by Amanda Zook, Systems Administrator, Biola University — September 03, 2010

Editor's Note: This blog was originally posted on Amanda's Adventures Blog and shortened by the editor. This is the last 'Live from VMworld" blog from our social media "woman-on-the street" and we thank her for doing a great job reporting on what she saw and heard at VMworld this year.

 

My 3 Jobs

I’ve had three jobs this week: SysAdmin for Biola, solving problems on the side, while at VMworld; Compellent Social Media Reporter and Customer Rep; Professor for Intro to MIS.

What a week it’s been! I’m exhausted. My body has decided it’s tired too, as I’m definitely fighting a cold now. Bummer. If you don’t rest, it catches up to you. I’ve pretty much worked from 7:30am to 11:30pm every night this week and tonight will be no exception, even though VMworld is done. That’s a long day! They’ve been great; lots of fun, great learning opportunities, wonderful new friends and networking acquaintances.

I almost didn’t want to leave VMworld. It was such a great environment, I had made a new little community of friends there, and didn’t have too much stress. Yes, I was busy running around doing things, but they weren’t super critical. If I missed a session I was bummed, but it didn’t matter. I can always watch them online anyways.

As I was flying home today I started getting freaked out. There’s so much to do here at home!

I realized as I was coming back that my slides for class weren’t complete. There were only about 15 slides. I just don’t know how to make each class session long enough! We finished class around 7:20 tonight (so a 1hr 20min class). We pulled apart some computers and played with the parts which I think they really enjoyed. I think it was pretty new for most of the people, although I know it was a little boring for those who know a lot about computers. It’s hard to balance that. We did the computer project for about 45 minutes or so, which means I only talked for 30 minutes or less. I think next week will be a lot better. I’ve already been prepping for the past three hours for our software class next week. It will be interesting I think. I am sure that I will go the whole session, as we now can go in to the labs and start working there on our projects. I really like my students. I’m excited to be teaching, but it’s just a lot on top of my already crazy-normal life!

“The world we have created is a product of our own thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein

Exciting stuff happening at VMworld today. The morning session was great! I wish I had more time at the conference. I did a great lab at 8am, ran over to the general session at 9am, and then ran to the expo from 10-10:30. I literally ran almost all the way back to my hotel (1 mile away) to be back and ready with my stuff for the shuttle to pick me up at 10:45. I was sorta run-walking (my sister does race-walking) and I think I would have won the race! Haha! My feet definitely hurt now.

I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get to spend more time in the Expo area. I was in the Compellent booth most of the time that I was in the Expo area, so I didn’t get to scope out the new products or get too much swag. I had to get some things to bring back to my team, otherwise they might not ever let me leave again

Morning Session: Awesome stuff. The theme was innovation, and so they had three presenters talk. My favorite was a Ph.D student from MIT who started a company called SixthSense (see Fast Company’s review of them here). They created a gadget that uses augmented reality. It comprises an off-the-shelf webcam, mirrors, smartphone, and a pico-projector–all hung on a lanyard. It can recognize objects, like a book in a store, and pull up Amazon review of the book and project them on to the front cover of the book. I can’t explain it very well, so go look at the review on Fast Company’s site. Wow. Really impressive. I think it definitely will take off.

Other presenters were Natan Linder, a Master’s student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab and Tan Le, Co-founder and President, Emotiv Systems. Natan Linder presented LuminAR, which can project images of the web, anywhere. It allows you to have Internet everywhere, as long as you have a wireless signal and a power socket. They’re calling it the new form factor for a computer. The pixels can be put on any spaces. It looks like a light bulb, and you can put the bulb pack in a lamp or in a robot.

Emotiv’s product is a head set that measure brain waves in order to move virtual objects. It tests your brian waves when you’re thinking of moving a block on the screen up. It then tells you to pretend that you’re moving the block. The block moves. Pretty cool. I’ve heard about them in INC. magazine before and thought it was awesome then. It allows you to control things with your mind. A demo was of a man sitting in his wheelchair and he had his chair hooked up to his brain waves. When he would move his face or think to go to the left, the wheels would start going to the left. I really think it has potential to do great things.

Emotiv Initial Brain Wave capture device

Emotiv Current Brain Wave capture device

Vendor Booth at Expo

By the way, Compellent was a Finalist for the Hardware for Virtualization category of awards at VMworld. Yay! That’s cool.

Hardware Virtualization:
Gold: Cisco Systems Inc., Cisco Nexus 7000 Overlay Transport Virtualization
Finalist: Compellent Technologies, Compellent Storage Center 5
Finalist: Xsigo Systems, VP780 and VP560 I/O Director

That’s all for now folks!  

by Amanda Zook, Systems Administrator, Biola University — September 02, 2010

Editor's Note: Originally posted on Amanda's Adventures blog. The journey documented by Amanda Zook, system administrator from Biola Univerisity and Compellent customer.

 

VMworld Day #3: Labs

Today was quite the day, as all the days have been at VMworld. The morning started off with a Women of Purpose breakfast where they had some women CIOs and CEOs sharing their career path and sharing a bit of wisdom.

One woman who is a VP at VMware said that as a single mom, she would always tell someone that she couldn’t go to a meeting or schedule something at a certain time because she had to pick her kids up. However, she said that she’s learned not to disclose the reason. “Keep it to yourself” was her advice. She said that men take time off some times in the afternoon to go see their kids games but don’t really say why they’re leaving or make a big deal out of it. Women tend to explain away or feel compelled to give a good excuse. No need, she encouraged. Just tell them you’re busy. Interesting idea. I like it.

A good chunk of my time today was spent in the labs. These labs are awesome. I just can’t get over it. After talking with a few people, they said that they would totally pay for the labs if they were put online for future use. One person even said he’d pay out of his own pocket. They’re really really good. Thanks VMware!

I worked through two: vSphere Troubleshooting and vSphere PowerCLI. I did all of the Troubleshooting lab, and it was great. Really gave me some extra places to look when having trouble with LUNs not showing up, or vmdk files that won’t start or appear to be non-functioning. If you can’t access your ESX host, check the firewall on the vCenter server. Wouldn’t have necessarily thought of that (probably something that I should have though!).

I did about 30 minutes of the PowerCLI lab and got 10 pages in. I wasn’t doing so well on that one. I haven’t done any powershell, so I was slowly making my way through it. It was helpful. I wish I could have finished it, but it would have taken me a long time. I needed to be somewhere at 11:30, and the line was really long to get in to the labs, which ate up a good chunk of my time. However, I do have a large poster with PowerCLI commands (side note: some guy asked what I had and I told him what it was and his reply was, wow, that’s kinda nerdy, to which I replied, well, I’m a SysAdmin. He thought that was cool, because he probably thought I wasn’t technical. It’s an interesting response when people find out you’re a techie girl). The poster will go up in my cube, and I will practice until it’s perfect! Good goal. I at least have a small framework to go from now.

I was at the Compellent booth for awhile and did the SANchat, which is a twitter gathering where people can talk about different topics on twitter for an hour. This month we discussed VMworld (no surprise there!). We got a few people talking about different topics such as their favorite sessions, which vendor had the best swag, if people would pay for lab access after the conference, and other things. It was an interesting experience. I’d definitely say it wasn’t my favorite thing that I’ve done all week, but it was something different. There were a few of us sitting around in the booth and so we’d tweet a question and someone (most of the time who was sitting right next to me) would reply, and I’d look up and say “Really?” or “That’s cool!”. It created a conversation starter for those of us sitting in the booth, but unfortunately there wasn’t a lot of interaction otherwise. I was hoping more people would participate. They were probably all in sessions, in the Expo area, or unable to get on the spotty wireless.

It was fun because I was staked out in the booth, so I told my “twitter friends” to come by and meet me there. The “virtual friendship” is really an interesting thing. Finally met another Compellent customer who I was trying to meet up with in May at the C-drive conference, which was great. Also, was able to meet a friend who I started following on twitter and found out he actually works at Fuller Seminary! How cool. Didn’t realize he was in LA, Linux admin, and at a seminary. Also met up with another new friend who saw an email of mine to a list serve and we realized we had a common friend. It was fun to meet up with him, because he works for Winslow Technology Group, which is our vendor partner for our Compellent solution. They’re a great company and all of the people I have met from WTG are the nicest people! Fun stuff to finally meet these virtual friends of mine. Weird too.

Went to a wonderful restaurant for dinner with Compellent. The food was great. Super fancy. I had a pot de creme for dessert. How do you like that?! (Christie, you would have loved the place!) There were some industry analysts there, as well as fellow customers, and the Compellent Execs. Great time talking with the others who were there. It really was a good networking time, and fun to get to know some more people. An industry analyst from Gartner who was at dinner with us (I don’t remember his name, but I think he was someone relatively well known) [Roger Cox] said that he wanted to come see my class that I’m teaching. I told him he was welcome to come! It’d be cool if he wanted to be a guest speaker as welll!

Speaking of networking, I only have 8 business cards left. I’d say that’s pretty good! I’ve been passing them out to those who I meet over time. I had a scare as I thought I lost my case of cards I’ve collected this week. Ahh! All that hard work would have been lost! Thankfully I found them in a pocket of my bag. I always write notes about the person on the back of the card so I can remember who they are and where I met them. It’s a handy trick that I’ve picked up.

Just caught the end of the VMworld party, which featured INXS (pronounced In Excess). The place was hopping. They had food and lots of drinks. People said they ran out of beer so they were all headed to the bars, but I was headed back to my hotel to sleep. They had a photo booth, large balls that you could go inside and roll around in, a trampoline that you could strap into and flip around on, and other fun picture opportunities. It seemed pretty good. A little bummed I missed it, but it was fine just seeing the end of it.

 

That’s about it! I’m sad that the trip is almost over. Heading back to LA to finish up the week.

by Amanda Zook, Systems Administrator, Biola University — September 01, 2010

Editor's note: More from our VMworld social media reporter, Amanda Zook. Originally posted on her blog.

VMworld Day #2

Note: this is long because there was so much good content today! Hope you still enjoy reading it.

What a great day it’s been today! Although the morning didn’t start off that well, as I didn’t end up making it over to VMworld with enough time to complete a lab before the main session, and then wasn’t able to get in to the PowerCLI session that I really wanted (Which would have made my goal of scripting a little easier!) the day definitely looked up from there.

The main session was great! The event was done very well. As the production director for my church, I really appreciate lights and sound that are done well. This was truly amazing. The screen was gigantic. They said that there are over 17,000 people at VMworld this year. No wonder you see people with VMworld name tags running all over the city. They ARE everywhere.

It was really neat to hear about what VMware is doing, and the new products that they are coming out with. They showed a great video in the beginning of the session talking about what a cloud is. It was really funny. They even threw some Inception-esque lines in — “The cloud is in your mind.” haha.

But really? What is the cloud? There’s the public cloud, like GoogleApps or other SaaS programs, and then there is the private cloud like using VMware inside your organization to host your VMs. They seemed to define it as a collective group of resources.

One thing that was really interesting to me in the keynote was the mention of how users now want things from businesses to work like the programs they use for personal use (Facebook, Google, Youtube, etc.). Users don’t want to have to submit a ticket to the IT department and wait for 3 days. They don’t care that you’re using a VM. In IT we like to point out that they’re using a cool new service. But they don’t want the platform. They just want their app to work. Essentially they want self service, where they can go in, click on the app or service they want to use, and be able to have access to it by entering information. Yes! This is so true. The business world can’t adapt that quickly to what users want, so it continues on with the slow movement while IT departments are working at a frenzied pace to adapt their whole system to what users want. We already have good fast moving infrastructure (ability to quickly create a new server/add RAM or other resources). The problem lies in the fact that we’re trying to use old apps. New apps need to be created to fully utilize the new architecture and infrastructure of cloud computing. Enter VMware. A lot of companies use it to reduce costs, or improve efficiency, but the next step of full utilization of VMware is flexibility and business agility. This is where the stuff gets good. They are putting out a product called vCloud Director. It pools virtual infrastructure resources in your existing datacenter and delivers them to users as a catalog-based service. I’d like to demo it out. It sounds pretty neat.

Also got to see some other product demonstrations that will be coming out in the future. My favorite one was the one coded “Project Verizon” (I think that’s what it was called…). It allows users to view their desktop from any device- iPad, Android phone, laptop, etc. It seemed like it will do a lot more than just normal VDI will. Interested in hearing more about it.
Although I liked the keynote session, apparently some others at Citrix and Microsoft had some comments about it. See these two blogs if you’re interested.

I wasn’t able to get in to the PowerCLI session, so I went and did a lab. Awesome set up they have. People have already done over 5,000 labs. Yikes. Over 40,000 vms have been created in labs. I think someone said there are over 800 VDI instances that are being used. I did the vSphere troubleshooting lab and it was very helpful. I must be slow though, because I had to ask them to give me more than the allotted time (1 hour) to finish it, as I almost ran out of time! Maybe I’m just thorough in reading instructions.

Heard a little more about VDI from a Gartner Analyst. Very good session comparing Citrix’s XenDesktop 4 and the new VMware View 4.5. He also compared Quest vWorkspace 7.1 and Microsoft VDI, but those both weren’t recommended for large enterprise usage.

Then, the event that I’ve been waiting to go to for 3 weeks now: Women of Purpose. So good. Ahh. They had a panel of 6 women who were either VPs, Directors, or CIOs in large companies. They seemed like great people. It was funny, one of the panelist said she was excited to see a lot of women show up for this event and knew others were happy to have a get-together as someone said in their blog that it was their goal was to find another woman sysadmin during the conference. That was me! So cool! A VP of IT read my blog. That’s fun. As a side note, thanks to all who read!

Many different topics were discussed on the panel from how to balance your time when you have a family and work as an exec in a company to mentoring and career paths. Most of these companies that the women were a part of were largely virtualized. One of the CIOs said her company was 100% virtualized. That’s so cool. What a great goal.

Good quote from Melissa Armstrong: Listen most, question often, talk least. Good advice. There was a lot of wisdom that was given in the 2 hour session. Very worth my time. I’m hoping to get in contact with a few people I met and maybe one of the panelists to see if they would informally mentor me. There was so much useful information given. I had to leave right after and couldn’t stay for the reception because I was off to skype in to my Intro to MIS class.

Thankfully there were no technical issues skyping! I think it went well, at least it did on my end. It’s easier to teach looking at a computer screen than a class full of 40 college students! I’m looking forward to meeting my students next week for class though. It’s fun to be able to do things like that and use technology in a way that allows business/teaching to still carry on even though I’m 300 miles from home.

After class, the evening was filled with talking with current and prospective Compellent and CommVault customers. Great party held at Tres Agaves, a Mexican restaurant. The food was really good. It was great to talk to other users. Met some new friends and did some good networking. It was a chill environment to sit down, have dinner with people, or stand around just talking. Even though I was at a conference all day, I probably walked over 5 miles today! The restaurant was 1.5 miles away and I thought I’d just walk rather than pay for a cab. And then I walked back with a Compellent team member on the way back, which I originally hadn’t planned on doing, since I already had walked quite a bit before. It sure was nice to move though, especially after sitting all day.

Looking forward to another day tomorrow!

Leave me some comments and let me know what was your favorite part of the day! Thanks for reading.