Summary of VMUG

VMUG in London was good - these VMUG's always are. In fact I must say. if you get the chance to go, do it.

2 talks stood out for me and here is my review:

1 – Software-Defined Control – Transforming IT Operations, Shmuel Kliger, VMTurbo

Shmuel Kliger, who is the founder, gave a talk about using VMturbo and the benefits of using it in your environment. It’s a tool that gathers 1000’s (well 10,000’s) of metrics from all component resources and calculates the optimum state for your environment. It’s good for the corporate IT world and a bit like the visioncore products that got bought out by Quest Software. It’s pretty much useless in a cloud environment if you ask me unless you like looking at charts and graphs and saying, ooh that looks good but ‘now what?’. Having said that, it can integrate with CloudPortal business manager and if it works well, it may be worth trying to offer this as a service bundle to offer vmturbo to the customer as a service offering.

2 – Don't Do Virtual Networking, Do Cloud Networking - Greg Ferro, packetpushers.net

This was by far the best talk presented by a guy who was to the point, lots of knowledge about networks and opinionated views. A very high summary is the discussions were about how traditional networks will turn in to more overlay networks and how SDN technology will glue overlay networks all together using encapsulation managed by SDN controllers using openflow as the management protocol. In fact, this was also something discussed at the HP technology conference last year so there seems to be a consistent message from these events. The opinion is SDN is still not ready but should start to progress in a few years’ time, circa 2015. The feeling was Cisco hasn’t yet made a move in the SDN space yet and there are no real standards. The only real standard are open vswitch, which seems to be the choice for the virtualization network stack but that’s not news, and openflow. I feel that the technology is all over the shop a bit at the moment but is gaining pace and needs some standardisations.

I didn't make vBeers but would have if I had the chance. It was great meeting with some of the guys there and talking about VMware and Puppet. Overall, a good day out.