London VMUG April 2016 (Part 2)
Last week was the second London VMware User Group of 2016- and I came away with so many notes I couldn’t justify just squeezing them all into one post. So, check out Part 1 here if you haven’t already and what to know what happened in the morning.
From the agenda I chose to start my afternoon with a look at VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) and how they fit with the offerings from Nimble Storage. Nick Dyer ran through the company background and an overview of their products. One of these was InfoSight Predictive Analytics, this cloud based analytics solution collects data from across Nimble’s entire install base which not only allows them to use your own data to help spot problems and improve performance with your own infrastructure but also the other customers’.
On the VMware front he discussed how VVols abstracts away from the datastore model, allowing the storage vendor to present their capabilities directly up to the virtualisation level using VASA 2.0 technology. A VM is assigned a storage policy and therefore can be hosted on the most appropriate storage at a very granular level- this can affect not only the performance tier the data is placed on but also things like the volume encryption requirements.
After the afternoon break in the (Not Quite on the) Thames Suite we had a round(ish)table discussion about HomeLabs chaired by Alex Galbraith. I’ve mentioned in other posts that the London VMUG community set me on my HomeLab path, and this was a great chance to see what other people were doing and to exchange ideas. There’s a whole range of systems out there, from things like my small NUC-based deployment right through to people with racks of blades in their garden sheds. There are also those using or looking at hybrid or full cloud solutions to exchange that Capex for Opex, although if you turn that under-bed datacentre off you’ll need to heat your house more conventionally in winter . I thoroughly enjoyed this session and it already looks like it will lead to further community discussion and resources – keep your eyes peeled on #OpenHomeLab for more.
My last session of the day was with Neil Andrew from VMware who talked about vRealize Business. A mention of some of the features that morning had piqued my interest, and it’s was great to have this timely opportunity to delve deeper into the technology on offer.
vRealize Business can help answer those questions such as “How much is a VM costing me?” and “Is it cheaper to relocate this to a cloud provider?”. Although real Chargeback is potentially tricky to implement fully in many organisations, I could see how the idea of Showback is quite achievable and could not only help plan (re)deployments of existing services but also be a valuable tool in planning the budgets for new ones. The customer (internal or external) can be given a real cost of the infrastructure they are requesting, rather than a piecemeal hardware/ licenses/ manpower/ environment/ etc. cost usually calculated on a difficult to maintain spreadsheet.
After the closing statements, and the prize giveaways (including a rather awesome prize of an Anki Overdrive kit from PernixData) we adjourned to the 10-Zig sponsored vBeers where the technical discussions continued.
There’s another London VMUG in a couple of months, and dates for 2017 are already booked in. See you there?
