Another great set of presentations took place today at the Toronto VMUG. As a regular to the events myself, I am really getting to enjoy seeing some familiar faces, and there are always some new ones each event which is a great sign.
This was a half-day event featuring two vendor presentations, and a VMUG community member presentation. We have been able to have 3 community members present at our local meetings over the last 3 sessions (including yours truly) and I think that this is a testament to the great people who come out and what the community has to offer for all to share.
First up today was Nimble Storage speaking about their flash optimized storage appliance which, if you haven’t seen it already, should impress you. The storage game has changed drastically over the last few short years and Nimble has come in as a feature player despite being a relatively young company.
I really like their scale-out capability, and the entire product line is able to be managed with a single interface (no, I did not say single pane of glass…I would never say that) and the ability to cluster and extend the units to ramp up your storage on-demand is very cool.
The presentation was a nice deep dive into the technology and use cases which was really great. Glenn Stewart (Senior Systems Engineer from Nimble Storage) was able to field a variety of deep technical questions with ease which is one of the things we love as VMUG community members. Being able to get into the real detail of products and services really adds value to everyone there.
For information about Nimble, please visit their website at http://www.nimblestorage.com and follow them on Twitter @NimbleStorage to stay up to date with the latest news and information. Their team are knowledgeable and personable and you certainly won’t be disappointed.
Next up was Dell Wyse (aka Wyse) which was a presentation about the endpoint product line including the P20 and T10 specifically. Kudos on a great presentation by Joshua Hutchins which also went straight to the depth that the audience wanted. We were given an overview of the Wyse organization with respect to the Dell acquisition, and a really great top level view of the product line.
The Dell Wyse P20 is their PCoIP device which is a wired ethernet zero-client device that has many excellent features, not least of which is the mere 15 Watts of power consumption during operation. As this is a VMUG presentation, we obviously concentrated on the VMware View capabilities, and there was talk of some upcoming announcements at the VMworld 2012 in San Francisco this month so keep your eyes on the Twitter feeds for that info!
Next we looked at the Dell Wyse T10 unit which is a wired/wireless ThinOS device that is currently non-PCoIP, but with a lower price point, you may find that it does just what you need. Like its P20 cousin, it runs with no moving parts, no cooling required and an almost insignificant 7.5 Watts average consumption.
We also quickly touched on two of the other products which were the larger Windows Embedded line and the portable Dell Wyse X50 series laptop line. For the larger scale implementation such as more than 2 monitors, you will need to go to the more hearty devices and for the Local-Mode VDI configurations you can use the X50 for offline desktops which lets you have the freedom to roam and then simply check-in the image when connected to your corporate environment.
Again, the depth of detail was great and Joshua handled all of our questions very well. For more information on the Dell Wyse products, please visit the Dell Wyse website and follow @Wyse on Twitter. Reach out to them for a demo and you can work with their sales engineers to get some hands on time and see how the products can fit your organization.
To close out, we had Sam Webb, one of our VMUG community members give a great presentation about automation and how to get efficiencies with virtualiztion using really cool products like Chef.
If you haven’t had any exposure to Chef (http://www.opscode.com/chef/) I highly recommend that you dive in and take a look. Sam gave some real-life scenarios where Chef was put into use and really did a great job of guiding us through the pros of moving towards better automation and how this product plays up against other players like Puppet and vCenter Orchestrator.
As a long-time fan of any type of automation I will most definitely be taking a deeper look into the Chef toolkit and how it may come into play for future projects.
Lastly we had a couple of great giveaways including the Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator by Cody Bunch, Administering Site Recovery Manager 5.0 by Mike Laverick and the VMware Cookbook by Matthew Helmke and Ryan Troy (which I recently reviewed here).
We were able to close out the event with a lunch together for a few participants and all in all I have to say it was a good day. Thanks again to Glenn and Frank from Nimble Storage, Joshua from Dell Wyse, Sam and of course to Angelo Luciani for putting it all together. And huge thanks to the Toronto VMUG community!
See you all at the next one!