Recap: April DC Metro VMUG

Many thanks to the great folks from NetApp for sponsoring our third DC Metro VMware User Group meeting last night. The event was held at McCormick & Schmick’s at the Reston Town Center.

We had terrific guest speakers last night including Andy Murphy, Principle Systems Engineer at NetStar Systems International, Desi Whalen, Systems Engineer at NetApp and crowd favorite, Andrew Stueve, Senior System Engineer at Neovera.

First up, Andy gave a great presentation regarding Distributed Power Management including how his organization is calculating energy savings thanks to DPM. Andy gave a before and after take on his DPM-enabled VI3 cluster, and provided some food for thought to all of the energy-conscious in the room.

The Q&A from this session covered topics such as headaches along the way, considerations for HA pools and potential solutions regarding scheduled tasks.

Next up, Desi Whalen from NetApp gave a very technically engaging presentation regarding the advantages of using a NetApp provided storage infrastructure under a VMware environment. Desi provided some great use-cases including backup strategies and virtual machine provisioning. By far, the most compelling argument was the cloning of 100 virtual machines in under 15 minutes. Good show!

Last night was also the first time that a show of hands resulted in a majority – the question? “Who here has used or is using NetApp storage?”

Finally, Andrew Stueve shared his experiences with the 3.0 —> 3.5 upgrade process, including the (sometimes) painful Virtual Center upgrade. Andrew covered all of the major gotchas and then allowed the audience to pick his brain on other topics, from NFS storage to Exchange virtual machine heroics.

Last night was full of great questions and answers from people like Samtha Attamagoda (pictured here) from Fannie Mae and Kanuj Behl from IGI.

As always, the VMUG meetings are a great place to network with area professionals. I finally was able to put a face to a name with Ken Cline from Wells Landers and had the pleasure of speaking with many of the attendees.

The next DC VMUG meeting will be held in early July and will also move back inside the beltway. Details will be posted in the coming weeks.

Thanks to all for another fantastic meeting. Topics on the horizon for the July event include Life Cycle Manager and perhaps application virtualization.

As always, if you would like to speak at this event, please contact me via this page.

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