Charles Gardner, Sterling Ideas Inc, IT Consultant » Virtualization

Orlando VMUG for 3rd Quarter

Charles Gardner — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:15:42 +0000

The next Orlando VMUG meeting is scheduled for August 25th from 6pm-9pm.

Here are the details:

Date: August 25, 2011
Time: 6pm-9pm
Location:Z88.3
1065 Rainer Drive
Altomonte Springs, FL 32714

Go to the registration page for details and to register for the event.

Tampa Area VMUG Meeting April 7

Charles Gardner — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:25:29 +0000

I recently attended the Tampa Area VMWare User Group 2011 spring meeting held April 7th at TechData in Clearwater. There were valuable user presentations from the Hillsborough County Tax Collector’s office and Tampa Bay Water on their virtualization implementations. Symantec and Wyse presented vendor segments. I found the Wyse live demo of their thin clients in a View environment to be very useful.

You can pick up all the presentations from the VMWare Communities.

Tampa Bay VMUG Meeting May 19

Charles Gardner — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:55:59 +0000

The next Tampa area VMWare User Group meeting is scheduled for May 19th at TechData in Clearwater. The agenda looks to be heavy on View so it could be interesting.

Here are the details:

Location: Tech Data Corporation

5350 Tech Data Drive

Clearwater, Fl. 33760

Raymund Center Building, Seminar Room #3

Date: Wednesday, May 19, 2010.

Time: 5:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Snacks will be available to all attendees and Door prizes will be awarded at the close of this meeting.

For the full agenda go to the VMWare Communities:

Tampa Bay VMUG Agenda 2010-05-19

vSphere Hardening Guide

Charles Gardner — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:56:35 +0000

VMWare released a first public draft of their vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide. They are soliciting feedback on this draft for the next month. Assumably we will see a final version in the spring.

The guide is broken into several PDFs covering different topics:

Take a look and give VMWare some feedback.

Why A Client Hypervisor Matters More Than You Realize

Charles Gardner — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:00:56 +0000

In the not-too-distant future, the availability of solid client hypervisors will dramatically shift the way we deliver IT, particularly in the SMB space. This XenClient page at Citrix.com does a great job demonstrating this. Be sure to watch the video while you’re there.

The client hypervisor’s impact will quickly eclipse the impact of the server hypervisor in many ways:

Consumerization: A common client hypervisor will be the platform by which IT can fulfill the promises of consumerization. A new employee already has a personal laptop? Great, just load the corporate VM onto their machine alongside their personal VM. Eventually we may even be able to do the same thing with their phone (see VMWare’s Mobile Virtualization Platform).
Standardization: With a hypervisor abstracting the physical host, a single VM image can be deployed across dissimilar hardware platforms, radically expanding the application of standardization. Rather than needing a separate client image for each hardware model, images can be created based directly on the usage case without regard for the underlying hardware. This will further align the standard image to the user’s needs.
Security: The ability to isolate tasks of dissimilar natures into separate VMs at the client endpoint will provide an additional layer of protection. For a task such as web browsing, which must be considered inherently risky, I would look to stand up and tear down a VM on a regular basis, possibly per session.
Flexibility: Hardware upgrades could become as simple as copying a VM from one machine to another. The IT department could easily issue a “loaner” PC or laptop for the user’s VM to run on while physical failures are fixed.

While client hypervisors will inevitably introduce new and complex problems of their own, I look forward to the opportunity to apply them to solve real problems in new and elegant ways.

VMWare Users Group Tampa and Orlando

Charles Gardner — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:02:04 +0000

I had the pleasure of attending the VMWare Users Group (VMUG) quarterly meetings in both Tampa and Orlando recently.

The Tampa VMUG meeting was held April 16th at the Southwest Florida Water Management District offices. It was an informative meeting, including vendor presentations from LeftHand SAN (HP) and Riverbed.

The Orlando VMUG was May 28th at the Everest University campus. Coming right after the vSphere launch, the discussion was interesting as was the presentation by Vizioncore.

The next Tampa meeting should be in July and include EMC, VMWare, and DataDomain (per VMUG discussion).