Cisco Networkers Update Day 2

Here is the video update from Day 2 of Cisco Networkers.



Included is a look at the UCS B-250 Extended Memory blade. You can also see this video for a view of it from the video below by Pete Nichol from Cisco. The boys get sneaky and steal the Palo adapter out of the B250 and put it in a B200 to test it out. You need a newer version of UCSM to make the palo work, so don't try this at home. I think they told me that to stop me swiping the Palo for my lab!



Rodos

Cisco Networkers Update Day 1

Cisco Networkers 2009 kicked off in full swing this morning with the keynote from Guido Jouret who is the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies Group.

Some key messages that I took from the keynote

• "Cisco are trying to be more than a comms company but be an experience provider to lead us all into the future."
• Cisco did a live demo from the other side of the world via LiveDemo which is TP on steroids.
• "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware". Alan Kay examples of this occurring are the iPhone, wii & Cisco TP
• Perfect Storm coming over power grid, its old, people are retiring and its not green. Cisco is investing heavy in SmartGrid and an energy internet.
• Cisco want 2 make all this video work across consumer, Enterprise and service provider networks for end to end anywhere experience.
• There is lots of vido in the Enterprise today but its silo'd. They need to all be converged and video needs to become simply a data type. Cisco Medianet is taking IP to the next level.
• Video is 65% of Ciscos internal traffic!
• People on IP enabled phones such as iPhone use 30 times the bandwidth! The melenials are going to bring video to the workplace.
• IP traffic will increase fivefold from 08 to 13. Its has take 25 years to get this far. Video will make it dble next year.
• "IT as an experience creator"

Thanks for all who came to the session I was speaking in, on insights into deploying Cisco UCS, I hope you received some good insights for how to successfully deploy UCS into your environment without "implementation fear".

Here is my video update for the day (below, otherwise visit http://rodos.haywood.org). Note there was lots of talk about the Flip video from Cisco in the keynote. All of this video was taken with my Cisco Flip, it really is as good as they say!



Till tomorrow.

Rodos

Welcome to Cisco Networkers

Welcome to Cisco Networks in Brisbane Australia for 2009.

I will be at the show hanging out, sitting in sessions, chatting to people, doing both duty on my employers stand, as well as speaking in a session or two too.

To keep the discussion kicking along I will be posting to Twitter insights, tips and facts on Cisco Unified Computing System every 30 minutes, for all of the 3 days. I certainly hope its not considered spam, there are 48 gold hand picked tips that are going to come your way. Hopefully they can get discussion going (virtual or physical) for those who are there, participating via CiscoLive or just following it on Twitter.

You can see the tips by following @rodos. Each post will start with "#CNW09 #UCS Tip XX:" where XX is the sequence number of the tip. So you can also search the appropriate hashtags from your favorite Twitter app.

Lets get ready to rumble!

Rodos

Cisco C-Series Rack Server Revealed

Cisco have announced the C-Series of UCS rack mount servers but until now no one has seen any, publicly. Well at Cisco Networkers in Brisbane Australia you can get a look at one on the Alphawest stand in the World of Solutions hall.

Of course if you can't wait, or if you can't make it to Brisbane, I took a very quick and unprepared video which is below (if you can't see it visit the http://rodos.haywood.org/).

Note I don't give too many details and also make the mistake of calling it a blade server, thats what you get for no planning. The box only arrived in country today and just made it in time by a matter of hours. It will be on the stand for the next three days after which it goes back to what it is meant to be doing, that is powered on in the lab doing beta testing. I may not be able to be so public about those activities.

Thanks to the executives in the Cisco SAV BU who allowed us to show this on our stand, you guys rock! Thanks to the local Cisco team in Australia who got it here. Thanks to our marketing team who did an great job of creating a secure glass case for it to live in and hence stop people stealing bits, especially as its fully loaded with RAM.

See you on the show floor as well as the session I am speaking in, "UCS : Opportunities, Objectives and Outcomes (ITMPCS-6500)" which is on Tuesday at 1:45pm to 2:30pm, where I will share my early insights from deploying one of the first UCS implementations.

Rodos

P.S. A rare reminder. Contrary to the tone of this post, this is my person blog and any statements, or announcements here are not official in anyway and I do not represent my employer, they and I will deny anything. Check for press releases at http://www.alphawest.com.au/ for anything official.

Cisco Networkers Techtorials

The first day of Cisco Networkers in Brisbane Australia today. There was setting up the stand, unpacking some gear plus sitting in on the "Data Centre Design & Concepts TECDCT-3873" session.

The session went into some deep networking concepts. I did okay with lots but some was just to Networking geek for this virtualisation and Cloud guy. There was some great stuff on FCoE, UCS and DC design.

My main takeaway was how much pinning and specific pinning such as MAC pinning is being use in the DC networking of the future. Having spent a lot deep diving into UCS I see a lot of this day to day already, what never clicked to me before was that we have been using this a lot in the past because a VMware vSwitch uses MAC pinning.

Here is a quick video I did at the end of the day to summarise (no more 20 minute videos like I did at VMworld)!

Hopefully I will be able to show more snippets from the event each day.

Rodos

Networkers Unveiling

We have something special to reveal on my employers stand at Networkers in Brisbane Australia tomorrow.

Here is a picture grab from the video I took of me doing a quick tour during the stand build earlier today. Rather than waiting till tomorrow I plan on uploading the video later tonight when I get back to the hotel.



Once you know what it is, if you want to deep dive and see more, drop by the Alphawest/Optus booth in the World of Solutions once it opens tomorrow.

Also see if you can come to one of the session I am speaking in "UCS : Opportunities, Objectives and Outcomes (ITMPCS-6500)" which is on Tuesday at 1:45pm to 2:30pm.

I look forward to the revealing as well as chatting to people who come by the stand.

Rodos

Savvis feel the Spirit while Reflex shield evil

My inbox got lots of messages today about Savvis releasing more details of their project Spirit that was mentioned at VMworld. You can read the press release.

What was interesting was the mention of security and VMware VMsafe. They don't mention the how of the security feature, you need to go elsewhere to get that piece of the puzzle.

Reflex published a press release today as well, stating that Savvis would be using their technology for Spirit. Puzzle solved.

I met up with the Reflex guys at VMworld a few weeks ago to dig a lot deeper into what they are doing in the cloud, great to see them have a good win like this.

Rodos

Who stole my UCS boot order?

Who stole my UCS boot order, well may you ask.

Check out the differences in the following screen grab from UCS Manager for one of my blades (I hacked the two screens together so you could see both at the same time).



Notice the difference between the two? The Configured order has boot from CD and then from SAN storage, the Actual order has the local hard drive in the middle, with the storage at the bottom. Weird thing is, I never made that change.

The issue here is a known bug, in that if a device is not available on boot the BIOS moves it back in the boot order.

To fix it you can apply the boot order again or re-associate the blade, both require a reboot, which does not really matter as your probably never had a successful boot in the first place.

When can this happen? It can occur when you have an outage or failure and things don't come up in the correct order or a timely manner. In my case I had booted my blades whilst the MDS FC switch was down. When the blades did not boot it was obvious that the MDS was not up, however after fixing that it was not obvious why the blades would still not boot. Reason, the boot order changed without me knowing it.

So if you have stack blades all booting from SAN, and let them boot with the boot device unavailable, you will have many blades to quickly fix boot order for.

Its really not a big deal when you know its coming, and now you know! Also if it was not my testing environment I would not have had local drives in there, after all this is stateless computing.

This is why we do comprehensive regression testing peoples, repeat after me, this is why we do regression testing.

Rodos

[Update : The DDTS, bug number, for this is CSCtb48651]

Cisco on Private and Public Cloud

The Private Cloud debate has been raging for a while.

In this video and the associated post James Urquhart from Cisco, details out internal and external as well as private and public clouds.



Rodos

Vmworld 2009 Hello Freedom

Well here is my video for VMworld 2009 Hello Freedom.

After a week of very little sleep due to the long video blogs I did (hey we all have to try new things) I thought I would end the week with something funny. Okay and attempt to be funny.

Unfortunatley you need to know the people to get the joke at the end but this is to say thinks to the VMware online community that were so welcoming, warm and kind with their words this week. You are a great bunch of people who are keen to share your knowledge and a friendly hello.

Also a great thanks to the VMware communities team, especially John Troyer, for their commitment and passion.

Guys, this one is for you! I hope you get a laugh.

Rodos

P.S. Thanks to all the participants for being good sports and contributing to something that sounded crazy at the time. Sorry to all those great people that I did not run into today and did not make it in as a result, I am thinking of you Dr Troyer!

P.P.S. If you are reading this through RSS the video may not appear, you might have to click through to see it.

VMworld 2009 Day 3 Video Summary

Here is my summary video for Day 3.

VMworld 2009 Day 3 Video Summary from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

It is a shame that I was not able to post this until now. I stayed up till 3am to record it but the poor internet quality of my hotel meant I could not upload it until after lunch when I finally got access to some decent bandwidth (400K a sec rocked). Still for those who were not there hopefully its helpful.

I have learnt a lot of things not to do in recording these this year, so thats a great outcome in itself. Next time can be better!

VMorld Live Interview : Moving to the cloud and SpringSource

Recorded a interview with Dr John Troyer from VMware in the recording booth at VMworld today.

Here is what the booth looks like. Its not me in there, its someone else, I am the one in the video lower.



For some reason there is some very loud audio of a VMware add over the top of the first 40 seconds or so. I think John must have had it running on his Mac and it got mixed in my mistake. We could not hear it on the headphones.

Here is the video below.



Rodos

VMworld 2009 Day 2 Video Summary

Here is my day to summary. This will be the longest one of the week I suspect.

VMworld 2009 Day 1 Video Summary from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

Hopefully the lighting is better. There is some general video at the end of the goings on of the day.

Rodos

P.S. Thanks for the fantastic bandwidth available over at VMworld, 6 minute upload compared to the estimated 3.5 hours at my hotel! However its taken a while for Vimeo to process it. Hopefully tomorrow will be smoother.

VMworld 2009 Day 1 Video Summary

Each day I hope do give a brief video summary giving my thoughts and experiences on the day. Here is todays.



Of course I have posted some separate videos you can see on the site as well.

Hopefully the lack of sleep will not get to me and I can actually throw one of these out a day. I don't have my Mac as I could not extract it from my kids at home so I am stuck with the features of the software on my Windows XP machine and the Flip Cemera software. So apologies in advance for the lack of interesting music, boring transitions and simplistic textual intros. Maybe one day I will get a Mac for my work machine.

Big day tomorrow, its now around 3am and I have to be up at 6:30am to make the keynotes. No rest for this blogger. If only my hotel had faster bandwidth!

Rodos

Tyler invites you to Liquidware Labs

Here is a video from the VMworld show floor with Tyler 't-rex' Rohrer from Liquidware Labs talking briefly about their acquisition of Entrigue Systems and invites you to their booth.



Rodos

Masteing vSphere 4 book singing

Why wait for the official book signing? Tonight at the communities lounge I ran into Scott and of course had to get my book "Mastering VMware vSphere 4" signed and record it on my new Flip.



Rodos