London Trip Report – October 8th, 2010
Folks,
Just wanted to share our trip report on our first ever Workshop in London. A huge thanks to Alan R. and Paul N. for helping us put this together. Please visit http://www.virtu-al.net/ for presentations and MP3 recordings.
Theme: Managing Large Scale vSphere environments using APIs / PowerCLI.
Background:
We wanted to maximize our Engineering and PM time out of office by visiting strategic locations en-route to VMworld EMEA. London / Financial sector has a very high rate of PowerCLI user base.
Goals / Objective:
Share best practices when managing large scale vSphere environments using the vSphere APIs / PowerCLI
Audience:
vSphere Administrators, Architects managing large vSphere environments in London
Some comments from our attendees
“I like the technical depth of the presenters. Being able to put questions directly to the chaps involved in product development was a great opportunity and I learnt a lot. Could we have more sessions like this?
“A useful and well balanced set of sessions. Even though I then went to VMworld, Copenhagen and could have seen most of these sessions, having them in a package was really good.
“Really impressive day – for those of not able/willing to attend vmworld it was a great taster
“Great to see some relevant technical content being advocated by VMware – more please!”
Total Attendees:
60 – 70 attendees – (Pretty impressive on such short notice – 10 days)
Key Take Aways –
Overall event ran without a hitch. We had some great interaction with our users and were very impressed by the questions posed to our engineering teams. In the future we need to perhaps allocate more time to the ESX TOP session and have more hands on demos. We should also better plan on food / snacks – we missed the morning Coffee.
Chamber of Commerce Central London
Alan R with some last minute changes to his presentation
This is the first ever PowerCLI Sticker released.
Short Videos
Ravi describes event
Questions and Answers during sessions
Agenda and Speakers
Exploring VMware APIs
Level: Beginner
Length: 60 minutes
Developers have a broad set of options to integrate with VMware platforms to monitor and manage virtualization. This session will provide the overall direction of VMware APIs, describe opportunities for tighter integration with vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1. This is a must-attend session for new product managers or developers to VMware platforms. For those familiar with VMware platforms, the session will provide a refresher course as well as a summary of enhancements to the APIs in the 4.1 release.
Speaker: Preetham Gopalaswamy
vSphere APIs for Performance Monitoring
Level: Advanced
Length: 60 minutes
Building on the initial knowledge of vSphere APIs, learn about the features available to developers via vSphere Web Services APIs to collect performance statistics. We will also discuss the best practices in collecting performance data when using these APIs. This presentation is a must-attend for any developer that retrieves performance information from the vSphere platform in any large environment. While the content is advanced, developers new to the platform will find it useful as well.
Speaker: Balaji Parimi, Ravi Soundararajan
<BYO> Lunch Break 12:30 – 1:00>
Automating vSphere Management Using PowerCLI & Onyx
Level: Advanced
Length: 60 minutes
This two-part session focuses on PowerCLI and Onyx. VMware vSphere PowerCLI is a powerful command line tool that lets you automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, VM, guest OS and more. PowerCLI is distributed as a Windows PowerShell snap-in, and includes more than 230 PowerShell cmdlets, along with documentation and samples. Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script. The audience will walk away with deeper understanding of how and when to use PowerCLI and Onyx.
Speaker: Vladimir Goranov, Yavor Boychev
Advanced performance troubleshooting using esxtop
Level: Advanced
Length: 60 minutes
This talk will teach you how to spot tricky performance issues using the various counters in esxtop.
Speaker: Krishna Raj Raja, Staff Engineer, Performance Team
