Toronto VMUG 11/13 recap: Nutanix, CiRBA and vCO with Mike Preston

It was a chilly day, but we were kept warm among the awesome VMUG community today at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. As our last half-day session for 2013, this was a nice way to wind down a spectacular year and once again Angelo Luciani (@AngeloLuciani) let our team and produced a great lineup of technology and people.

The sessions were very interactive, and the questions were coming from all angles including business process and technology deep dive details. The presenting vendors brought their A-game and they were able to work with the attendees to create a great set of presentations.

Nutanix

We kicked off the half day session with Michael Burnett from Nutanix (www.nutanix.com) talking about their product line and the inner workings of the Nutanix NDFS and overall ecosystem.

I doubt that Nutanix needs an introduction, but if you haven’t seen this impressive converged solution, you need to take a deeper look right away.

nutanix
Image source: www.nutanix.com

While VMware is the focus, it was great to see Hyper-V and KVM added to the hypervisor support list. With founders who came from the halls of Google and architected the famous Google File System, Nutanix has shot onto the scene in the last couple of years and made a distinct impact on the converged virtualization landscape.

Make sure to take a look at the Nutanix suite of converged virtualization solutions, and talk with their team by reaching out on Twitter @Nutanix or through their site here: http://www.nutanix.com/connect-with-us/

CiRBA Capacity Control

Next up was CiRBA who hail from right here in Toronto. They brought their product, CiRBA Capacity Control, is a very impressive suite that offers capacity control, performance analysis, capacity and performance prediction, and much more.

CiRBA-ACCS
Image source: http://www.cirba.com/product/CiRBA-Product-Overview.htm

Since we were a VMUG audience, they presented their product with the clear VMware target features, but they also fully integrate with Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM which extends the support to OpenStack and RHEV. Needless to say, I will be looking much more into what CiRBA has to offer to find out more detail.

The console screenshots were slick and the demo showed off some of the management features and most importantly, their capacity planning and “what if” scenario feature which allows you to look at the workloads you have in place today, and predict how continued growth will affect performance.

CiRBA
Image source: http://www.cirba.com/product/CiRBAs-Control-Console.htm (click for full size)

At this point I have to turn you over to CiRBA (http://www.CiRBA.com) for more detail, and I encourage you to take a look at this tool and see what it’s all about.

Reach out to the team through their contact page (http://www.cirba.com/company/contact-us.htm), and feel free to add comments here on what you think of CiRBA and what they have to offer.

Community time – vCenter Orchestrator with Mike Preston

One of the great things about our VMUG community is the sharing of info among our peers. This was another fine example as Mike Preston, blogger at http://mwpreston.net and soon to be published author (Troubleshooting vSphere Storage) who you may know as @mwpreston on Twitter.

Mike started with the humble statement that he is new to presenting, but I can tell you that Mike’s relaxed presentation style and solid knowledge come across perfectly to the crowd. Even more impressive is that running a live demo of creating a vCenter Orchestrator was the ultimate test that he passed with flying colors.

The message was strong in the presentation that orchestration and automation is not just a “nice to have”, but it should be treated as a requirement for us as IT professionals. There are great free tools like vCenter Orchestrator available to us, so there really is no reason not to investigate how to save time and ensure consistency with orchestration tools.

It was a great presentation with lots of questions, and we gave away 3 Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator books by @Cody_Bunch to some very happy attendees. I am pretty sure that we will see some great automation and orchestration chats coming up in the VMUG community thanks to great books like Cody’s and great presentations like this.

Thank you to all the presenting vendors, to Mike, to the VMUG organizers and to the attendees for making this another great VMUG session. I’m looking forward to planning for an amazing full-day session in February!

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