The Winds of Change

Well… One of the reasons that I haven’t posted much on here is that I’ve made a rather big change in life lately. Many of my friends and family are already aware of this change, but others might not be…so here it is…

After nearly 12 years of service at KBR, Inc., I’ve decided to part ways with the company and advance my career in another direction. I’ve joined Terremark Worldwide, Inc. as a Shared Systems Engineer. I’ll be moving my family out of the Houston area and up to the Dallas area as their offices are located in Las Colinas in Irving.

It’s a big change for me and although I know that I certainly possess sufficient technical abilities to master any challenge…I’m never one to think that I know everything. Above all else though…working for a company like Terremark, where technology is their core business will in my opinion offer me a better environment in which to grow my skills. KBR, while having been good to my family and I over the years, had gotten technologically and structurally lost in my opinion from an IT perspective. The blame for most of this I lay at the feet of the IT leadership at KBR who in my opinion, were not always up to the challenge of staying in-the-know technologically or ideologically.

I certainly miss all of my former co-workers and the other folks that I had developed relationships with over the years there at KBR. But it’s all water under the bridge now…and I’m very excited to be working for Terremark. I think big things are in store for Terremark in the near future and I look forward to being a part of that bright future.

You can find Terremark on the NASDAQ as TMRK…

VMworld 2009 Final Thoughts

(Sorry for the extreme lateness of this content…I had some pretty serious career changing activities lately that precluded posting…)

I left my heart in San Francisco!… Ok…yeah…I had to resort to the corny reference…I just couldn’t resist. I actually did have a great time in San Fran, and being my first time there…I can understand some of the attraction to the area.

On a scale of 1 to 10…with 1 being the most worthless waste of time my life’s ever seen and 10 being time so well spent that I would have sold my first born for it…I give VMworld 2009 a…

6

It was a valuable few days. Perhaps not for all of the reasons that I would have wished…but in general…the things that I felt were lacking were somewhat made up for by gains in areas that I’d not fully planned for.

Best of show:

• Solid, but not spectacular, instructor-led sessions.
  • I did not (nor did a HUGE number of other folks) get into all of the sessions that I wanted, but I got into quite a few. The sessions appeared generally well organized and for the most part hit on exactly what I expected out of them. I felt some of the sessions were a little light on high-level technical details even though they were listed as being for the advanced track, and many times they attempted to cover topics that they had no reason to believe could be given proper credence in the time allotted. You know…I can’t speak for everyone else…but I’d prefer if a conference would provide the option of letting you pick “quality” over “quantity” and would thereby offer “true” deep-dive type instruction on a few specific topics for once.
  • In the sessions that I attended, the stations were generally ready to go and there were not a lot of technical issues during the session, although I did hear from many other attendees about major issues in other sessions.
  • Marketing to Content ratio was hit and miss…some sessions were almost entirely marketing poo…while others were dead on technical. Generally speaking…the VMware-led sessions = Most Direct Content vs. the Third-party sessions = Majority Marketing Spin/Gibberish
• Superb Networking Opportunities
  • Met some great folks that I know will become lifelong contacts.
  • Super opportunity to interact with others from industries outside of your own to share and develop ideas and possibilities.
  • Super parties, tweetups, and other extra-curricular activities…Mucho props to J Troyer and co. For setting up several of the tweetups.
• Schwag, shcwag, and more schwag…
  • So many shirts…I think I could have flown into town with just shorts and slacks…and still come back with enough pairs to make the week plus some.
  • My kids greatly enjoyed the NetIQ flying monkey. I can’t say that I appreciated it much after listening to it for hours on end after I returned home…but at least it’s cheap entertainment right?

Overall, I had a good time and I felt it was a worthwhile experience. I agree with many other bloggers and commenters though…very anticlimactic in general and there was certainly no huge “Wow”-type moment. Oh well…here’s hoping next year will have enough of those types of moments to make this year’s VMworld a distant memory!

Day Two…Put a fork in it!

Well…Day two was very good at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco. I’ve got a few quick hit type thoughts thus far…

The Good:

• Informative and Valuable Sessions, Breakouts, and Labs
• Great interaction with Vendors, Peers, and Customers
• Awesome Information on:
  • Long Distance vMotion
  • vCloud Express (Won’t help my company anytime soon that I can see…but I can feel the potential)
  • Totally Awesome All-In-One Intel Blade System!
  • Really cool technologies demo’d for security, backups, networking, and much more…
• Great appreciation gatherings
• VMware Workstation 7 (Awesome! …will elaborate more later)

The BAD:

• Absolutely HORRENDOUS wireless access…just about everywhere…
• Really bland, boring, and not very good food
• Too much emphasis on parts of virtualization that may or may not impact that majority of corporate America in any reasonable timeframe
• If I hear “cloud” one more time…I’ll puke.
• Nerds really don’t shower or bathe often enough…I’ll just leave it at that.

But overall a good day. I’ve got some new vids up over on the VMworld 2009 page and I’ll be uploading more great pics and vids later…

Official Day #1 In The Books

A good day today overall.

The keynote this morning was…interesting. I couldn’t stay for all of it because for some reason they overlapped it with the start of sessions! You’d think they wouldn’t do that.

Thoughts? Well…I really like the vCloud Express offering. I really think that will open up a huge new market for consultants, SMBs, and other smaller businesses…but it’s just not an “Enterprise” interesting feature. Really impressive power consumption numbers from the IBM demo…WOW! Major, major, major props to HP for the super tight integration of HP Insight Management into vCenter… (WHY OH WHY CAN’T DELL OPEN MANAGE DO THAT!!!) Otherwise…just more cloud propaganda and the like. Look…the cloud is important and I think it’s the only logical way that things can continue to progress…but it’s not sure thing that we’ll all be running VMware clouds only…and it is very true that VMware makes some major “lock-in” type moves which would sort of scare me if I were pulling the purse strings…but get real…name me one vendor that doesn’t try to “lock-in” its own customers and I’ll show you their bankruptcy filing.

Break-Out session thoughts???

Vizioncore Analyzation and Automation: Mostly a long commercial…but they’ve got some good products and I learned that they made their vConverter product free…so that was cool. I’ll certainly try it out when I get a chance soon. Can’t be any slower than vCenter Enterprise Converter

vCenter Mobile Access: My thoughts? WHY IN THE BLEEEEP AREN’T WE USING THIS ALREADY!!!! Another reason, although I hesitate to say it, to get a Blackberry. Not that the experience is any better…quite the contrary…but the setup is easier because your BES busts in through your firewall for you. Almost zero configuration. But really…for a free management tool…what a godsend! There’s almost nothing you couldn’t do through this tool as far as your virtual infrastructure is concerned.

Automated Disaster Recovery for Branch Offices: Pretty cool. They showed the upcoming vSphere SRM product and how you can protect multiple vCenters at a single SRM site. We should really be doing this already. We already have the basic infrastructure in place…all it would take would be a little capital investment…can’t be any worse than the check we write to our DR Host every year.

Hypervisor Competitive Differences: Very interesting and I thought very evenly presented and balanced. Ultimate outcome? VMware is still the clear leader and most ready for Enterprise level implementations…but the others are MUCH closer than ever before. I really think this is going to come down to a religious war in the end. Much like Apple and MS…there is no one that is clearly, certainly, without doubt better than the other, and each will have its own strengths and leanings. It’ll ultimately just be a matter of preference and feel. My money’s still on the leader for now though.

One other quick thing… it’s sickening and frightening the amount of MS plants at the conference and on the twitter feeds. You’d think that MS would be busy…I don’t know…like…maybe trying to fix the products that it already makes? I wonder how they’d react if VMware spent a chunk of money and showed up at WinHEC to show off their “virtual hardware”?

I’ve got lots of good pics and a complete video (in several parts) from the Hypervisor comparison breakout session. I’ll get them up as soon as I can…but for now…I’ve got to find something to eat…

Nice Dinner and Wayyy Too Late

Well…were do you eat in Downtown San Fran after 10PM? Not many places apparently. While at an impromptu Tweetup…I ran into one of the folks from Trainsignal. If you’re not familiar with them, they produce a wide variety of high quality training materials and programs for all sorts of current technologies. One of these good folks was Gary Eimerman with whom I also ran the VMworld 2009 “Save The Bay” Fun Run at the Golden Gate Bridge earlier in the afternoon. After the tweetup began to clear out several folks noted that they hadn’t eaten dinner and neither had I so the race was on to find where to go. We all eventually ended up at this place called Oola’s. I had a burger, which was pretty good…slightly pricey…but good, and we all shared some good conversation. Always good to speak and meet with people of like minds and techy backgrounds. But seriously…why aren’t there more restaurants open late in San Fran?

Overall, I think the day was good. I got a lot of good information from the VMworld Scripting Lab 12, and somewhat decent information from the vSphere best practices session…but I was very disappointed in how long it took to get into the Self-Paced labs…Unacceptable! I’ve got some more vids and stuff to post up …but I’m beat and it’ll have to wait til tomorrow. I’ve got to get to bed for the keynote in the morning @ 8AM!!!

Another Day…Another Video

I posted another vid on the VMworld 2009 page. I think it’s funny how they have this video and are proud about reducing deployment and delivery times down to 6 to 8 hours…but I have superiors that think that deployments should only take minutes now! Anyway…this is just a quick post to let everyone know that there is more to come tonight…I’ve got to get down to the Moscone and get on a bus to the Golden Gate for the VMworld 5k! Wish me luck!

New Vids Added!!!

Check out the newly added videos on the VMworld 2009 page from the toolbar above. …or you can click here if you’re just too lazy!!!

I’m sure they’ll be enlightening and entertaining…

Registered & Ready!!!

Well, I’m all checked in and I’ve received my attendee bag. Pretty nice bag and 2 T-shirts. Looking through the program guide everything looks very nicely laid out and organized. Mucho props to the VMware VMworld organizers. I’m going to upload a few pics and vids in just a moment. You should see the systems they’ve got setup as you make your way down the escalator into Moscone north…very impressive.

Massive Amount of really cool hardware (Actually not that massive for all it does come to think of it!)

Here’s where the keynote will be…wonder if they’ll throw down the Gauntlet on MS, Oracle, and Citrix (Are those really separate companies anyway?)

Shhhhhh… Don’t tell anyone…but the third blade from the bottom in this Cisco UCS already had a bang on it!!!

Getting Ready!!!

Well…I finally managed to get a seat reserved on the flight to San Fran.

Phew… I was worried that I’d be flying standby or get bumped to an even later flight. At least it looks like I got lucky and snagged an aisle seat.

I’m going to try to make it to the Moscone Center early and get registered on Sunday. I hear the lines and waits are pretty hectic on Monday, so I figure it’s worth it to get it all done early if available.

Here’s what’s on the agenda for Monday:

10:00 AM-12:00 PM	LAB12	Scripting VMware® Infrastructure (PowerShell/Perl Toolkits)
1:30 PM-2:30 PM	V11721	Best Practices for Successful VI Design
3:00 PM-4:00 PM	V12644	Designing a Virtualization Infrastructure for the Small Environment

I plan on hitting some of the vendor booths that day as well.  High on my list are, but in no certain order…

• Dell
• Akorri
• Hyper9
• EMC
• HP
• Symantec
• and many others

If someone has a suggestion or comment on my schedule or list of vendors to grill evaluate…by all means, please register and leave a comment! This is certainly meant to be an interactive communication method, and I appreciate and need feedback!

Wish me a good trip tomorrow!!!

The thorn in my side…aka…Virtual Center

Look… I really love VMware’s products and technologies, but I’m no yes man and I’ll call a spade a spade if given the chance. In my opinion, in no area has VMware dropped the ball more than in Virtual Center and the VI Client. The way they’ve opened it up to third parties through extensions is great, but I think they would have been better off devoting their efforts on removing some of the warts in the way it looks, operates, and handles many situations.

I’m currently fighting a LONG-running issue with my VC server where the service basically locks up and must be restarted. I’m at my wits end with it…as are many others. I’ll try to post a follow up on this soon where I’ll elaborate further… Stay tuned….