Veeam Community Podcast

The Veeam Community Podcast is focused on giving the global virtualization community a new resource for connecting with industry experts, bloggers and peers, as well as for staying up to date on the latest industry news, developments and trends. Each 30-minute weekly episode of the Veeam Community Podcast will be available through RSS subscription and the Apple iTunes store. The podcast is hosted by Rick Vanover, a writer, blogger, VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified IT Professional and a Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator. He currently works as Software Strategy Specialist at Veeam.

In this episode, host Rick Vanover (Twitter @RickVanover)  welcomes Brian Knudtson (Twitter @knudtson) and Doug Carson (Twitter @Douglas_Carson) to discuss Brian’s VCAP experiences. Brian is a system integrator and blogger based in Nebraska and Doug is a system integrator based in the UK. Brian also takes some time to explain his experience with a regional VMUG event in which a large hands-on lab environment was deployed.

Brian is in the hot seat for “Three views from you.”

Rick: Hello, and welcome to the Veeam Community Podcast. I'm your host Rick Vanover. This is Episode 8, "VMUGs and VCAPs, Heartland Style." Here we go. Today, our guests are Brian Knudtson and Doug Carson. How are you doing, Brian?

Brian: Good. How are you?

Rick: Hey, I'm great. Thanks for being on the show, and Doug, welcome back again. How are you, Doug?

Doug: I'm fine, thanks. Thanks for asking.

Rick: Hey, not a problem guys. So I picked on Brian, in particular, because he's one of the few people I know that has gone and taken the VCAP exam. Brian, share with us your experience. How did that go?

Brian: Well, obviously, just to lay the base for those that don't know, there's actually two different VCAP certifications today. One is more on the administrative side, the other one more on the design side. I have taken both and passed both at this point. They're advanced certification, so they're kind of the next step up from the VCP. So VCP again is kind of a generalized one, and then it splits into two different tracks, the administrative and the design, with the top level being the VCDX combining the two together. So both are requirements for the VCDX.

Rick: Dude. Man.

Brian: Yeah, it's something that the community has been asking for, for a long time, some more advanced above the VCP. I don't want to say the VCP has been watered down, but there are a lot of VCPs out there now, so it's hard to distinguish yourself. So in what may be the last little over a year now, they've released these three different advanced certifications.

My experience with the tests were they are definitely advanced certifications. They were much more challenging than the VCP, and the VCP4 was a pretty challenging test in and of itself. The administrative one was, for me, probably the more difficult one, partially because it was the first of the two that I took, so I wasn't quite as prepared for the type of test that it was. It's a lot of questions in a long time, but for the number of questions, it leaves you between one and three minutes on average per question. So you've got to kick through them real fast. The administrative one is all hands-on, so they give you a live environment to go in and configured. It says stuff like, "Go enable HA and test to make sure that it works," type of stuff.

Rick: Oh, cool. That hands-on is important. You've got to have a little bit of real world supplement really to give validity, I hate to say it, a little bit better than multiple guess. You know what I mean?

Brian: Yes, absolutely.

Doug: Brian, did you attend any courses at all to help these things?

Brian: The only two VMware courses I've taken was way back in the 2.5 days when I first started. I did the install/configure/management, which was about the only course available back then. Then, in early 2008, I think it was, when it was still VI 3, I took the deploy/secure/analyze, the DSA class.

So I didn't take any courses specific to preparing for the VCAP exam. So it truly was pretty much based on my experience in playing in a lab. Those are really the two biggest things I think there are to preparing for it is know what you're doing, and those things that you don't do every day, build up a lab and play with it and learn the things you don't do on a regular basis. Not everybody uses FT, so to be able to go in and just do it, you can figure it out pretty easily, but from a time perspective, you've got to know how to do it before the question pops up and know exactly where to go to do it.

Doug: I think it's very much the impression I get for the VCAP is you have to have had experience in VMware before you can really sit these. Would you say that's right?

Brian: Yes, definitely. There is a little bit of an element of troubleshooting in there, too, which no matter what you do, you really can't prepare for, short of having run into the problems and understanding how FT works in the first place. So if FT is not working, you have to understand how it works in order to troubleshoot it in the first place.

Rick: I can break anything. I break all kinds of stuff in my lab, which brings up a good point. Brian, do you do the laptop lab, or do you have a white box farm at home? Or what do you do for that type of thing?

Brian: I do a little bit of both. I've got my work laptop, which I've beefed up with some RAM and am able to run a very, very small environment on. But most of what I do for heavy duty lab work, like preparing for the VCAP, is in my work lab. So I work for a VAR, a value-added reseller, and we have hardware in our own little closet data center that we use to run demos and stuff and our local infrastructure. So within that environment, we have enough bandwidth. Sometimes we have additional servers where I can just throw up a complete lab environment. At the time I was working on the VCAP, we had a UCS system connected to a CX4, so I had a pretty decent lab environment to play with. I took full advantage of that, and had it yanked out from underneath me not too long after I had taken the exam. So [inaudible 05:34] help me out there.

Rick: Probably the other thing that would be good in the lab capacity, and it's going to be better with physical hardware, is DVS config and troubleshooting, because it's just not the same on virtual ESXi all stacked up on your laptop.

Brian: Yeah. And when you want to do something like FT, there's nothing specific on the VAI, but there are questions that allude to how do you configure storage in a certain way. You just simply can't replicate that on ESX running on top of Workstation.

Rick: For sure. Cool, man. The other thing that Knudtson is like a superhero in the community for is some of your VMUG work. I saw it on Twitter, maybe it was your blog, but you had kind of a cool thing that you did for the Kansas City VMUG. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. So historically, I was one of two guys that started the Omaha VMware User Group. So I kind of grew that, and then I went to work for a VAR, and that prevents me from being a leader of a VMUG, so I had to give that up. So after I started with the VAR, I talked our management into sponsoring a VMUG here in Omaha, and we did hands-on labs. That was in early 2010.

Then in Kansas City, the Kansas City VMUG, the Omaha VMUG, and a couple of the others around Kansas City, like in Arkansas and Oklahoma, got together at the end of 2009. They did a Midwest Regional VMUG, kind of brought them all together and did that not uncommon mini VMworld type VMUG like you see in New England and over in the Netherlands and stuff like that. The first time they did it back in 2009, it was pretty low key. They had pretty much one place for presentations, and they had this smallish room where we were all kind of crammed in there with one circle table each.

So, being pretty close with all of the leaders in all those groups through many different avenues, that brought up, "Hey, let's do hands-on labs. That worked out really well for VMworld in the past, and we've done it successfully in Omaha. Let's take it up a notch and do it for the regional event." So discussions went on and negotiations, and we jumped on it. What we ended up doing for that one was all HP, HP blades, P4000 storage, HP networking, HP thin clients, HP monitors, and built a little lab not unlike what you see at VMworld and put together just a quick list of five or six different topics that we felt were interesting, both between us as a VAR and the VMUG leaders, being the community representation.

Rick: So you had a full, kick butt lab. That's pretty cool. How did you guys get that gear? Was it like a loan, sponsor from HP? How did you score that?

Brian: It was sponsored with HP. So we are a very tight relationship with HP, so they obviously saw the advantages, just as my company did, as to what that meant and the exposure that it gives them. So they essentially just pulled up a truck and rolled off a rack, and inside that rack was everything we needed, and then two or three pallets worth of thin clients and monitors, which we spent half a day just setting those up alone.

Doug: I think for VARs I think these VMUG shows are really great. It really allows people, first of all, to know that you're there. I must say, I work for a VAR as well in the UK, and the couple of VMUGs I went to prior to starting with a VAR were actually great. It's amazing just the community that revolves around VMware is just unbelievable. It's probably one of the best communities I've ever seen.

Brian: Yeah, and I'm huge on the community aspect, obviously starting a VMUG and watching it grow. Omaha is not one of the bigger ones, but it averages anywhere between 50 and 100 people each meeting. When we did the labs in Omaha, back in early 2010, it pretty much doubled what the highest attendance had been before that, so that was impressive. So the community has been good to me. I like to give back to the community.

I remember the VMware community forums way back in the early days when they first started that. I've been to every VMworld up to this point and to three of the partner exchange. Helping Theron out with VMunderground parties now, so we did one of those before PEX this year, and plan on a pretty big one for VMworld this year in Vegas. So I'm all about the community. I think that everybody's better together, and to other VARs, I'd definitely recommend considering doing something like this for your local VMUG, because like you said, it's all about exposure and getting your name out there and showing, hey look at what we can execute. This is something pretty big.

Rick: That's pretty cool, Brian. You bring up a good point. I was really struggling. Did you call the Kansas City . . . did you call it the Midwest Regional VMUG?

Brian: Yeah, they decided to go Midwest Regional because it's greater than the Kansas City VMUG. It does take place in Kansas City, but it does encompass several of the Midwest VMUGs.

Rick: Yeah, but see that's the thing. Midwest. I don't know if I'd call Kansas City the Midwest. I think of that like Heartland or Great Plains. I think of Midwest as just like a smidge north of that. It's like North Carolina. Is that the South or is that the East Coast?

Brian: Well, that's getting into geography, which is far from my main smee.

Doug: I'm in the Far East in Europe.

Brian: It's all relative.

Rick: I used to get into these discussions with people when I lived in Michigan especially. I'm like, we're not really Midwest up here. It's kind of like Great Lakes. But then I was talking about Ohio, because I used to live in Ohio as well before then. I don't know if it's not really the Midwest, because a lot of people think that Cleveland and Pittsburgh are the last cities in the East, and Indianapolis is the first city in the Midwest. We got into this no man's land. I don't know. It's just pub talk, if you will.

Brian: Oh yeah. It becomes a religious debate for some people, too. It's like, "No, I'm Midwest."

Rick: For sure. So were you at PEX, Brian, I take it?

Brian: Yes. Yes, I was.

Rick: How was that? I watched some of the three words. I watched some of the tweets. Other than that, I didn't really catch anything.

Brian: People tend to be a little bit more quiet at PEX than they are at VMworld, just because a lot of the stuff is NDA. So we all have to be pretty careful about what we tweet, especially during sessions and keynotes. So what you see is more of the socializing aspect of it than anything else. But for those of us that are in the partner community, it's kind of a six month out VMworld. It's much smaller, much tamer, especially on the show floor. You don't see the antics that you see at VMworld a lot. The booths are a lot smaller and a lot more tame and less about drawing people in and more about sharing ideas and connecting with other partners.

It's interesting running into some of the other people I've known for a long time before I was ever working for a partner out there who are now competitors of mine. I had this conversation at least a couple times where we sat there and it was like, "Oh hey, it's good to see you." You're kind of walking on nails a little bit. And then you kind of warm up, and you're like, we're all here to learn more and to push the message. Yeah, we compete, but we just have to be careful what we say to each other when someone from your home territory is standing there next to you. I talk to people from the East Coast, West Coast, who don't live anywhere near Nebraska, Iowa, and we talk completely openly and talk about success stories for each of us. Hopefully, we both help each other out a little bit more. So it becomes a weird environment where you're not only competing, but you're also working together towards a common goal.

Doug: Something I picked up on through Twitter, and even just listening to the VMware community's podcast, that John Troyer hosts, was there seems to be quite a number of smaller VARs looking to essentially build out vCloud initiatives for some of the SMV customers. The thought behind that was . . . what I thought was interesting was that the smaller customers were quite keen to stay with the VAR and had quite a good relationship. But also, they felt that they would get better service from a slightly smaller cloud provider than maybe something like Terremark or something that size. That's the kind of theme I felt came out of some of the stuff that I saw. Would you say that's right, Brian?

Brian: Oh yeah, absolutely. I work for a small VAR, and our main client base is SMV. We do have several large customers as well, but they're starting to ask the cloud question. They're starting to get some of the hype and wondering what they should do about it. We're still debating internally exactly what our instinct is going to be. Do we try and build out cloud? A lot of the smaller VARs I talk to out there, their approach is we're going to partner with somebody, because they've got the expertise to do it. They've got the global reach, or at least a regional reach that I can't provide where I'm at with my company. That's another one of those cool aspects about PEX. We can sit down and talk about it. We don't have to look over our shoulders wondering if there's any customers listening, because now we can talk on a level that a normal customer shouldn't be hearing potentially.

Rick: Sure. I think that the, I don't want to say mom-and-pop cloud, but the not big five type of cloud, I think there's definitely a market for that. I've bumped into a number of people, and they find a groove. They find a customer and probably the satisfaction index, the people that I've met, again it was at a VMUG, they were happy as can be. They loved it, it was great. Then you can get into some of the, especially on the smaller, local cloud types, you can even get into some colo arrangements as well.

Brian: Well, and that's where a lot of the smaller cloud providers are coming from. Their original model was colocation, and they've slowly moved up to doing more services based offerings, where maybe it's we'll help manage our exchange server all the way down to we'll provide you hardware and everything. We'll rack and stack it. We'll put it in a rack. We'll power it. We'll make sure you've got Internet connectivity, but it's all yours from there. All the way down to the very bottom ground, which is you just need square footage. Bring in your rack, bring in everything that's in it, and go. They're taking that next leap, which is, okay, we're already managing your stuff. You just pay for a slice of infrastructure, and we're going to combine everything and be able to offer that up as a self-service offering where they may or may not be managing it themselves.

Rick: Sure. I bumped into a guy that provides . . . it's kind of weird. I can't really tell the exact story, because I didn't get his permission, but I'll neutralize it as much as possible. But this person runs a very large data center that is segmented out like condos to other data centers. So you'll see one little room with two or three racks in it, and then another room that might have four or five, and then another one only has one. That variety will repeat itself hundreds of times in this building. They've got some pretty big storage resources they can provision out, and great bandwidth in the facility, that kind of stuff. It was kind of cool, and he just parcels it out like a condo, if you will.

So there are a lot of different models that can work for a lot of different people, and I kind of think it's exciting to see how that's going to go, because a lot of customers just can't get over that push for that initial investment for the whole data center, the right bandwidth, and all that kind of stuff. So, I don't know, Doug, do you see a lot of colo type of arrangements?

Doug: Not a huge amount. There are some clients that have DRS and colo and stuff like that, but a lot of the SMVs I speak to know they're not really looking at putting anything into the cloud or colo. I've had a few quotes from people I can't really mention about in terms of cloud services and stuff like that, but their prices were quite high we found. I think as time goes on and models start to emerge and stuff like that, I think the SMV market from what I can see are very keen on adopting some of these things. If I was starting a small company, I really wouldn't think twice about putting anything into the cloud right now, because it's just, "Why should I buy hardware when I can rent it essentially?"

Rick: Oh yeah. It's so much easier when we're starting from a clean slate. There's no baggage stuck in my own data center. We just start it where it makes sense, and it would make sense in a lot of cases in the cloud. I don't know entirely in the cloud. Maybe hybrid. That becomes the proverbial it depends at that point.

Doug: I think you get so, but I think you get the things where it's initially VMware coming down the line saying go put your test in the cloud, see how that goes. And then about like how virtualization started.

Brian: Yeah, and those smaller customers gain a huge advantage by going to the cloud, pushing everything to the cloud, because today they may be running in the closet at best, and you've got all the risks with heating and cooling and security that, quite frankly, they can't really do much better than that with their size and budgets. You move them up into a cloud, and you're probably reducing their OPEX costs overall and definitely their CAPEX cost. Now you've also given them the ability to have all those world class features that they couldn't afford in a colo facility either. So by simply throwing out a handful of VMs as opposed to having to buy half a rack worth of stuff, they can get that HA type capability that is huge for an SMV to be able to just . . . I know I'm going to have to take the server down, put it in maintenance mode, and everything vMotions off of it. They've just saved themselves a ton of downtime just doing firmware updates.

Rick: The other thing is they got that closet back.

Brian: Exactly. Now they have a place for their coats.

Doug: The cleaner is happy.

Rick: Right. Well, I've got a gimmick on my podcast, Brian. I don't know how well you read my notes that I sent. I put it way at the bottom. So, I've got three questions for you. You're on the hot seat.

Brian: Awesome. I'm prepared.

Rick: All right, cool. So just generally speaking, as a technologist, not necessarily related to your work, not necessarily related to virtualization, but in your past, in your history, what's the most interesting technology thing you've ever worked on or story you can share with us?

Brian: Obviously, there's no lack of interesting technology going on these days or even in the past 10 years. I guess as I looked at your note, the thing that kept popping in my head that I thought would be most interesting to everybody, and a lot of people have probably already heard this story, because I tell it often enough. It was really my first aha that this VMware thing is actually going to work and be something big. Back in the 2.5 days, we were standing up our first VMware environment. We were somewhat tinkering with it. There was a big project coming in that just needed a ton of servers.

We said, "Well, we're just going to virtualize them." They were freaking out. I said, "No, we'll start with dev and tests, and as you're doing your testing, we'll be prepping it for production and making sure it's production ready for you for when you go to that." It came down to they were doing a lot of database conversions as part of this application upgrade, and for some reason, they would hit these weird network glitches where the whole thing would just come tumbling down. So it was very network sensitive, and one late afternoon, we're in the data center. This is a colo facility, so we're off-site, disconnected from everybody for the most part. We're working on upgrading things, kind of doing our last push to make this thing production ready.

So we're kind of walking on needles a little bit trying to make sure that we don't disrupt things. We're down to the very last server. We had to do firmware updates and upgrade it to the latest version of patches and everything. It's like, okay, they've got some stuff running on here, but it is all dev and tests. Should we just go ahead and vMotion it? I happened to be there with my manager, and we kind of looked at each other, and he said, "Yeah, go for it. We've got to trust this thing sometime."

It's like, okay, vMotion, got the ping test running. Back in those days, you drop three pings on a fairly regular basis. You catch your breath, and you hold it for a couple seconds, and then you come back and everything's fine. You say okay. You stand there and you wait for the phone to ring. The phone doesn't ring. So you say, "Okay, let's keep going." So we do the upgrades and everything, and we're done, close up shop, still haven't heard from anybody.

Next morning we go in. "So how are things going in that dev test environment?" "Oh, it's going great. We've been running the database conversion for almost 24 hours now." "Oh really? No problems?" "No, it's been running great for once, as long as we've gone so far." I'm like, "Really? Nothing in the afternoon at all?" "No, no issues." It's like, "Okay thanks." And I walked away from there and went to my manager and said, "Hey, guess what? We're did that vMotion. They were running the database conversion, and it didn't look bad at all." And we looked at each other, and we both kind of wiped the sweat off our foreheads, and said, "Okay, we're all full in for this now. There's no going back."

Rick: Rock on, that's awesome. You know what's scary is all these, I don't want to say kids, but all these kids coming up here, they don't know any different now. Virtual machine, it's the only way to go. I'm like, come on. They don't really appreciate these battle scars. Right now, what's going on in your work experience or just general technology that you're most interested in today?

Brian: Again, there's a lot of cool stuff to like, but in my personal career-wise, it's variety. It's being able to sit down with a customer and show them something cool and almost blow their mind in a lot of cases. Trying to sit down and explain how HA works and how slot sizes are calculated and give them that kind of deep technical information that they've never even considered. They say, "Oh, virtualization cloud. We need to do that. Let's do that." They don't even realize what they're getting themselves into. At a certain point, you see them go blank like, "Oh my gosh, I'm never going to be able to catch all this." Then you get to that point where they actually understand it, and you see that light go off and come back on in their eyes. That's a happy moment for me, walking them through that.

Rick: Cool, cool. How about in the future? What do you see coming in the future that is interesting to you, exciting, on the horizon?

Brian: Well, I see the future looking as cool as the past has been. Obviously, technology is on a massive acceleration right now. You see tablets, you see network convergence, you see . . . most of us grew up in a time where we were geeks and we were shunned to the side because we liked technology, and now everybody has it. Most of the people that I know that have the coolest, newest cell phones are people that aren't even in IT. My sister and people like that who I look at and I'm like, "You're into this kind of thing?" "Oh yeah, look at all these cool things I can do." I sit back and it's like, "Wow, you are such a geek."

Rick: Yeah, that's awesome. Payback, it's awesome.

Brian: Yeah. So I think going forward, all of this stuff is just going to completely, as it has in the last 20 years, it's going to completely change things 20 years from now. It's going to be up to some massive visionaries to guide places. You look at Zuckerberg and what he did with Facebook. Who would have ever thought five years ago that what that was going to be. Well, 10 years ago, whoever thought virtualization was going to completely change our lives? I was a web developer. I was working as a webmaster before virtualization came down, and through a series of unfortunate events, or fortunate depending on your point of view or my point of view at the time, it kind of landed in my lap as more of a senior person on the team, and I started digging into it. Now I'm full board on it and rarely touch a web server anymore. So it's amazing how quickly things can change both from an industry perspective and from a personal perspective if you keep your ear to the ground as to where the next big thing is going to be.

Rick: You're right, 100% agree. I have to admit something. When somebody first told me about Facebook, I rolled my eyes and said, "I don't care. That doesn't sound like it's of any use." I was definitely wrong.

Doug: It's the same with Twitter. I didn't bother with Twitter. I thought, it's just something else I've got to look at, something else that will pop up. Actually, over the last few months on Twitter, it's unbelievable the amount of really good information you can pull from different sources and guys in the community. It's absolutely amazing.

Rick: Yeah, so you and me are 0 for 2. It's like these things come, you just need to give them a chance. Virtualization, the same way, cloud the same way. It's not really anything new, I guess, is it? So hey guys, let's wrap it up. Brian, thanks for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

Brian: My pleasure, Rick. Thanks for the opportunity.

Rick: You're on Twitter @BKnudtson, B-K-N-U-D-T-S-O-N. Did I spell that correctly?

Brian: That is correct.

Rick: Rock on. Spell check didn't help me on that one.

Brian: No, it usually doesn't.

Rick: And then on your blog, it is www.Knudt.net/vblog, and that's K-N-U-D-T.net. And Doug is on Twitter @Douglas_Carson. If anybody has any podcast questions, you can send me an email at podcast@veeam.com. Otherwise, hey guys, thanks for being on the show.

Brian: Thank you.

Doug: Thanks a lot.

Rick: All right. Cheers guys.