Is VMware Site Recovery Manager Really Worth It?

Following on from yesterdays post ‘10 Questions With Craig Kilborn‘ VMware have posted my first article on the Bloggers Bench

It’s not a ‘true’ technical article, more along the lines of why use technology to met your business objects.

From the Bloggers Bench: Is VMware Site Recovery Manager Really Worth It?

Let’s start off with a cheery fact ‘the U.S. Department of Labor estimates over 40% of businesses never reopen following a disaster. Of the remaining companies, at least 25% will close within 2 years. Over 60% of businesses confronted by a major disaster close by two years, according to the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (information source).

A question I’m asked a lot is do I really need DR? Well reading the above statement, I hope the answer is yes, but in all reality the actual answer is, it depends.  OK that is probably the most ‘woolly’ thing anyone in IT can say, we like hard and fast, black and white rules as engineers dammit!

For example, you may work for a company that has no on premise IT, you use a cloud based platform for your accounts, CRM and HR packages and you use hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync as your communication pieces, would you need DR, well the answer is probably not.

What about if you work for a company with a vSphere environment which can cater for two host failures and has redundancy on every level.  This is then housed in a Tier 5 Datacenter offering 99.999% uptime, with the usual battery backed generators, diverse internet links, fire suppression systems and environmental monitoring.  Connectivity is provided by diverse links to the datacentre, would you need DR then? Possibly as it depends on how the company views risk, if I was a betting man, I would say in most scenarios DR wouldn’t be necessary.

Read the rest of the article here

10 Questions With…Craig Kilborn

Seems quite strange writing a blog post about myself.

A little while ago VMware SMB contacted me after seeing my series on ‘Configuring Site Recovery Manager (SRM) with HP StoreVirtual VSA’ and wondered if I would contribute on the SMB site.  Naturally, I was more than happy to be considered!

Part of the process was to answer 10 questions about your truly, it’s perhaps one of the hardest things that I have done, give me a technical article any day.

If you want to know a little bit more about me and how I got into VMware check out this link

My First UK VMUG

Like many who use VMware products, I had heard about the VMware User Group but had not had the opportunity to attend due to various work commitments.  For those of you who are unaware, they are organised by the community, and people give up there time to orchestrate the event, which I for one applaud.

So, what’s it like? Well the easiest answer is ‘a mini VMworld, but for free’!

On arrival you perform the normal sign in process and then you are greeted by free tea and coffee.  What a great start to the day.

We then got chaperoned to the opening keynote from Joe Baguley who is the Chief Technologist for VMware EMEA.  This guy rocked, very witty and informative about the future roadmap that VMware has.

After this you can either choose to go to the (did I mention free) seminars or you can go the vendor hall.  I decided to go to a Veeam session ‘5 Ways Smart VM Backups May Surprise You’ did I learn something from this? absolutely.

We then had a thirty minute break to give you time to mingle with vendors or other like minded people, and drink some more (free) tea.

The next session I chose to attend was hosted by Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping which was a ‘Deep Dive Group Discussion’ they did an excellent job of translating business issues faced and some of the ways to overcome them.  I mean how often do you get to ask questions you have to industry experts?

Lunch was a great buffet spread which catered for pretty much everything you need (again for free).

In the afternoon, I attended a session hosted by Darren Woollard which was to design an infrastructure for a fictional company.  This lead to a decent debate of what servers, storage, switches and vSphere configuration should be used.  This was of particular interest for me, as it’s great to validate design ideas with your peers.  A worthy mention to Darren for then answering a number of my questions for what I’m sure seemed like an age to him!

I was keen to attend the session by Julian Wood on ‘vSphere Networking and Converged IO with Blade Servers’ as with 10GbE becoming more and more affordable it’s something that I will  be deploying in the not so distant future.  Julian did an outstanding job and he does know his ‘networking onions’.

The closing keynote was from industry heavy weight (not by size) Scott Lowe, again doing an awesome job of trying to educate us on how to ‘Stay Sharp and Relevant in IT’.

So in summary it was an action packed day, which I was overwhelmed with not only by how organised and professional it was but also by the number of industry leaders who the UK VMUG had arranged to attend.  Awesome job UK VMUG.

Social Media

For the social media folks, some twitter handles and websites

Joe Baguley @JoeBaguley

Duncan Epping @DuncanYB http://yellow-bricks.com/

Frank Denneman @FrankDenneman http://frankdenneman.nl/

Jane Rimmer @Rimmergram http://hiviz-marketing.com

Darren Woollard @dawoo http://blog.vmote.net

Scott Lowe @scott_lowe http://blog.scottlowe.org

Julian Wood @julian_wood http://woodITwork.com

Simon Gallagher @vinf_net http://vinf.net

UK VMUG Meeting – Thursday 15 November 2012

Registration for the next UK VMUG is still open folks, lot’s of industry heavy weights will be on hand to share there words of wisdom with us.

As you can see it’s a proper impressive line up.  Details below taken from www.vmug.com

So what are you waiting for? Get involved, by registering here

TIME                 TYPE  EVENT LOCATION
8:00 – 8:30 Registration | Breakfast | Mingle with Vendors Trafalgar Foyer
8:30 – 9:00 Keynote VMUG Welcome | Alaric Davies Britannia Suite
9:00 – 9:45 Keynote VMware Keynote | Joe Baguley | Software Defined Data Centre, Weapon or Necessary Evil? Britannia Suite
9:45 – 10:00 Break|Mingle with Vendors Imperial Suite
10:00 – 10:45 Breakout Block #1 | Education Sessions
Sponsor Nimble Storage | Stress-Free Data Protection for VMware and VDI Bracebridge Suite
Sponsor Veeam | 5 Ways Smart VM Backups May Surprise You Ballacraine Suite
Sponsor Teradici | How to Enhance Your VDI Experience Waterloo Suite
Sponsor Trend Micro | Security at Every Stage: Trend Micro, VMware and Your Journey to the Cloud Britannia Suite
Community Ricky El-Qasem | Creating VMware Apps for Novice Programmers Kirkmichael Suite
10:45- 11:15 Break | Mingle with Vendors Imperial Suite
11:15 – 12:00 Breakout Block #2 | Education Sessions
VMware Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman | Deep-Dive Discussion Group Bracebridge Suite
VMware Hugo Phan and Aidan Dalgleish | VCDX Boot Camp Ballacraine Suite
VMware Alan Renouf and William Lam | Practical Automation for Everyone Waterloo Suite
VMware Matthew Steiner | What’s New in vSphere 5.1 Britannia Suite
Community Chris Dearden | A Techie’s Guide to Getting the Most Out of IT Support Kirkmichael Suite
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch | Mingle with Vendors Imperial Suite
13:00 – 13:45 Breakout Block #3 | Education Sessions
Sponsor Fusion-io |  Flash as a Cache – Rethinking Virtualisation Bracebridge Suite
Sponsor Embotics | Lessons Learned in Deploying Private Clouds Ballacraine Suite
Sponsor Coraid | Server Virtualization Demands a New Storage Architecture Waterloo Suite
Sponsor Quantum | The 7 Questions You Must Ask Before Buying a VM Protection Product Britannia Suite
Community Mike Laverick | Building my vCloud Director Home Lab Kirkmichael Suite
13:45 – 14:15 Break | Mingle with Vendors Imperial Suite
14:15 – 15:00 Breakout Block #4 | Education Sessions
VMware Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman | Deep-Dive Discussion Group Bracebridge Suite
VMware Cormac Hogan | VMware Storage Update – 5.1: Storage Features and Storage Futures Ballacraine Suite
VMware Aidan Dalgleish | vCloud Director DR Waterloo Suite
VMware Tom O’Rourke and Kim Raynard | Dynamic Ops – Cloud Automation Britannia Suite
Community Tom Howarth | Deep Dive on Desktop Design for VDI Kirkmichael Suite
15:00 – 15:15 Break | Mingle with Vendors Imperial Suite
15:15 – 16:00 Breakout Block #5 | Education Sessions
Sponsor Whiptail | Flash 101 – The Physics and Stuff Bracebridge Suite
Sponsor Hitachi Data Systems | Storage Systems Basics for Virtualized Environments Ballacraine Suite
Sponsor VMTurbo | Can You Manage Your Virtual Infrastructure so That Optimized Performance and High Resource Utilization are Not Mutually Exclusive? Waterloo Suite
Sponsor iLand | vCloud Services: IT’s Secret Weapon Britannia Suite
Community Julian Wood | vSphere Networking and Converged IO with Blade Servers Kirkmichael Suite
16:00 – 16:15 Break | Mingle with Vendors Imperial Suite
16:15 – 16:45 Keynote Closing Keynote | Scott Lowe | Staying Sharp and Relevant in IT Britannia Suite
16:45 – 17:00 Prize Draws Britannia Suite

VMware Hands on Labs Online

A really quick blog post, VMware have announced some exciting news, that they will soon be offering Labs Online.

Previously to use these labs you had to attend a VMware event of some description, but now they will be available online.

The purpose behind this is to give end users the ability to use and explore the latest VMware products.

For more information see VMware Hands on Labs Online – Beta