can you report on….

Install PowerCLI 5.1 in Windows 8

I don’t believe that PowerCLI 5.1 is yet officially supported on Windows 8, however that’s where I wanted to run it. While carrying out the installation I hit this issue, i.e. .NET Framework 2.0 was not installed as a pre-requisite. This is because PowerShell 3.0 on Windows 8 uses .NET 4 and no longer has .NET 2.0 as a requirement. To install .NET Framework 2.0 in Windows 8 you need to turn on .

UKVMUG 2012 - Agenda Published

The agenda for this year’s UKVMUG has been published and looks tremendous. I know how much effort is put into organising this event and they look to have surpassed themselves this time. One great thing to highlight is the amount of community content there is amongst the published sessions, definitely putting the User back into a User Group. Watch out too for a further announcement about even more community content to be included as part of the day.

UK VMUG User Conference - Registration Open

Registration for this year’s UK VMUG User Conference is now open. This was a great event last year and from what I’ve heard it’s shaping up to be at least as good this year. The agenda so far is below. I highly recommend you attend the evening before, since again there will be a vCurry and a chance to network with attendees before the event. VMUG is pleased to offer top notch education at our user conferences.

UK VMUG Call for Papers - Nov 15 2012

Last year’s UK VMUG was a fantastic event and the guys are already planning this year’s event, scheduled for November 15th. They’ve just put out a Call for Papers, so if you have a good virtualisation topic, whether a good story from your workplace or info about a particular area of interest, then go fill out this form and you’ll be in with a chance of taking part. If you haven’t contributed to an event like this before, then here are a few reasons why I would encourage you to do so.

VMworld US 2012 – Day 3

First up on Wednesday I managed to squeeze into the early 8am PowerCLI session of Alan and Luc who covered some great info on PowerCLI Best (or recommended :-) ) Practices. I stayed in the same room for another automation session from William Lam and Alan who covered some of the new features in 5.1. William also demonstrated something engineers have been working on which I think was a way for linux based engineers to talk to vCenter and automate tasks in a similar way to PowerCLI.

VMworld US 2012 – Day 4

So last day of VMworld and a short post to finish things off. The general session has some non-VMware sessions up with some football playing robots and the Google self-drive car. I visited the vSphere Design session with Scott Lowe and Forbes Guthrie which was one of the best sessions I attended all week. Lots of useful information for the thought processes you need to put into a vSphere design.

VMworld US 2012 – Day 2

So I’m finding the choice of food, shall we say interesting. If you’re not used to the American ‘breakfast’ then you might need to shop around yourself, here I was hunting for some fruit: First up today was the Keynote with Steve Herrod and today was all about End User Computing. There were a lot of bloggers in the community lounge, so I figured it would be good to watch it in there where it would be live streamed on the big screen.

VMworld US 2012 – Day 1

So after yesterday’s poor start I was really hoping for better today and thankfully it was. First up was the keynote, starting out with some drummers, which seemed to influence some of the speakers later using words they shouldn’t be using at that age like ‘jiggy’. It was streamed live and you can watch it here if you missed it. The first main announcement was around vSphere 5.1 and it being bundled up into the vCloud Suite along with vCloud Director and Site Recovery Manager.