vPi – a Raspberry Pi for VMware presentation on vBrownBag EMEA

Last week I hosted a session talking about vPi. vPi is an image for the Raspberry Pi based on Raspbian, specifically targeted at VMware integration. Many great things can be done with this solution, including some very nifty automation, scripting and reporting.

The session was hosted on the weekly vBrownBag EMEA webinar. Take a look at the embedded Vimeo video below to watch through. Here is a basic breakdown of what the session covers:

  • Introduction / about
  • Basic intro to Raspberry Pi
  • Basic intro to vPi
  • Live demo
    • Demonstration of various VMware utilities included with vPi, such as ESXCLI, the RVC fling, vmkfstools, etc…
    • Very cool provisioning script demo using Python and Perl to deploy Virtual Machines by users sending a simple e-mail through to a designated mailbox (audience participation)
    • Quick demo of a home automation script that integrates with Foursquare, Facebook, and local Weather channels to announce various statuses/states
  • Conclusion

Remember to switch to HD mode so you can read the text in the presentation and PuTTy session I had open. Also a big thanks to Gregg Robertson (co-worker and fellow saffa) for inviting me to present on last week’s vBrownBag EMEA session.

 

httpvh://vimeo.com/71875957

 

Slides are available for download here, but it probably makes more sense to check the whole presentation out on Vimeo, as the demo is the bulk of the session:

[download id=”26″]

Enhanced vMotion / X-vMotion / shared nothing vMotion live demo [video]

I was looking for a live video demonstration of the new and improved vMotion in vSphere 5.1 the other day but could not come across one at the time. I therefore decided to get it set up in my lab and record a demo of the new vMotion in action.

This improved version of vMotion doesn’t really have a new name, but some people are calling it: Enhanced vMotion, x-vMotion, or “shared nothing” vMotion amongst other names. I am happy to just call it vMotion for now, with the knowledge that it can now live migrate (powered on) VMs across from local storage on hosts (non-shared) to other hosts with shared or local storage.

You can initiate the migration using the vSphere Web Client. Here is a live demo I recorded using my home lab system with two 1Gbit vMotion interfaces. The VM is small for demo purposes – just 512MB RAM and a very small virtual disk. It was powered up for this demo.

 

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95_TWepFMgA

 

The background music for this demo is licensed as per the following link:

Mac vs PC Parody

This is quite old but I still find it hilarious the way the majority of Mac users love to brag about their Apple products. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Apple. I even own an Apple Powermac G3, running Mac OS 9 which I used to use for design. They are however just PCs running Mac OS with different looking peripherals in the end.

The fan boys are the people that ruin Apple products though. These clips below illustrate this “fanboism” quite well…

httpv://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JixbzFjv_cU]

httpv://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tq7yykR-DM&eurl=http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant]