More Aussie vExperts / VCDX’s

Back in April, I did a post when VMware announced 754 vExperts for 2014. This week, 123 were named vExperts from the Q2 nominations.

That adds another 2 Aussie vExperts to the list; Tim Williams (@ymmit85) and Matthew Healy (@matt232h). By my count, we now have 24 vExperts in Australia.
Melbourne: 17
Brisbane: 4
Perth: 2
Sydney:1 (Nick Marshall moved to USA VMware HQ)

2014 APAC vExperts
Name	Last	Twitter	Region
Alastair	Cooke	@DemitasseNZ	New Zealand
Andre	Carpenter	@andrecarpenter	Melbourne
Andrew	Brydon	@sidbrydon	Melbourne
Andrew	Dauncey	@daunce_	Melbourne
Andrew	Brydon	@sidbrydon	Melbourne
Anthony	Burke	@pandom_	Melbourne
Anthony	Spiteri	@anthonyspiteri	Perth
Arron	Stebbing	@ArronStebbing	Melbourne
Benjamin	Troch	@virtualb_me	Singapore
Chris	Jones	@cpjones44	Melbourne
Craig	Waters	@cswaters1	Melbourne
Dan	Frith	@penguinpunk	Brisbane
David	Manconi	@dmanconi	New Zealand
David	Barclay	@davidbarclay99	Brisbane
Faisal	Rahman	@frtamal
Frank	Fan	@frankfan7	Melbourne
Grant	Orchard	@grantorchard	Melbourne
Greg	Mulholland	@g_mulholland	Melbourne
Iwan	Rahabok	@e1_ang	Singapore
Josh	Odgers	@josh_odgers	Melbourne
Justin	Warren	@jpwarren	Melbourne
Keiran	Shelden	@Keiran_Shelden	Brisbane
Mandeepak	Sidhu	@MannySidhu2	Melbourne
Michael	Webster	@vcdxnz001	New Zealand
Nathan	Wheat	@wheatcloud	Melbourne
Rob	Waite	@rob_waite_oz	Melbourne
Ryan	McBride	@RyanMcBride81	Sydney
Shane	White	@ausvmguy	Melbourne
Tas	Tareq		Brisbane
Tim	Williams	@ymmit85	Perth

vExpert 2014 Q3 nominations are open until September 2014. Nominate yourself, or someone that’s done a lot for the community. This is the last chance for 2014.

VCDX

Also this week, the latest round of successful VCDX’s were announced, and that includes two from Melbourne. Congratulations VCDX-DV #135 Harsha Hosur (@harsha_hosur) and VCDX-DV #139 Andrew Brydon.(@sidbrydon).

Melbourne is definitely the virtualisation capital of Australia with 17 vExperts, and 6 VCDX’s. (10 VCDX’s in total across Australia). Although all throughout Australia there’s a great virtualisation community, which you’ll see at vForum plus a collaborative project coming soon….

Melbourne VMUG May 2014 Wrap up

Last week we had the quarterly VMUG meeting at the Telstra Conference Centre.

We paid homage to the creator of the VMware community, John Troyer, as he’s moved on from VMware after 9 years. John was responsible for the vExpert program, in which 16 were from Melbourne this year.

If you want to participate in the VMUG community and perhaps become a vExpert, contact us about doing a community presentation. If you’re nervous or unsure, look into the @Feed4ward program. We’re here to help you succeed.

Community

The Salvation Army did a community presentation on the difficulties they face with “Operations on a Limited Budget”, and how they get around those constraints. It was a fascinating presentation, almost a rags to riches storey as they started with VMware server running on laptops, and then moved to servers running vSphere.

Storage Panel Session. The year of the Desktop Storage

Not a police line-up.

With the fierce competition amongst the storage vendors, we were lucky enough to get four storage vendors that worked together, presenting the ‘new world architecture’, with flash, and server side storage. I was a bit worried as to whether the four vendors would actually work together, or take shots at each other with snide remarks ending up in a punch on. I sensed some nerves in the storage vendors too. There was an increased presence of other vendors in the audience, keen to see the outcome, and probably to defend their own company if they were named during the presentation.

Each vendor did a brief 10 minute intro showing their offering for the uninitiated, and then they lined up to answer questions from the audience. There were some great questions, one even getting a vendor to admit a particular use case wouldn’t suit their platform, and suggested the vendor to his right would be able to handle that use case. It was a great honest panel session. No Marketing. Just the facts.

Is it a risk running your enterprise workloads on something from a startup? Perhaps. But the trade off can be a cheaper solution that suits your requirements and the vendor will work harder to prove their technology was the right choice as they can’t afford to disappoint customers.

Thanks to Nutanix, Pure Storage, VMware and Tintri for working together on the panel session.

Prizes

There was a raffle for heaps of prizes such as movie tickets, Apple TV, bluetooth speakers, VMware Press books and more. If you don’t have business cards, make some yourself, or bring a bunch of post-it notes.

vBeers

All that talking was thirsty work, and we headed to Trunk Bar & Restaurant across the road from the Telstra conference centre.With the alcohol flowing, there were no punch ons with the storage vendors, just love.

Presentations now available online

The slides from the night are available on the Melbourne VMUG workspace: http://www.vmug.com/p/do/sd/sid=2470&type=0

The sessions were recorded, thanks to Justin Warren (http://www.eigenmagic.com).

Here’s a playlist of all videos on the night. Read Justin’s blog for more info on the night.

Keep an eye out for the next vBeers event on the 26th June. Check the vmug.com/melbourne website for the latest info.

vBeers – Thursday 3rd April

Virtualisation is thirsty work

Because there’s never enough time at the Melbourne VMUG to catchup with members, we’re having an in-between VMUG vBeers at Trunktown. If you can’t wait for the next VMUG, this should keep you going for another 6 weeks until the next Melbourne VMUG, on 15th May, 2014.

There’s no official agenda, meeting topic, speakers or sponsors. It’s a social occasion of virtualisation folks having a few drinks. With no sponsor, you’ll be paying you’re own way. It’s perfectly fine to drink water, or you can show off how much of a high flyer you are with buying fancy drinks with umbrellas. It’s up to you.

Once Again…

vBeers – 6pm Thursday – 3rd April, 2014

Trunktown – 275 Exhibition St, Melbourne 

www.trunktown.com.au

Hope to see you there!

Top vBlogs 2014 A/NZ

You’re all winners

Eric Siebert announced the results of the top virtualisation blogs the other day and it was great to see the local Australia/New Zealand guys score well.

These bloggers really are “community guys”. They’re all active on twitter, and have participated in a VMUG at some level.

Results

Here are the Australia/New Zealand voting results…

Blog	Rank	Previous	Change	Total Votes	Total Points	#1 Votes
Long White Virtual Clouds (M. Webster)	13	21	+8	178	1040	11
CloudXC (Josh Odgers)	21	NEW	NEW	75	494	7
Demitasse (Alastair Cooke)	93	128	+35	33	165	1
Proudest Monkey (Grant Orchard)	95	NEW	NEW	31	164	1
Craigwaters.org	136	203	+67	29	129	0
Penguinpunk.net (Dan Frith)	184	109	-75	21	95	2
The Odd Angry Shot (Andrew Dauncey)	209	NEW	NEW	18	85	0
Hosting is Life! (Anthony Spiteri)	233	NEW	NEW	13	74	3
Musings of Rodos (Rodney Haywood)	245	93	-152	20	71	0

Eric Siebert has a tough job policing any fake votes, but as you can see, 18 pranksters made it through and voted for this blog. Ha!

You can see the full list at http://vsphere-land.com

And the rest

There’s plenty of good blogs that weren’t listed in the voting.

Some of the blogs that SHOULD have been there:

Nathan Wheat – wheatcloud.blogspot.com

Anthony Burke – blog.ciscoinferno.net

Andrew Mitchell / Chris Slater – www.definedbysoftware.com
Nick Marshall – nickmarshall.com.au
Arron Stebbing – blog.qd-solutions.com
Chris Jones – cpjon.es

Basically, anyone in the side bar to the right!

I hope the bloggers that didn’t make it onto the voting ballot pass their details to Eric for inclusion next year. I’m sure they will do very well.

If there’s anyone I’ve left out, let me know.

Even You can do it

Although it’s great to acknowledge the bloggers that do it well, no one does it to make the list. So if you’ve been thinking about it, just do it. The problem you blog about may be the solution for someone else.

I started the blog with unpublished drafts on problems I had, and how I solved them. It wasn’t until I ran into a problem for the second time, and I had to read my own post on it, I thought, perhaps someone else might find this useful. Most of the hits here are for posts containing errors from ESXi/vCenter logs, so I hope my solutions work for others too.

Now go and blog what problems & solutions you had this week!