Final day of VMWorld

I have not won any thing, I have not gone out drinking every night, and I have hardly done any networking, but I have had the most amazing experience here at VMWorld 2013. Yes, some sessions were lame, yes Microsoft was an annoyance, but all in all I have so much new information. So many new things to look at. I have gotten to take a look at the issues that the industry is facing. I can logically talk to some of the issues our uses will be facing if we just try to recreate the standard standalone desktop. 

What an amazing general session! The innovations that those men are putting out are AMAZING!! MakeyMakey, Romotive and Makerbot. These guys are my new idols, they are taking the bull by the horns and they are doing something new and fresh. These are the true leaders of the future.their ability to look at things in a fresh new light and make it come to life is nothing short of amazing. The uses for their tech is almost endless. Congrats and hats off to you!

This year I have been more focused on our Horizon environment. With a couple of other things splattered in just for good measure, but that is what my life is right now. 

A Big Thank You to VMWare for doing such a great job. You have been on point on everything in my mind. I am not one of the IT elite that get to travel to every event and I truly appreciate all the effort that was made to help us have the most pleasurable experience we could have (next year busses back to our rooms after the show please?). 

Thanks to my company for investing in me. I do appreciate it. I will do my part to make things work the best I can for us back home with the new knowledge. A special thanks to my wife for keeping everything running back home, I wish you were here with me honey.

Day 3 continued....

Wow the PCoIP class was awesome! Dude really knows his stuff! I picked up so many good tips. He was clear, and to the point. Banging out useful information throughout the whole session.

QOS - set PCoIP right under your  VoIP or your Telepresence.

Make sure your network latency is not high already.

Beware your "Burstable Networks"! Anything that is over your purchased bandwidth, it can be marked a discardable and this will definitely affect your performance. You are only guaranteed what you have purchased.

Interesting thing to note, Zero Clients will not really use the improvements to PCoIP. If you run desktops or thin clients that run the View Client they take advantage of the new improvements. This is a complete bummer to me. We as an organization are try to get rid of the damned desktops so we don't have the extra layer to troubleshoot. Ah well....we can hope they will be included someday.

There was a ton more but those were my highlights. Like I said that session rocked! 

Now the Technical Deep dive that I am in right now .....OMG! Wow....hard to understand monotone- and has mainly been bars and graphs. 

But he is starting to get to the meat of the session with the best practices....too bad half the folks have left during his death by PowerPoint!

Day three....

I have yet to have coffee this morning so my head is still fuzzy. Before you ask, NO, I did not go to any of the parties last night. I have given up on the networking part of this little adventure. I am not a party person, I don't like to drink that much so I will leave that for the others to do. 

Most of the sessions that I have taken have had some great knowledge, some ...eh not so much. I got over here nice and early, skipped my coffee and came into a Mirage 201 class. Honestly I should have slept. I didn't realize Mirage 201 would be nothing more than you need to do good project management and have a good infrastructure. Gee do I need to wipe when I am done too? Bah! Ok so it was a management track class I guess. I don't think it was advertised that way but whatever. 

On a positive note, VMWorld Party tonight, at AT&T park. Looking forward to that. I know, contradicts what I said earlier, but this is different. I get to see Train and Imagine Dragons. I will be there to take pictures and to rock out. 

Well off to PCoIP "sizing for success", should be an interesting session. 

Day two continued...

Holy crap! What an incredible presentation by VMWare's President and his staff! Or was it their CEO ...I can't keep that kind of stuff straight. What I can keep straight though is the amount of automation that VMWare is bring to business and the dynamic ways in which users will be able to be empowered to create their needs within a structure that IT defines! 

I am beginning to feel a touch like they are trying to put me out of a job! But I guess someone has to be able to put all that infrastructure in and define what the users can and can't do. Products like the VMWare Automation Center, vSAN, Virtual networking, and more working together seamlessly to give the users the immediate responses that they want. 

Next up Distributed Switches...brain is going to hurt as much as my feet after today.

Day two VMWare rants and insights.

Waiting on the start of the general session. We are learning I see. They have opened the walls to the general session so we can get through without it being as big of a fire hazard. Should make getting to our first session a lot easier. 

The poor guy trying to keep track of the amount of people that were trying to come into this place is going to have a serious case of carple tunnel in his thumb with all the clicking he was having to do.

Ok, is it me, or is Microsoft's Hyper V hawkers outside the event are really starting to get annoying? Women handing out candy to a bunch of IT nerds. I can only equate it to the dirty old man trying to cop a cheap feel by saying he has candy in his pockets to children. "Hyper V wants to give you some candy", "Hyper V wants to give you a free custard". Makes me want to report Hyper V to the local police as a stalker. It's a VMWare event, have an once of class and piss off!Maybe it is the blisters on my feet, or maybe it is just the fact that I am annoyed by other things this morning, but I am not wanting to jack with these people today. 

As for the convention itself, all I can say is wow! So many great sessions yesterday! Mirage, Workspace, and Exchange in VMWare. More to come!

Day one so far...

Wow! What a start! 

New versions, better performance, more storage capabilities, virtualizing both network and storage. Lots to take in, and as always I can't help feeling like there is a ton for me to catch up on! 

I am anxious to implement some of the new things that I have seen when I get back to the office. The HOL I took yesterday were pretty good. Great Thinapp session and the performance HOL for ESX was by far the most popular. I finally figured out when doing the HOL you will NOT finish a whole one in the 90 minutes you are given. So I just made sure to see the stuff that was important to me.

I am struck by the question, how do other admins keep up with this stuff? I know I learn by fire, putting in systems to best fit the organization and to solve a particular need. As IT professionals we are constantly learning, constantly having to change gears, but how to keep up with with ever changing landscape that is IT. As for me, the only answer is ship my children off to boarding school, divorce my wife, fire my boss, and last but not least give up my new puppy in a bizarre IT fueled ritual.....

Naa, I will keep the puppy and I suppose the others as well, and just try to make some more time for reading.

Oops session is starting ...more later 

VMWorld 2013!

***Ok, so not having ever blogged before, this is more for my enjoyment than yours....I'm selfish that way. There, you have been warned. ***

Don't know if it is the smell of tech in the air or if it is the influence of all my techie peers around me, or me just wanting to voice my opinion of this event, but I have suddenly got the overwhelming urge to blog about this event. I am a Systems Administrator, nothing more. I make my living trying to keep  the systems of my company up and running and looking for the "BEST" ways to do that while at the same time not killing our budget and avoiding any career ending "Mistakes". Not that making my own dumb mistakes with virtualization have not provided me with times where I thought security was going to be coming around the corner to escort me out.

I can proudly say a good portion of my data enter is virtualized (about 70/30) and I have some of my Exchange environment on it. I have implemented SRM to our offsite DR location and had successful DR tests where we have brought up almost our whole Data Center (small sections of things my hands are tied with). I can also say that I am in the middle of a VDI project that has provided me more "opportunities" then I would care to say grace over right now.

I am here with a purpose.

I have come here to kick ....

No, no, no. I came here to find solutions. I came here in search of better ways to do my job. I have come here see what the latest industry trends are and see if they are something that I can use and lastly, I have come here to network with folks. I suck at networking though!

The expression "the Devil's in the details" is something that I feel applies to IT a lot, if you don't pay attention you miss things, you don't please the customer. So far the details have been the cool thing I have seen around VMWorld. All the cool little techie shit and the outstanding visual stuff too.

Overall I am hoping as a whole my experience this time will be just as good as my last one in 2009.




#VMWorld.