Archive for May, 2012
Carolina VMware Users Summit 2012 Recap: I Won a Helicopter
May 15th
The 5th annual Carolina VMware Users Summit was today in the Charlotte Convention Center, and the event was great as always. The speakers list featured a cast of VMware experts like Jason Nash, Scott Lowe, Alan Renouf, and more.
The keynote was “Two perspectives: The Past and Future of VMware Storage” by Satyam Vaghani. Satyam was one of the first 100 employees of VMware and played an important role in VMware’s storage architecture which he shared much of the history on from discussing how they dealt with clustering, SCSI reservations, etc. He has recently moved on from VMware to a new CTO position with another company, but he closed the keynote on where VMware is likely headed in regards to storage. He noted that it is likely VMware will work with storage array providers to allow the hypervisor to interface directly with the storage instead of needing VMFS allowing VMware’s storage architecture to come full circle. It was an interesting topic and a great kickoff to the event.
I was able to catch the following sessions:
- vSphere Distributed Switch – Technical Deep Dive by Jason Nash
- PowerCLI 201 by Alan Renouf
- Network Architectures for VXLAN: Enabling Stateful vMotion with Existing Network Addressing by Arista Networks
- vSphere and Network-Attached Storage Design Considerations by Scott Lowe
- vCloud Director PowerCLI by Alan Renouf
- Hands-on Labs provided by Varrow
The sessions were all outstanding from both a technical material standpoint, but the speakers were also excellent speakers that were able to really keep the audience engaged and interested. The hands-on labs from Varrow were implemented through View virtual desktops, and the systems were stable and speedy (which can be tough by the end of the day to maintain in these environments). I chose the EMC VNX lab, which went through iSCSI setup on the VNX platform with vSphere 5.x.
Of course, such as with all of these events, there was plenty of vendor swag, and I was lucky enough to win a helicopter from EMC:
Next year I’m hoping for a life-size version. 
A big thanks goes out to all of the speakers, vendors, and organizers for setting up this event.
This Month on the VMTN Forums – 4/12
May 2nd
Interesting Q&A’s from April:
- Question: How can SRM/vSphere Replication’s network utilization be throttled?
- Answer: There is no built-in method. The best solution is to use Network I/O Control, which requires Enterprise Plus licensing.
- Question: Is it possible to change swap file location for a running VM?
- Answer: Yes, this process is described in KB 2003956.
- Question: Can’t activate OEM XP Install after P2V
- Answer: P2V is successful, but cannot activate. This is due to OEM licensing, which is bound to particular hardware. Switch to a Volume Licensing Key or try contacting Microsoft.
- Question: How to properly use Storage vMotion with VMware View Virtual Desktops
- Answer: For Manual Pools (non-Linked Clones), Storage vMotion will work fine. For Linked Clones, rebalance the VMs to the new datastores.
- Question: Does adding more vCPUs do permanent damage?
- Answer: No, this only causes problems with older versions of Windows that had specific HALs for SMP/non-SMP. If there is a problem, the VM can be reverted back to the previous vCPU count.
- Question: Should re-assigning desktops move the profile in VMware View?
- Answer: Re-assigning users to new desktops does not move the profile. To get that experience, one could detach the persistent disk then recreate a desktop from it.