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Monthly Archives: April 2012

A Successful Silicon Valley VMUG User Conference

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A few weeks ago we blogged about the Silicon Valley VMUG User Conference that was held on Wednesday, April 11 and it was a great hit. VMware Labs premiered at this event, Mike Laverick was the morning keynote and Steve Herrod, VMware’s CTO, was the afternoon keynote speaker. Over 520 attendees were present for this event, and 30% of them work at small or medium sized businesses. Overall, we were very happy with this exciting and successful event! If you are interested in attending a VMUG event, visit the calendar to see when a user conference will be coming to a city near you. 

VMUG

VMware End-User Computing Virtual Conference

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Banner_compvirtconference
Please Join VMware as we discuss the next step forward in end-user computing for the post-PC era.

Watch Vittorio Viarengo, VP of End-User Computing, discuss the latest advancements in the VMware End-User Computing Platform. Understand how VMware provides solutions to simplify traditional technology silos, enable policy driven management, and connect people to technology and each other in new and collaborative ways. 

This event will provide you with an opportunity to:

  • Attend a live keynote from the VMware leadership team
  • Learn about the latest innovations in the VMware End-User Computing Portfolio
  • Chat with VMware End-User Computing product experts
  • Network with peers

We look forward to seeing you there,

The VMware End-User Computing Team

VMworld 2012!

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Be a part of VMworld 2012—the place for technology and business professionals looking to increase business value and competitive edge, while decreasing time and money spent supporting underlying infrastructure.

Tell Your Story

Have you integrated VMware solutions and technologies in an innovative or unconventional way? Share your story at VMworld 2012 by submitting your session today.      

Describe your experiences and best practices. Include practical advice, key success factors, data points, an in-depth explanation of the challenges you've solved, and lessons learned on topics related to IT infrastructure, cloud operations, applications and end-user computing.


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SMB Success Stories – Myron Steves and Company Slashes Disaster Recover Costs with VMware

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VMware Brandon Sweeney 2009Hi, for those of you that don’t know me, I’m Brandon Sweeney and I lead VMware’s U.S. Mid-Market & Small Business Customer Segment.  I joined VMware 8 years ago and most recently have been running our Americas Partners Organization, serving all our Partner RTMs and Customer Segments.  With our Partner Led model in SMB, leading the Mid-Market and Small Business Segment is a natural extension of my experience and a business for which I am very passionate. 

While we already have tens hundreds of thousands of SMB customers today, we’re building the SMB Business Unit to deliver even greater focus on the needs of Small and Mid-Size Businesses.  Our goal is simple – we want to provide solutions that drive Real Advantage for our Customers by simplifying their IT environments and making IT a competitive advantage for their business.

When I talk with customers, I am always impressed with their stories and wanted to share one with you.  Myron F. Steves and Company is a Houston-based insurance wholesaler that deployed virtualization and cloud solutions from VMware to help ensure the company’s 200 employees can respond to customers should disaster strike.  Myron Steves serves more than 3,000 independent insurance agencies and as  you can imagine, they cannot afford the risk of being incapacitated in the event of a disaster. With the virtualized architecture enabled by VMware, Myron Steves is able to fail over to backup servers within hours instead of days – server failover is now a reliable process and the company has reduced IT costs significantly. 

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Want to simplify your IT? Virtualize it!

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Hello, again! Hope everyone did well with their NCAA Tournament picks. Now that the hoopla of March Madness and the first quarter is behind us, it’s time to get down to business and ensure a successful 2012. RobChen_SmProfile_

Last time, we looked at how virtualization can help address the challenges that small and medium-sized businesses are facing by delivering:

  • Infrastructure consolidation and cost savings
  • Application high-availability and business continuity
  • Simplification of server resource and application management
  • Security and centralized patch management
  • A building block for leveraging cloud computing

Now, let’s look at how easy it is to get started with virtualization in four easy steps.

Step 1. Check that your server hardware has the minimum requirements to support virtualization. Below is a list of the hardware requirements:

1

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Patch Tuesday Overview from Jason Miller

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Microsoft has released six bulletins addressing 11 vulnerabilities in the April 2012 version of Patch Tuesday.

Jason Miller

Marking the fourth Patch Tuesday of the year, Microsoft and non-Microsoft vendors are making this quite an interesting month with critical security bulletins and new products to consider in your monthly Patch Tuesday.

There are many products that are affected by the new security bulletins. This means you will be seeing quite a few patches missing on a single machine.  For example, MS12-027 affects 29 different products and service pack levels.  For those administrators responsible for reporting their patch compliance, this can be quite a headache.

As scheduled, Microsoft has released their bi-monthly update for Internet Explorer.  With any browser (Microsoft or non-Microsoft), patching is always on the top of the priority list as Internet browsers are one of the most targeted pieces of software for exploitation.  With Internet Explorer 10 (bundled with Windows 8), Microsoft is turning on automatic updates in the background.  We will have to wait and see if Microsoft increases their patch releases for their browser like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.  Since the last time Microsoft has patched Internet Explorer (February 2012 Patch Tuesday), Google released new updates to their browser seven times.  Five of these releases were security releases.  

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VMware, NetApp and Cisco Enterprise Solution Comes to a Mid-Size Business Near You!

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If you work for one of the growing number global mid-sized businesses (100 – 1,000 employees), you know that it is critical to prioritize activities that contribute to growing the company’s revenue, acquiring new customers, and reducing costs – these are the main (some would say the only) priorities that matter!  It’s not uncommon for employees at mid-size firms to wear multiple hats.  As a result, very small groups of people are often responsible for the company’s entire IT operations (as a full time or just part of their existing job).

Screen shot 2012-04-05 at 9.29.11 AMCommon vision and key attributes of the Cisco, NetApp, and VMware collaboration. 

In my experience these teams often don’t have time or resources to dedicate to complex, poorly integrated IT tools – in the same manner that we expect the electricity and water to “just work”, we expect the same of our IT solution – it must be simple (ie. integrated) & reliable (ie. always-on!).

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