The last few weeks have flown by for me. After returning from Japan to welcome warm weather here in North Carolina, now it would also seem the conference season is in full-swing! (creeps up on us every year).

A couple weeks ago, NetApp submitted abstracts for VMworld "Call for Papers". Now the abstracts have been released for public session voting. I have two sessions in the mix this year:

Session 5400 will be lead by Chris Gebhardt, my colleague on the VMware TME team. I will co-present with him on the Horizon Workspace integrations with NetApp. Here is the abstract:

Horizon View Virtual desktop deployments have traditionally been the most difficult workloads for storage. In this session attendees will learn how seemingly insignificant design decisions can have a great impact on end-user experience and solution scalability. Attendees will learn how VMware Horizon View & Workspace storage integrations can help customers reduce the size, cost, and complexity of VMware Horizon environments. We will demonstrate how desktop administrators can take advantage of these technology integrations without changing their existing desktop management workflows. We will also cover common storage pitfalls, and how to avoid them; proper solution analysis, architecture and sizing, and design decisions.

Session 5501 will be lead by Mac Binesh, Director of Horizon Performance at VMware, with me as co-presenter. The abstract for that session is as follows: 

This session will feature a technical deep dive into the architecture, deployment topologies and best practices for Horizon Workspace, from software to storage. Attendees will gain a better understanding of ways to deploy for best performance, data protection, efficiency and security. Attend this session to get a better understanding of the EUC solution and it's enterprise file sharing capabilities as the preferred solution in the industry.

Go out there and vote today... let your voice be heard. See you all at VMworld!

I am in town for the first time in over a year. That makes it the
perfect excuse to do a vBeers! Please join me at a great place for
food and drink... Nakameguro Taproom. We'll get things started at 7PM
and go till the beer runs out (just kidding) ;) Hope to see you there
for good beer and even better virtualization, cloud computing and
storage conversation!

Location: Nakameguro Taproom
Address: Nakameguro GT Plaza C-Block 2F, 2-1-3 Kamimeguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo
Date: 4/4/13
Time: 7-10PM

My family and I are headed to Tokyo tomorrow. It's our first visit as a family since moving to the Carolinas in 2011. While they will be enjoying family time, I will be working remotely. I plan to meet with my colleagues at NetApp Japan and with our partner VMware to see how we can collaborate more globally with each other. We have a lot of cool things in the works in the area of technical marketing that I hope we can translate to the global market.

In addition, I'll be meeting with customers regarding their plans around virtualization & cloud computing and NetApp. We hope to gain insight into what works and what needs improvement as we move forward in the cloud computing space. It will be interesting to get feedback from that region on our progress.

Finally, I'll be planning a vBeers in Tokyo for sometime in the next couple weeks. I'll post an invite on the vBeers.org website shortly. If you are in the area and new to virtualization or a veteran technologist, please come. It should be a great chance for networking and like-minded industry conversation.

Hope to see you there!

I would like to give a shout out to John Troyer, David Davis, Simon Seagrave and especially Eric Siebert for announcing the list via the latest vChat. Unfortunately, I didn't crack the top 25, as did my colleagues Vaughn Stewart and Nick Howell, but hopefully I'll continue to move up the list by delivering better and more valuable content.

I have been hosting an RSS feed of the top 50 bloggers on the right sidebar of my site for a while now. Continue to look for the latest posts from the top 50 bloggers there. It will be updated with the current list once Eric posts the update to his vLaunchpad page.

Thanks for reading!

The session was well attended and we provided some detailed information about system requirements, storage scenarios, and other useful information about implementing Horizon Workspace on NetApp as well as other reference architectures.

Here is a Speaker Deck of my presentation entitled: Sharing Enterprise Files Safely and Efficiently:

In addition to the session, I worked the NetApp booth where my colleagues and I had great conversations with partners and VMware alike. We discussed lots of ideas regarding how to better collaborate with VMware in the future as well as ways to spread the word about Clustered Data ONTAP.

Finally, the parties provided an informal atmosphere for furthering relationships with folks that I already know as well as developing relationships with new folks. At the vExpert/VCDX party, me and my colleague also had an opportunity to chat with Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO, for a few minutes about NetApp and VMware's partnership and the great things coming on the horizon.

The environment at PEX is very different from VMworld. It gives partners the ability to talk with our partners and VMware on a more personal level; something that's very difficult to do at VMworld. It was great to participate again this year. It serves as a great way to kick-off the new year's conference season and the content that I will present throughout the year builds off this show. 

Now we look forward to VMworld, Insight, and beyond!

If you have been following this blog anytime in the past 6 months or so, you have undoubtedly seen a fair number of posts around Project Octopus, Horizon Data, etc. in its various incarnations. I have also blogged extensively about Zimbra, upon which Horizon Workspace was partially based.

Well, the latest change to the name is Horizon Workspace. VMware (finally) officially announced details around the functionality and availability of the components of the Horizon Suite today, including Workspace.

Horizon Workspace, for those not familiar, is a solution aimed at the mobile workforce. A solution for helping enterprises deal with the influx of BYOD. This is an obvious break from the past, as we all know. It's a way to combine access to Apps, Desktops and Data all from within a single "workspace"

Being part of a company supplying data storage to SMB and enterprise companies alike, NetApp is obviously very interested in technologies that utilize large amounts of data, and or shift data around in the datacenter to make it more viable to the business. Freeing the data for use by everyone in the organization in a way that encourages collaboration and ease of use is a huge enabler to business efficiency.

NetApp is also very conscious of the shift toward new protocols for sharing data, as well the need to store data in a secure fashion to maintain compliance standards (evidenced by the Iongrid acquisition). We can see the potential impact to protocols like CIFS/SMB and we will continue to be on the forefront of innovations in this space.

As a follow-on to the Horizon Workspace annoucement, we will be talking about our integrations with the product at VMware Partner Exchange next week. We will talk about the storage efficiency capabilities that deduplication and compression make possible, how NetApp is offering a unique backup and recovery solution (using NetApp Snap Creator) for Horizon deployments, as well as the non-disruptive operations afforded when deploying Horizon Workspace on top of NetApp's Clustered ONTAP platform.

Please join me for session EUC1388: Sharing Enterprise Files Safely and Efficiently along with Mac Binesh from VMware on Wed. 2/27 from 11-noon. You'll hear what we are working on to position NetApp as the preferred storage vendor upon which to deploy Horizon Workspace and the broader Horizon Suite. You can also visit the booth for demos of our combined capabilities or look for me around the show... I'll be happy to fill you in on the exciting solutions we have in store!

Well, the time has come again to vote for the Top VMware & Virtualization Blogs of 2013. I was lucky enough to be included last year, and this blog was fortunate enough to place in the Top 50 (#39, to be exact).

I think that I was steadier with the delivery of content this year, versus last year, by blogging more frequently and with shorter articles that I hope were valuable to the readers. I, of course, still like to do an involved, in-depth blog here and there. I continue to work on the cadence and quality of my content. Thanks for your continued readership!

I would also like to mention the blogs of my colleagues who are on the list as well. You may have seen their posts in my Twitter feed as well as my front page RSS:

Nick Howell - datacenterdude.com

Vaughn Stewart - virtuastorageguy.com

Some other bloggers that I personally find indispensable and would like to ask for you vote include the following:

Duncan Epping

Frank Denneman

Mike Laverick

Cormac Hogan

Stephen Foskett

Chris Wahl

Josh Atwell

Thanks for your vote!

VMware Press has been generous enough to supply me with an exclusive discount code to share with the readers of this blog. Thanks! 

Go to any of the Pearson family of publishing sites, including: 

pearsonitcertification.com, informit.com, ciscopress.com and/or quepublishing.com 

and enter VSAMUG to save 35% off any purchase.

Thanks for reading!

In light of the fact that I have been living in the world of End User Computing (EUC) for a while now, especially with my work around VMware Project Octopus and now Horizon Data, I have been brushing up on my VMware View knowledge to round out my expertise.

As such, I wanted to pick up the most recent, up-to-date book on View. This came in the form of: VMware View 5: Building a Successful Virtual Desktop by Paul O'Doherty from VMware Press. This book was billed as follows:

Deliver high-value virtual desktop infrastructure and a superior user experience

Companies that have already realized the benefits of VMware server virtualization are now discovering that VMware View 5 offers equally powerful opportunities on the client side. VMware View 5 is a comprehensive enterprise-class solution. But, until now, crucial information about it has been scattered throughout dozens of technical documents. In VMware View 5, leading desktop virtualization expert Paul O'Doherty combines this critical information with deep insights and best practices from his extensive enterprise deployment experience.

O'Doherty walks through every step, from the earliest planning phases through configuration, implementation, and management. He addresses important considerations ranging from changes to end-user experience through support and performance management. You'll learn how to plan and smoothly stage virtual desktop infrastructure deployments, and avoid pitfalls associated with latency, scalability, storage, and networking. 

Whether you're an architect, system administrator, or virtualization consultant, this guide's proven techniques can help you dramatically improve IT productivity as you build environments that are far more flexible and easier to manage.

Review

I feel this book is great for someone new to View or someone who has a the basics down and is looking to cover all the aspects of the product. 

All of the elements of a successful View implementation are covered, including technical details of View Persona, ThinApp, vShield Endpoint, vCenter Operations Manager, and View Adapter.

Pros:

• Great reference
• Can skip to whatever section you are interested in, without reading cover to cover.

Cons:

• Includes information about vSphere that can be found in other sources.
• Would have loved to see more on the planning of a View implementation.

Overall, I would highly recommend giving this book a try!

*Disclosure: I received an electronic copy of this book for evaluation purposes. This in no way affect this review or any review done on this site.

I am particularly interested in the one entitled: "Enterprise Alternatives to Public Drop Boxes Will Gain Traction"

Enjoy!