VMworld 2017 Stardate -1

Well here I am at my 3^rd VMworld in Barcelona, and I’m thrilled to say that I’m here this year as one of the official VExpert Bloggers. It must be true as it says it here on my badge.

So I arrived early yesterday to take advantage of a few days in the sun only to find that it was raining!

But today was more of a typical Barcelona day so we decided to spend the time at the beach, after all it was a lovely day.

There are two highlights for coming to VMworld on the Sunday; one is registration and the other is the vRockstar Party, unfortunately demand for the tickets is unbelievable and I was unable to get a ticket this year.

The main highlight for me was getting my badge and of course this years rucksack, so what’s in the rucksack you ask? Well there are no surprises, it’s the rucksack, the water bottle (sponsored by Hewlett Packard which is different) and the customary tee-shirt and notebook. Don’t forget that if you go to the Info desk at the front right of the registration area you can get your badge scanned for a free T10 metro and bus pass.

Tomorrow is the first day and is traditionally the partner day so as I not a partner I’m looking forward to a serious amount of time in the VMvillage, attending some hands on labs, and networking at the VMTN and Blogging areas. It goes without saying that I will be hitting the Cloudcred challenges quite hard tomorrow as well and catching up with Noell Grier the Cloudcred admin.

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Free NetApp Training

Well time for my first post of 2017, I had such good plans for Christmas, produce some blog posts, reply to some emails and get some studying done. Well you guessed it, nothing much achieved over the Christmas period. In my defence I was in the office for two of the three days so I only really had a couple of long weekends.

However some small steps were made, I did reply to all the comments made on the blog, I did spend some time going through my mailbox and I have started some studying but that’s another blog post.

In going through my mailbox I found an excellent resource on Netapp and other Storage that I don’t know why I didn’t publish its existence sooner.

I had an email from a new blogger Neil Anderson who wanted to make me aware of his blog at www.flackbox.com where you can find lots of NetApp material and even a free course on San and NAS storage. But then his biggest achievement is he’s written a free eBook on How to Build a NetApp ONTAP 9 Lab… For Free!

Let me just put that in perspective: he’s put together a 117 page eBook that will teach you how to build a fully virtualized storage lab. It features a couple of NetApp ONTAP9 clusters, plus Windows and Linux clients, and is networked using a VyOS router. The best thing about it is you can put it together and run it on your laptop completely for free.The detailed step by step walkthrough points you to where to download all of the required software and shows you how to handle the configuration of all components. Critical (but little documented) adaptations such as adding virtual SSD drives and extra storage space are also covered.

The lab supports most of the features you’d encounter in a production setting. You’ll be prepared to implement iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, storage Thin Provisioning, Deduplication and Compression, Snapshots, and FlexClone among others, and exercise the replication technologies SnapMirror and SnapVault.

The blog is frequently updated with new NetApp training videos which teach you how to configure the features in the lab.

So I suggest that if you’re interested in all things NetApp you go and take a look sometime.

Evo:Rail Challenge

We have been having a challenge at work to see who can get a Ticket to VMworld by entering the EVO:Rail challenge, This is a challenge to complete a VMware HOL in the quickest time, so I’m pleased to say that one of my colleagues at work has won this very challenge and is off to VMworld , so it just goes to show people that its possible to win these challenges

So a big congratulations to Ryan Harris, Ryan is one of the most passionate guys I know about VMware, he is a regular blogger and his blog can be found here.