When & Where

The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The Cittie of Yorke’ pub which is placed centrally to both London’s West End and The City. This venue serves a fine of selection of English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks.

• Location: The ‘Cittie of Yorke’, London
• Address:  22 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6BS
• Nearest Tube:  Chancery Lane
• Time: 6:00pm
• Ye Olde Map: MAP

What are vBeers?

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It's 6am here in San Jose, as you can tell I have a little jetlag. If you regularly follow me on Twitter, you'll probably know that I am over here in the US for the Hitachi Data Systems' Bloggers day which takes place tomorrow and Wednesday.

I'll be joined today by a small list of other bloggers, some of wish I've met before at the Gestalt IT Tech Field Days. So I'm really looking forward to catching up with them and meeting the other guys who I have only chatted to on twitter. Here is a list of the attendees for you to follow.

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Here is how I decided the script should function:

1. Send myself an email telling me that the backup process has started
2. Import the name of the VM to be backed up and the destination datastore from a CSV file
3. Create a Snapshot of the VM I want to backup
4. Create a Clone'd VM from the Snapshot
   • Place the backup onto my Backup Datastore
   • Name the backup <master VM name>-<date stamp>
   • Thin provision the backup
5. Remove the Snapshot from the master VM
6. Send myself an email telling me that the backup process has completed

So that's what I wanted to do, this is what I ended up with.

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Fortunately whilst visiting EMC at the GestalIT TechFieldDay earlier in April, each of the delegates, including myself were given a copy of EMC's book; Information, Storage And Management.

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During GestalIT TechFieldDay, myself and the other bloggers were introduced to the new Data Robotic’s product called the Drobo FS.

About the Drobo FS

The revolutionary Drobo FS was designed with one purpose in mind: to deliver the best file sharing experience ever. From the moment you plug it in and see it instantly appear on your desktop, you’ll know there’s nothing like it. The all-in-one Drobo FS is perfect any connected home, home office, or small office environment needing a simple, safe device for sharing and backing up files over the network.

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I came across this free eBook today on the Hitachi website. If you're like me and work with Virtualization products but would like to learn more about Storage Virtualization then is a great freebie to download.

Just click on the following link and fill out the form to get your copy. HDS: eBook – Storage Virtualization for Dummies by Hitachi Data Systems

Related posts:

1. Bedtime Reading – EMC’s ISM Book
2. APAC Virtualization Roundtable
3. VMware Virtualization TCO / ROI Calculator
4. Hitachi Data Systems’ Bloggers Day #HDSday
5. VOTE NOW!

Veeam have just released some White Papers all written by VMware vExperts. See Veeam's complete series of white papers here or click on our latest additions below.

5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery

by Eric Siebert, VMware vExpert, Senior systems administrator at Boston Market

“New VMware vSphere and its vStorage technology improve data protection and disaster recovery. The White Paper explains how organization of all sizes can reduce storage utilization by 30%, increase the full backup speed by 50% and incremental backup speed by 90%, lower the cost of near-CDP by 80% while increasing reliability.”

http://www.veeam.com/go/vmware-vsphere-backup-wp

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The 8100 Series 2nd Gen CNAs are the first 2nd Gen CNAs to be listed on the vSphere 4 HCL. This is key because the 2nd Gen CNAs (in comparison to currently shipping 1st Gen CNAs in the market) offer:

• 150% higher FCoE performance
• 1/3 the power consumption
• Standard PCI Express form factor which enables the adapter to be deployed in any leading rack/tower servers with PCIe x8 or larger slot. Current Gen 1 CNAs are compatible only with a limited set of server models due to its large size.
• Compatible with the latest released standards for FCoE

Below is the URL with more details on the new certification.

http://ir.qlogic.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=85695&p=RssLanding&cat=news&id=1358476

Related posts:

1. Veeam’s VMware vExperts White Paper Series

A collegue of mine just gave a me a few tips on how to view the logfiles on an ESX Host in Real-time. Normally I would export all of the logs via the VIC or the vm-support command. But this limits me to only seeing what has happened, not what is currently happening.

Using the VMware Infrastructure Client, you can view some of the logs in real-time, but there is only a small amount of logs to choose from.

So how is it done?
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