On the 3rd of June we had our second South West UK VMUG and I am pleased to say it went superbly well. As before we held it at the Mshed facilities in Bristol. We had a great day with many sessions from sponsors,vendors and community speakers alike! Big thanks go to our speakers that day who were.. Justin Rohan - @justinrohan - Nimble Storage - Sponsor James Smith - @james55smith - PernixData - Sponsor Julian Regel - @jr_on_the_cloud - Community session on vCD Adam Bohle - @adambohle - VMware - vCAC session Jonathan Medd - @jonathanmedd - Community session on PowerCLI/Automation Richard Munro - @RikMunro - VMware - vCHS Session One of the South West UK VMUG leaders Barry Coombs took a fantastic time lapse video of the day which can be viewed on his blog site.

I was recently sent a copy of Christian Mohn’s new book “Learning Veeam Backup and Replication for VMware vSphere” to review, and as ever this is my honest opinion of this book. I am not receiving anything other than the copy of the book for this review. I don’t work for a vendor, so I have no axe to grind! Content The book starts of with explanations of basic backup strategies and explains principals like Grandfather-Father-Son media rotation and RPO/RTOs.

Recently I had the good fortune to be invited along to a blogger briefing with Satyam Vaghani CTO and Co-founder of PernixData. Those of you not in the know Satyam already has quite the track record, more notably for authoring 50+ patents, Principle engineer and Storage CTO for VMware (10 years). So it is safe to say he knows a thing or two about storage and related technology! Nine of us (bloggers) were in attendance.

Yesterday saw another fantastic London VMUG with lots of quality sessions and opportunities to network with peers and friends. The committee seem to do a fantastic job every time and this one was no exception, so thanks to Alaric Davies, Jane Rimmer, Stuart Thompson and Simon Gallagher! One of the best things for me about the VMUG is the chance to chat with some of the smartest and most influential people in the VMware world – a trip to the coffee table provided a great opportunity to “chew the vfat” with two of the VMUG’s biggest characters, Mike Laverick and Ricky El-Qasem – all before any sessions had started.

This was the second online event I have attended in the last few months, the first being the VMUG Virtual event back in January. One of the aspects I enjoyed the most about that event was being able to chat to many well known and familiar faces from the wider community. In this recent event there was a lot of focus on the various offerings from VMware with a good deal of focus on VSAN, NSX, Horizon and vCHS but certainly not neglecting their other offerings.

I recently came across Infinio and after reading about the unique way it tackled the problem of increasing I/O and reducing latency I was curious to see how it would perform in my lab. A few things I would like to point out. First of all Infinio works only with NFS storage, secondly it does not require flash storage as it utilizes the host RAM instead however it provides only read acceleration.

I recently got my hands on a copy* of Chris Wahl and Steve Pantol’s Networking for VMware Administrators and was very keen to read it – especially given the reputation of the authors. I came to the book as someone who is at CCNA level (although now expired) and someone who regularly designs complex VMware networks using standard and distributed switches. I would class myself as having a fairly decent understanding of networking, though not a networking specialist.

It was with great honor both Sam and I were awarded vExpert 2014 (my first and Sam’s second award!) we are both proud to be listed alongside so many others in the vExpert programme. You can view the announcement and the full list here - http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2014/04/vexpert-2014-announcement.html

One of the things that never fails to amaze me are the superb PDF diagrams I occasionally stumble upon so i thought it would be a useful idea to list some of the the ones I have found on my travels. vSphere 6 ESXTOP quick Overview for Troubleshooting http://www.running-system.com/images/2015/04/ESXTOP_vSphere6.pdf VMware vSphere 5 Memory Management and Monitoring diagram http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2017642 Concepts and best practices in Resource Pools http://federicocinalli.com/blog/item/194-concepts-and-best-practices-in-resource-pools#.Uzre1_ldV8F Network port diagram for vSphere 6.

Recently I have had the pleasure to use PernixData but I did come across a bit of a ‘gotcha’ after uninstalling it from my hosts. If like me you use iSCSI then you will likely spend a bit of time setting up your Path Selection Polices to suit your specific needs, so it was interesting to note the following. When you do uninstall and remove PernixData from your hosts your Path Selection Polices do not revert back to your original configuration rather they revert back to the default vSphere setting of MRU (Most recently used).