Mike Laverick of RTFM Education is a regular on the VMTN Forums, a blogger, and a VMware Certified Instructor in the UK. Here’s his report from VMworld so far.
VMworld Session Review: VCP Certification
Personally, I’m hoping VMware will develop a new certification which is
something like a VCP+. Something that proves as a server guy your cut
above the point-and-click guys who only have done the VCP. Now, that’s
something that would appeal to me I’ve been told that this might get
delivered but the emphasis is going to be on the “architect”
certification in short-term. …The other thing I have heard bandied about amongst the education-folks
with which I swim – is the promise of more CBT/Elearn and Remote
Assisted Instructor Lead courses. Now, I’m actually borrowing a HP term
(RAIL). This is where not just the kit for course is remote but so are
the students and instructor. So, we don’t meet up in a physical
classroom but a virtual one. We communicate via conferrence calls and
some web-ex style presentation tool. You get to sit at work or home and
learn – and get a better quality of life! Believe me, living out of
hotels for 6-8 weeks to teach courses is no fun. There is only some
many DVD’s you can watch – and one airport looks very much like another
when your flight is delayed by airstrike in Finland!
VMworld Hands-on Lab Review: Scripting VI-3
There were 4 slides – what are scripts, why script, what is com and
what is perl. Now go ahead and code. Well, I guess I had unrealistic
expectations – as someone who just about understands the ideas of
objects, properties and attributes – and how these com libraries are
“called” in a script – it was over my head. I really needed more
guidence.Fortunately, that came in the shape of my lab partner – former Scot
who now works in Switzerland. He had some ADSI and vbscript experience
that he was a little rusty on. Together we worked out line-by-line what
was going on. Had I been on my own – I probably would have left in the
first 30 mins – because it would have been “whoooosh” way over my
head!!!
VMworld Session Review: VMTN Community Experts LIVE
So, who shone out from the group. For me it had to be Ken Kline of
HP. I’ve message’d Ken quite a bit from the forums. But this VMworld
was the first time I had met the man in person. You could meet a nicer,
easier going guy… Always there with a subtle insight – that rocked my
view of the world.What came out of this session? Well, something I had heard privately
voiced amongst the people who manage the VMTN environment. They want a
more “interactive” community. Something that is more real-time and
live. For me this could a “Second Life” for VMware. So you better get
out there and buy a VMware Island – and build a train station to get
those second-life people to the meeting room!The other thing they seem to leaning towards is a kind of wiki for virtualisation – not specifically VMware.
VMworld Session Review: Troubleshooting ESX Server Faults
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
VMworld Session Review: A User Perspective
I really enjoyed this session. Being an instructor the amount of actual
real-world deployments I get involved in pretty limited. So it’s always
interesting to hear peoples experiences. This one won was pretty cool
as laid out in sq feet and kilowatt’s the amount of space and money
saved in their datacenter. We all know that space and heat is one of
the great saving points of virtualisation. But it was good have a price
tag in dollars put on these savings for once. At last a TOC/ROI that
was beyond the usual marketing fair presented by vendors…
VMworld Session Review: Keynote on Tuesday
But things became more interesting with industry panel on the impact
of virtualisation. So along side all the gunho pro-virtualisation
people – there was some interesting Professor from Standford University
to remind us that industry back-slapping is not the way forward.
Without bashing Microsoft directly – the problem remains with or
without virtual machines the guest OS we run and the applications we
support within them – aren’t written very well.You can sense the humour and cheering building as the audience got
behind the Professor – a welcome devils-advocate amongst the dancing
monkeys…
