kcvmug

New year, new schedule, same great VMUG

2012-01-17T22:46:32Z

Greetings, VMware faithful! Your hard-working VMUG Steering Committee has decided to switch from a quarterly meeting format to a bi-monthly format, adding 2 additional meetings to the year (in addition to the big Regional meeting).

The registration page for the first meeting—February 9, sponsored by Tintri—is available, and as usual, we’re meeting at the Boulevard Brewing Company’s Muehlbach meeting room. Hit the link for agenda and additional details.

In addition to the first meeting, we’ve got meetings planned for “even months” through the year, with tentative plans to repeat the big one in December.

April 26 — Fusion-IO
June 21 — 2X software
August 16 — Dell/Compellent
October 18 — (tba)

Third Conference a huge success, breaks records

2011-12-07T22:31:45Z

Packed room for Veeam’s breakout sessionThe third annual Midwest Regional VMware User Group conference, held on December 6th, 2011 at Kansas City’s famous Arrowhead Stadium, wrapped up shortly after 5:30pm local time. The final tally of checked-in attendees stood at 526, breaking the previous year’s numbers for the event, and setting a record for the recently-renovated venue as well.

According to Arrowhead event coordinator Ashley Netzer, the VMUG event was the largest non-NFL event to be held at the stadium since the $375 million renovation was completed in time for the 2010-2011 NFL season. It was those renovations that made it possible for indoor events at the scale of the VMUG conference to be possible. Although the stadium originally included indoor facilities that would support events such as wedding receptions and the like, nothing pre-renovation would have supported the number of attendees and booth space of the exposition area. In addition to stellar support from the Arrowhead event staff, the catering staff did a superb job of feeding the crowd with hot buffet meals for breakfast and lunch, as well as snacks and soft-drinks in-between.

Attendees in the expo area

The conference boasted an exposition area with booths for 40 sponsoring organizations, including VMware and Platinum Sponsors HP, Hitachi Data Systems and Riverbed. In addition to the conference-opening general sessions featuring VMware veteran Irish Spring and EMC’s Chad Sakac, 22 breakout sessions were presented across 5 tracks of interest: VMware, Backup, Network, Storage & Cloud.

Gold Sponsor EMC also provided 6 stations for cloud-based hands-on labs, hosted using VMware’s premier cloud computing services from the sponsor’s Durham, NC datacenter: proof that cloud computing’s promise can be fulfilled.

vBeers with the vStorage ExpertsVMUG events are all about “serious fun,” and nothing showcased it better than the final 90 minutes of the event. Thanks to Platinum Sponsor Riverbed, a panel session titled “vBeers with the vStorage Experts” concluded the educational portion of the day with an “open mike” format where storage questions and various beers were served to attendees and panelists Eric Siebert (HP), Nick Rieker (Dell Compellent), David Robertson (EMC), Theron Conrey (Nexenta), Scott Baker (NetApp) and Pieter Teeling (Dell Equallogic). Irish Spring’s deft moderation of the session kept the mood light, and attendees that were willing to stand up and ask questions for the panel found themselves with the additional reward of random goodies from ThinkGeek that the VMUG team had on hand.

Additional goodies in the form of ThinkGeek items, copies of Scott Lowe’s Mastering vSphere 5 and Mike Laverick’s Administering VMware SRM5 books, and various high-desire electronic devices like Apple iPads were raffled off to the ~100 remaining, dedicated attendees from both sponsors and VMUG prize bags.

Special thanks from the local VMUG leadership team to Ashley Netzler and the Arrowhead event & catering staff, the Chicago-based Global VMUG support staff (Amy, Frances, Victor, Bret, Dave), and of course, the Platinum, Gold and Silver sponsors, without which we couldn’t have made it happen.

Keynote Session with Chad Sakac

2011-12-06T17:44:51Z

This morning, EMC’s Chad “Virtualgeek” Sakac addressed a crowd of nearly 300 from the 450+ attendees of the Regional VMware User Conference in Kansas City, held at Arrowhead Stadium, home to the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs.

Whether you missed the keynote or not, Chad shared his slide deck with us for general distribution.

Midwest Regional, 6-Dec-2011

2011-12-06T06:11:20Z

Midnight has been passed, and it’s officially zero-day for the Midwest Regional VMUG, held in Kansas City at the nationally-reknowned Arrowhead stadium, home to NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs!

The stadium was renovated around 13 months ago, and the Regional meeting will be one of the largest events—outside of NFL football, of course—to be held at the stadium.

If you’re interested in more history on the venue, what better place to look than the Arrowhead website!

The entrance to the event is the “Tower Club” entrance, on the South side of the stadium. If you’re new to the venue, you’ll be aiming for Parking Lot E as the primary choice for parking. If that is full (or you have a problem with stairs!), you’ll want to choose Parking Lot D instead.

The most direct access to Lot E is Gate 5, off Raytown Road. While it may appear that there’s no access from the I-435/Raytown Road offramp, a quick u-turn will have you passing the Chiefs Practice facility and on to Lot E in short order. If you’re approaching the stadium from any other direction, you still want to aim for the south side of the stadium: given the weather forecast, you really don’t want to walk from any other parking lots if you can avoid it.

This is the third all-day, regional-class event to be hosted in Kansas City, and the KC VMUG is incredibly proud to have grown—roughly doubling each year—from our humble roots at Cerner’s Riverpoint facility in 2009.

Local Event: Starfire's "IT Strategy Lab"

2011-09-28T19:23:52Z

Local VMware partner Starfire Technologies is hosting their annual “IT Strategy Lab” on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at Johnson County Community College. This all-day seminar will be of interest to VMUG members; there is both a storage management and a virtualization track on the schedule.

Registration Open for 22-Sept-2011 Meeting

2011-09-09T19:04:00Z

With all the chaos of going to Las Vegas for VMworld, your leaders at the KC VMUG did the unthinkable: we forgot to get the registration page opened for the next meeting!

That’s been corrected, and you can register now. We meet at Boulevard Brewing Company’s Muehlbach Suite, and we kick it all off at 1:30pm with “vBeers with vBen,” an open discussion session primarily aimed at new users, but everyone is invited.

The agenda includes a presentation from EMC’s backup team on leveraging “changed block tracking” to supercharge your VM backup scheme.

We’ll also have a rundown of VMware’s recent announcements, directions and a recap of other cool bits from VMworld 2011.

See you there!

Reminder: Midwest Regional on December 6

2011-09-06T15:01:58Z

Check your calendar; if you don’t have Tuesday, December 6 2011 reserved to come to the Midwest Regional VMUG Conference, hosted by the Kansas City VMware User Group at Arrowhead Stadium, now is a great time to do so!

Registration for the event is open, and we have a great slate of vendors and presenters on board to make a great day for the event.

Plan to stay the whole day! Don’t just come for an hour or two; don’t come for the morning and skip the afternoon! We have cool stuff in the works for the entire day; it will be worth your while to stick around…

VMworld 2011 session: VSP1823, Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler

2011-08-29T14:16:49Z

DRS—Distributed Resource Scheduler—for VM workloads has been a part of VMware since VI3. The concept is that vCenter can evaluate the utilization of the compute and memory resource consumption for each host in a cluster (with DRS enabled). Based on policies you set, DRS can automatically initiate vMotion to migrate VMs to balance the workload across hosts in the cluster or evacuate guests from a host in order to place it into standby.

Storage DRS (sDRS) is one of the new features added to vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus, and its impact on storage utilization should be just as ground-breaking as it’s predecessor, Host DRS (hDRS).

I attended the breakout VSP1823/sDRS by Manish Lohani and Anne Holler, VMware Product Manager and Engineering, respectively.

As one might expect, sDRS is the logical product of Storage vMotion under the control of DRS. In conjunction with SIOC (storage I/O control)—which helps to throttle the storage access within the confines of a single datastore—sDRS takes historical and instantaneous data on storage performance and redistributes VMDKs for a VM to different datastores within a storage cluster.

The sDRS product team started with a basic problem statement: storage placement is not automated. This applies for both VM creation as well as VM growth. In summary, sDRS intends to solve the following three problems that otherwise must be managed manually.

VMDK Placement
Avoiding out-of-space conditions
I/O load balancing

In a well-balanced cluster and storage environment, it’s possible to create a new workload on a datastore that then causes that datastore to become a performance bottleneck. Other than removing the offending workload completely, the administrator must determine the new location for the load without merely tranferring the problem along with the VMDKs. Today, that process can be trial-and-error, or the use of such over-powered datastores that one never gets into the problem in the first place.

Further, a cluster & storage that is well-balanced today may become unbalanced through utilization, when no new workloads have been added to the system.

Finally, I/O load patterns may be “bursty” or otherwise cyclic; without a history, a datastore could be performing acceptably when administrators are making storage decisions, while peak utilization could make the performance of the datastore unacceptable.

In order to perform its magic, sDRS introduces “datastore cluster” as a new management object. Like a host cluster, multiple datastores can be added to a cluster that is then managed by vCenter as a single resource pool. For that reason, clusters you create should be comprised of similar-performing datastores; in the hDRS analogy, you don’t put dissimilar hosts (e.g. Intel & AMD based systems) together in a host cluster.

The relationship between host clusters and storage clusters is many-to-many; the boundaries for both are the vCenter instance. Ideally, the configuration would include fully-connected hosts and datastores, but it is not a requirement; sDRS “understands” the partially-connected environment, however, and takes that into account when making recommendations.

In almost every other way, sDRS is equivalent to hDRS:

Affinity rules for maintaining two (or more) VMDKs on the same datastore.
Anti-affinity rules for separating two (or more) VMDKs across different datastores in the cluster.
Maintenance mode on a member datastore will cause sDRS to evacuate the VMDKs to other datastores in the cluster.

Unlike hDRS, the creation of a VM on sDRS-enabled datastores offers a wealth of options for suggesting a target for VMDKs, all of which can be overridden.

Another way that sDRS differs from hDRS is the way the automation is “tuned”; with hDRS, the administrator has a setting for “how aggressive” it will manage the load on the hosts. sDRS gives more granular controls than hDRS with it’s “stars rating”.

Finally, sDRS differs from hDRS by defaulting to non-automatic operations, where hDRS defaults to “full auto.” In fact, automation is actively discouraged for certain types of SAN environments; environments where optimization and load balancing are done “in the background” (e.g., EMC FAST or Equallogic multi-member storage pools).

And, as one might expect, the implementation of sDRS means a number of new managemet views and performance graphs have been added to vCenter.

Guest Post: Traveling to Conferences

2011-08-28T10:33:17Z

In the IT field, continuing education is critical to both personal and professional success; professional success should also translate into success for the businesses for which we work. Education can come in many forms, from reading books and trade magazines to attending classes and seminars. Doing any of these things on-line is fine; getting out of the office and sitting down next to your peers adds the additional benefit of connecting you with folks who may be struggling with the same challenges as you. You may also find that you are doing the helping, instead of being helped.

Attending a good conference is a way to get a concentrated dose of seminars and classes with a chaser of networking thrown in for good measure. And traveling out-of-town gives you the additional opportunity to set aside your normal routine and get immersed in the environs.

I typically budget for a couple of conferences each year, and I’ve been going to the same ones for a while. Contrary to any belief that “the same old stuff” is presented at annual meetings, the ones I’ve attended have updated, fresh things to learn every time; and as a bonus, I tend to see the same folks coming back, year after year. Not only does that make for great networking and friendships, it helps validate that the conference is a good one.

VMworld is one of those conferences, and I’m back for my fourth year.

It’s early yet for the schedule as I write this post; registration isn’t open for another 7 hours. But in the 14+ hours that I’ve already been here, I’ve reconnected with guys I’ve known for a while and met a bunch of cool, new folks who share my passion for IT and VMware. I’ve already learned some things, too.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m here for the tech. But in the course of relaxing before the business of the conference gets going, I joined a number of fellow attendees at a sushi bar. For the folks that know me, I’m sure you’re surprised. I’m a straight-up steak-and-potatoes kind of guy, and the thought of eating little bits of raw fish and seaweed is kind of nauseating.

So I followed my own advice: when you get out for a conference, you set aside the routine and push yourself to learn something new.

As it turns out, I learned that sushi isn’t all bad; in fact, the “spicy tuna” was pretty darned good.

So this conference is off to an auspicious beginning: my travel wasn’t marred by weather problems (my condolences to all those folks affected by Irene!), and I’ve learned something that I’d have never learned had I skipped the conference and stayed home.

(In the spirit of full disclosure: after the sushi bar, I went to another restaurant and made a filling meal out of a more substantial dish.)

Jim Millard is a member of the KC VMUG Leadership team. You can follow his exploits in his blog or on twitter.

VMworld 2011

2011-08-26T00:56:52Z

The 7th annual VMworld conference is set to kick off on Monday, August 29, 2011 in Las Vegas. The leadership for the Kansas City VMUG will be at the event, and we’ll be sending reports back as your “roving reporters.”