Cloud Camp Minneapolis
04/18/2009

Sponsor List
Platinum: VISI
Gold: enStratus, Microsoft, Rackspace
Silver: Best Buy, Cisco, Magnet 360, SalesForce.com, Split Rock Partners
Location sponsor: University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science and Engineering

While other topics may have stood out most to the rest of the attendees, I felt that there was a fundamental difference in the definition of cloud computing from those who are developers and infrastructure oriented, compared to the definition used by the cloud hosting providers.

For those not already knee-deep in application virtualization, I strongly suggest you take a look at InstallFree and what they have to offer.

I am, self-admittedly, someone who lives on the edge. I don’t believe in doing backups of my desktop, my laptop or anything else I use as a consumer (servers, databases, etc. are another story of course).

This has burned me a few times in the past, but I’ve learned that, for the most part, I have everything in an email, or someone has kept a copy for me – I’ve remained relatively unscathed by this approach. I believe that my data should just exist, as a given. Hardware failures? Not my problem. Laptop takes a loss on a flight abroad? C’est la vie.

As reported here on vcritical.com, and originally on vmware.com, VMware has unleased a fantastic marketing campaign to dispel the rumors of how Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager can manage a VMware virtual infrastructure.

Back on September 6th, I received the great news that I had passed the first VCDX exam - Enterprise Administration.

I took the exam way back in July of 2008 so I was very happy to finally get the good word from VMware.

Well a bit of good news arrived last week. Back in early July I took a day trip up to NYC to take the Enterprise Exam, one of the steps in VMware's new VCDX exam.

The four requirements to receive this esteemed and exclusive certification are:

• Must be certified as a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3.
• Pass the VMware Enterprise Administration Exam. Includes live labs and tests a higher level of skill set than the exam for VCP on VMware Infrastructure 3.

After a very successful 2008 season, I'm preparing to kick off the 2009 season in style.

Since I often receive emails from vendors looking for sponsorship opportunities, I decided to open up my track car's livery to the virtualization ecosystem.

Your logo could go here.

For those that are interested in creating a bootable thumb drive to boot a server to VMware's hypervisor (today VI3, tomorrow vSphere 4), please read below.

1) Get a thumb drive, preferably of 1GB or more.
2) Get dd.exe from here: http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd‐0.5.zip
3) Run dd.exe --list and take note of all devices that are listed.
4) Insert the thumb drive.
5) Run dd.exe --list and take note of the new device that wasn't listed in Step 3.

In today's Wall Street Journal there was an article on the Demo Conference in Palm Springs, California. One of the more interesting points in the article that you can read here is that Citrix is launching their GoView product for FREE as of today.

One of the sessions I was most interested in yesterday was the vCenter for Linux session, hosted by Adam Young.

The Blackberry 8330 takes the worst pictures ever.

Some key points made:

• Based on CentOS 5. This is the [un-]official platform for all of VMware's own appliances. It's RHEL without the trademarked bits.
• There will be no embedded database in the appliance; that's for the admin to provide.
• First release will include support for Oracle only.

"VMWorld Unplugged" was a very interesting session yesterday in the Auditorium Louis Lumiere that included Paul Maritz (President and CEO), Tod Nielsen (COO), Steve Herrod (CTO) and Maurizio Carli (General Manager, EMEA).

The executive team fielded questions from the audience, pre-submitted questions and moderator questions.

Some tidbit:

Yesterday just before lunch I attended a preview on vCenter Data Protection, which is VMware's next evolution of their backup solution.

Key points included:

• Storage API for Data Protection will be available. This will allow third-party backup vendors to tie into Data Protection.
• Data Protection is the next evolution of VCB and will include a greatly updated API.
• Differential, Incremental and Full will all now be supported backup types.
• Integration into the Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC).

So today was a great day, and not just because I'm now a VMware vExpert.

vCenter Orchestrator comes from the Dunes acquisition and is used to automate just about anything you can imagine in a virtual infrastructure.

The main take-aways I got from this session were:

• LOTS of integration work will be needed to effectively implement the solution.

So I woke up to mega news this morning, after a very positive day yesterday. I am honored and humbled to have been given a VMware vExpert Award, as announced by VMware today.

The exclusive award was presented to 300 virtualization experts from around the world today, so kudos to all my fellow vExperts.

Perhaps the highlight of the day came from a long discussion with Andry, part of the Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) team at VMware (through the Trango acquisition no less).

The short version is that the MVP will allow mobile devices to virtualization their guest OS's, which in this case could be Android or Symbian. My Blackberry powered by a VMware (Trango) chip could in theory run not only native Blackberry apps, but also IPhone Apps, Windows-CE apps and whatever else comes out.

This is a shot of their booth display, a mockup of a big cell phone; quite slick: