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Join us, along with our sponsors, Cohesity and Ixia for the upcoming Wisconsin VMUG meeting taking place at Fox Valley Technical College on Thursday, August 3rd, 2017.
This is a great opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!
Meeting Agenda
- 8:15 Registration: Refreshments provided by our meeting sponsors Ixia and Cohesity
- 8:45 Welcome: by Mike Nelson, WI-VMUG Co-Leader
- 9:00 VMware Presentation: Migrate to the vCenter Server Appliance, You Should by Heath Johnson, Technical Account Manager at VMware
- The vCenter Server Appliance is the future of vCenter Server. In this session, you will learn about the advantages of the vCenter Server Appliance as well as how to migrate from Windows-based vCenter Server 5.5 or 6.0 to the vCenter Server Appliance 6.x. Gone are the days of having to spend countless hours manually moving ESXi hosts between vCenter Servers, creating scripts to copy your vCenter Sever inventory, and re-registering other products with vCenter Server. Learn about best practices and how to leverage the latest tools from VMware to migrate all configuration settings, inventory, and even vSphere Update Manager seamlessly into a new vCenter Server Appliance.
- Also bring your vSphere upgrade questions!
- 9:50 The Data Management Platform for VMware Infrastructures by Kevin Brztowski, Sr. Systems Engineer at Cohesity
- After spending the last decade consolidating our servers with VMware, we’ve now entered a whole new era of consolidation around secondary storage. As vSphere became more and more prolific, an entire ecosystem was born to integrate with various VMware solutions. Multiple vendors were created, and even existing vendors implemented new solutions to tackle all-new ways to handle Data Protection, Disaster Recovery, DevOps, Analytics, and more! This has led to an extremely fragmented secondary storage landscape making it more and more difficult to leverage cohesive data protection solutions, especially ones that can be repurposed for other activities, empowering the end user to make use of their backups for space-efficient clones and instant recoveries, as opposed to sitting around waiting for something to break. Secondary Storage constitutes 80% of the data footprint in the typical datacenter today. While your primary storage handles your Tier-1 mission-critical workloads, including your VMware vSphere environment, your secondary storage environment is still fragmented among various data protection, automation, and analytics solutions; all of which is bolted together with different requirements, storage solutions, and software providers. As your data grows and the storage market evolves, simplicity and consolidation are no longer nice-to-have adjectives when describing your fractured environment. Learn why converged storage becomes inevitable for virtualized environments and develop an understanding of what will be necessary in this fast evolving corner of the data center.
- 10:40 Break
- 10:55 VMware Presentation: What’s New in Intelligent Operations by Kim Jahnz, Principal Technical Account Manager at VMware
- Managing the data center infrastructure is a multi-faceted task. It involves troubleshooting and management for apps, compute, storage, networking and security, on the virtual and physical infrastructure, across private and public clouds. By leveraging the power of VMware Intelligent Operations with vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight. Learn how integrated solutions in Intelligent Operations can help you identify, decode and root cause a problem even before it impacts your SLAs. Learn about “What’s New” in the latest releases of the vRealize Suite.
- 11:45 Lunch provided by our meeting sponsors Cohesity and Ixia
- 12:15 Community Presentation: Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast by Steve Murawski, Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft
- Looking for a place to get started with some DevOps practices?
- Already trying some tooling and not seeing the return you expected?
- Then, my friend, it’s time we had a chat about pipelines. Now, CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines aren’t necessarily the first thing operations teams look for when attempting to tackle a problem or implement a solution.
- And I’ve heard many of the arguments – with the chief of those being, “I’m not some startup. We don’t deploy changes tens or hundreds of times a day. We deploy every 4 months and we like it (or at least that’s what we have to like contractually).”
- While that may be true, my guess that that your environment changes a bit more than that and the changes that happen outside those well-defined maintenance windows is what ends up causing most of our pain. Adding a pipeline to control the delivery of change forces us to slow down and think about the types of changes we make and how to automate and validate them. Once we’ve done that, making these changes becomes easier and easier. My firearms instructor from the police science program (years ago) had a saying which captures this, “Slow is Smooth, and Smooth is Fast”. By making our change process smooth, we put ourselves in a place where we can consistently deliver change on demand. CI/CD is about speed and readiness, not only about volume.
- Join me for a chat about why building a pipeline for infrastructure changes, especially in slow environments, is both possible and extremely rewarding. We’ll also look at some tooling to help make standing up those pipelines easy enough that we can try it over a lunch break.
- 1:05 tbd by presenter, title at Ixia
- 1:55 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
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- 2:35 Wrap-up: Announcements and Drawings
Be sure to share this meeting information with your colleagues, and join the Wisconsin VMUG Community!
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