VMTN Blog

We're back with the first podcast of the year in our weekly series the VMware Community Roundtable. For the VCR series, we gather a set of community leaders for our panel and welcome everyone to join in live to call in or just chat. We had an outstanding set of attendees for our hour of conversation today. This week was podcast #30 and we had an open agenda.

As always, listen via the widget on the right or by downloading the mp3. More info. We are available on iTunes. Here are some of the topics we covered:

• Eric Siebert's Open Letter to VMware (QA, naming, pricing, and more)
• VMware finally releases product pages for the new products, announced at VMworld, that will be relased in 2009.
• paid subscriptions available for VMworld.com 
• vRanger Pro supports ESXi. Quest Software's Scott Herold, who was on the podcast, did some marketing, but only when I pushed him.
• we declare 2009 to be the year of automation
  • Getting Started with PowerShell and PowerGUI in your Virtual Infrastructure from Scott Herold @ VMGuru
  • Add Custom Fields to VI Client with Powershell (Samples) from Hugo Peeters
  • Head over to the VI Toolkit (for Windows) blog or just Google Powershell VMware for more.
  • One of the new products mentioned above Rod Haywood just blogged about after our podcast: Get ready for vCenter Orchestrator. We never really got to Orchestrator during the chat, however.
• then we talked cloud
  • The maturity model for cloud computing - 2009, the year of automation from Rod Haywood
  • Cloud computing explanation that anyone can understand nice video from GoGrid's Michael Sheehan
  • Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Amazon, a tale of future historical perspective on security from Michael Mucha
  • This just in: James Urquhart: The biggest cloud computing issue of 2009 is trust
• VMware User Groups
  • main VMUG page
  • VMware User Groups from Jason Boche
  • Roger Lund wants to start his own VMUG in St Cloud, Minn. Contact him if you're interested. If you don't have a local group, first talk to VMware, and then if there isn't a close one, start checking out other technology user groups, talk to local IT consultants, see what kind of activity you can stir up.
• increasing vMotion performance by increasing the number you do at once from Simon Long in Boche's blog. Kudos for this cowboy tip from all the podcast attendees.
• Why you shouldn’t restore VMware ESX from a backup by Edward Haletky. Again, lots of agreement from the crowd. See also:
  • ESX Deployment Appliance and an update on EDA v0.85, articles from Duncan Epping about an appliance by Herco van Brug
  • statelesx
  • host profiles demo video, announced at VMworld 2008
• new VMware COO Tod Nielsen
• our VMware community acknowledgment program, which may be called VMware Virtual Professional, or perhaps something else entirely, is still simmering on the burner, more soon.

And a disclaimer: I'm always speaking only for myself on these podcasts, not for VMware. Or as Rod Haywood says: "as John is in marketing, nothing he says can really be taken to mean anything real. :-)"

Please feel free to join in the fun next week, Wednesday @ noon PST / 3pm EST / 8pm GMT.