If you’re in the SMB or mid-market space, you’ve likely heard of SpiceWorks. They offer a free (as in beer) platform for you to monitor your infrastructure, build and offer a help desk to your users, and interact with other SpiceHeads (fellow consumers of SpiceWorks) on purchasing decisions and figuring out how to solve issues. It’s a very cool community filled with people who are groovy enough to share tips and tech with one another.
This year, I’ll be delivering a session at the SpiceWorks conference, SpiceWorld Austin, coming up on September 23rd-24th. The session is titled Ridiculously Awesome and Completely Practical ways to Master VMware Networking because that sounded fun. It will run on Wednesday, the 24th, from 10:15 until 11:15 AM CST.
What will this session be about? I’ll give you a sneak peek at the abstract:
[symple_toggle title=”Click to view the Session Abstract” state=”closed”]While virtualization with vSphere does an amazing job at abstracting away all of the hardware resources from virtual machines, there’s still a lot of design and configuration work to be done around plumbing the physical network into the virtual switches. And who has to deal with these headaches – you! This introduces a number of head scratchers around the recommended practices for connecting your management, vMotion, IP storage, replication, and virtual machine traffic flows without sacrificing performance or incurring costs. In this session, join Chris Wahl, a VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) and author of the hit book Networking for VMware Administrators, as he shares his experiences and secrets around real-world deployments of virtual networks for a myriad of use cases just like yours.
In this one hour session, you will learn:
- The differences, advantages, and caveats when using standard or distributed vSwitches.
- How the ESXi hypervisor handles switching, routing, and network lookup tables.
- All of the networking jargon necessary to request or build the right 802.1Q VLANs to successfully tag your port groups.
- Methods to integrate your iSCSI and NFS storage networks into a vSphere environment with no muss, no fuss.
- Proven ways to design for server hardware that uses 1 Gb, 10 Gb, and mixed speed network interface cards (NICs).[/symple_toggle]
Anyone who wants to attend can get 20% off the conference registration with this code: WAHL20. Note that early bird pricing ends this Friday (Aug 22nd), but the code will continue to work after early bird.
I’ll also bring along a few signed copies of Networking for VMware Administrator books to give away during the session. Hope to see ya’ll there!
