The last month of VMware Community Roundtable Podcasts have been really good. Every Wednesday at noon California time (3pm East Coast, 20.00 GMT) we gather for this live anything-goes mostly-technical podcast. We cover the latest news of the week as well as guests from VMware and the greater virtualization ecosystem.
Everyone in the community is invited to join us live, either via the online chat or by dialing-in via a regular or VOIP phone. Callers are especially welcome and it's easy to get your question on the air! The chat runs fast and furious in the background as the interview goes on streaming live over the Internet. Since I conduct most of the interviews, I won't tell you that the chat is more informative than the questions I'm asking, but I will tell you it is often very entertaining! If you can't join us live, you can always listen to the recording, either from the web page or via iTunes.
Next week for Podcast #121 our topic is 2010 in Review/2011 Preview with the good folks from TechTarget. Bring your predictions for 2011! Colin Steele from SearchServerVirtualization is also asking for your 2011 virtualization predictions and is offering a few new books as prizes for folks who participate. More information on the VMware Community Roundtable Podcast series and dial-in/voip info.
Topic: 2010 in Review / 2011 Preview with SearchServerVirtualization
Date: Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Time: Noon PST / 3pm EDT / 20.00 GMT
How: (724) 444-7444 19367# 1# or VOIP & live stream information here.
For each of these podcasts, you can listen right here in the web page, via the mp3 link, or via iTunes.
#117 - Advanced esxtop & performance troubleshooting. One of the best sessions from VMworld 2010 was on esxtop, the performance metrics and analysis tool for VMware admins. It's a real power tool. Krishna Raj Raja, one of the speakers from that session, joined us on the podcast to give us the inside story on esxtop, use cases, and tips and tricks to get the most out of this powerful tool. Krishna is a long-term veteran of VMware and had a lot to share. Listen via the widget at right, the mp3 file, or iTunes.
- Interpreting esxtop statistics reference document
- esxtop how-to's from Duncan Epping
#118 – Storage I/O Control: Past, Present, and Future. VMware engineer Irfan Ahmad is one of the key drivers of Storage I/O Control, introduced in vSphere 4.1. Irfan joined us this week to give us the inside scoop on this new capability, some of the reasons we built it, some of the design challenges that monitoring and throttling storage I/O across a cluster posed to the engineering team, and we went overtime talking about some best practices and implications for using it now, and where this kind of functionality might go in the future. A highly recommended session. Listen via the widget at right, the mp3 file, or iTunes.
- Storage I/O Control overview
- Storage I/O Control Technical Overview & Considerations for Deployment
- Managing performance variance of applications using Storage I/O Control
#119 – Alive VM. Most of us first saw the Integrien Alive product at VMworld this year when Steve Herrod announced that Integrien was joining us and demoed their unique monitoring and management tool live at the General Session. David LaVigna from the Integrien team joined us for an hour on Alive VM. Unlike other monitoring tools, Alive VM doesn't use thresholds or other static triggers. Instead, you feed it any sort of time series metrics – from CPU and disk utilization to how many warnings are in your logfiles – and by watching their patterns over the weeks and month, it starts to understand the patterns of your business and it gets very smart about noticing when things get off-kilter. It also has some killer dashboards and visualizations that give you a better overall view of your data center. Listen via the widget at right, the mp3 file, or iTunes.
- Alive VM at the Integrien Site
- Get Alive VM promotion
#120 – vCenter Configuration Manager. George Gerchow dialed in from the Gartner conference where he was presenting to tell us about vCenter Configuration Manager, one of the Ionix products that joined VMware in April. Configuration Manager is a mature product that can automate configuration and provisioning and help you manage compliance across your data center. George shared with us some of the capabilities of Configuration Manager, what people are using it for, how it can help remediate issues. We discussed some of the management, compliance and control issues as you reach higher levels of virtualization and build out private or hybrid clouds. Listen via the widget at right, the mp3 file, or iTunes.
See you next week on the podcast!
John
@jtroyer on Twitter
