Back in January, I gave a presentation for the local LUG group (CIALUG) and while it was nice to put it all into one presentation, I’d like to go back and break down the various aspects of the presentation and show off what Puppet can do in your organization.

What is it?

Puppet is a tool designed to manage the configuration of Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems declaratively. The user describes system resources and their state, either using Puppet or Ruby DSL (domain-specific language). This information is stored in files called “Puppet manifests”. Puppet discovers the system information via a utility called Facter, and compiles the Puppet manifests into a system-specific catalog containing resources and resource dependency, which are applied against the target systems and any actions taken to remediate the system to the desired state will be reported. (Source: WikiPedia)

Before VMworld, I laid out a few of my predictions of what I thought we’d see at the conference. Let’s see how I did…

• vRAM is dead. The rumors were true. This was kind of a gimme but I’ll take it. So long vRAM licensing!
• vCloud 2.0. Got this one too though its vCloud 5.1 to line up the numbering scheme with vSphere. We have snapshots and multiple disk levels supported within the provider vDCs. At the conference, I can’t say for sure that the vConsole app was new, but it worked in Chrome which is a huge step forward.
• Virtual Phone for iOS. Yup, but not in the same way that they are doing it for Android. But still a protected application that has some nice tricks like not allowing you to copy and paste from the protect app to another application running on the phone.
• One pane of glass to rule them all. You could argue that the purchase of DynamicOps makes this happen, but its not fully integrated yet. I think next year will be the real integration and we’ll get that one pane of glass feel to managing our environments.

3 out of 4 isn’t too bad.

Last day of VMworld!

Its been a good conference for me. Solid sessions and the labs that I’ve done have been good. Its my second year here so things are a bit different than they were last year. In Vegas in 2011, I loaded up my schedule with sessions upon sessions. This year, no where near as many sessions as they are all online and available after the fact. This year I tried to get into the labs more, but honestly, the labs had some issues. There were quite a few issues just getting the sessions to launch for me in the “traditional” route. Where I had the better luck was with the BYOD labs. Basically load up a web page, launch the lab and then fire up your view client. Slick! And the best part, there have been rumors and a wonderful lady that I spoke to yesterday pretty much confirmed they will offer the labs after the conference. Solid!

No keynote planned for today. Just sessions, labs and the solutions exchange.

Some of the cool tech that is out there that you should check out are:

PuppetLabs: Can’t say enough good things about what these guys are doing. Automate your infrastructure with Puppet! Its damn impressive.

Raidundant 1 Million IOPs in 3 U. This guy has some very cool tech, wicked smart and oh…has a patent on this tech. Well worth checking out.

Day 2 and everyone is a little more tired but ready to get their learn on. Today was the day that Steve Herrod gets to take the full spotlight and show some of the cool tech that is happening at VMware. Much like last year, the day 2 keynote was focused on the end user with both the desktop and mobile device.

The View + Mirage technology was slick, no doubt about it. Being able to have a local image syncing back to the server that in case of someone breaking their laptop having their laptop stolen, they can move that image to a view desktop in a few clicks. Seamless! It was pretty impressive.