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Cisco Live! 2010

(Photo from the Cisco Live! 2010 Customer Appreciation Event)

I've spent this past week attending the Cisco Live! 2010 conference in Las Vegas, learning about the various Cisco products, technology, and how to make it all work.  It's been quite an overwhelming week covering a ton of knowledge.  Inside the air conditioning system caused us all to freeze, while outside, it got close to 109F almost every single day.

On Sunday, I spent 8-hours in "Cisco Unified Communications Manager Serviceability and Troubleshooting" learning about the various tools to troubleshoot CallManager--or as it's been rebranded CUCM.  While a good session, there is only so much CUCM troubleshooting I can handle before my mind turns to mush. The rest of the week I spent mostly in sessions on wireless, mobility, and security.

I also spent a lot of time on the show floor (World of Solutions), where I ran into some old friends.  Of particular interest I learned that the Cisco Mobile 8.0 iPhone application does not require the mobility server (contrary to what I'd previously been lead to believe).  This application turns your iPhone into a Cisco IP Phone, providing access to your corporate directory, acting as a soft phone, providing visual voicemail, and allowing the switching on IP calls to the cellular network.  I'm looking forward to using it in our environment, reducing the number of devices I have to carry, and helping address AT&T's poor coverage at my school.

Also on the show floor was one of Cisco's Tactical Operations Emergency Response Vehicles. This truck goes into trouble spots and provides connectivity.  In can bridge radio channels across UHF and VHF frequencies, and provides network connectivity and IP phones via a satellite mounted on the truck. It event supports Telepresence. It can produce it's own power and cooling with an onboard generator, fuel tank and AC system.  Cisco provides the trucks in disaster area for public service free of charge, and pays the satellite charges.  Very cool, you can follow them on twitter @SJ_NERV and @RTP_NERV and Facebook. (photo from Cisco TACOPS facebook page).

(Another photo from the CAE)

Fireworks!

Photoshop World (Las Vegas)

I’m a geek, so I think it’s great fun to spend my vacation going to a conference in Vegas to learn Adobe Photoshop.  I’ve just returned from my first Photoshop World, and I had a blast.  It was great to get away from everything and spend some time focusing on something I really enjoy.  Ironically, I ended up taking relatively few pictures during the trip.  I brought a new Canon T1i DSLR camera to try out.  Below are a few pictures taken with the camera.  I was a bit surprised about how noisy the T1i was at high ISO.  Other than that, I really liked it.

 

Sign Failure

I was going through some old e-mail and found this photo from 2001 taken in Las Vegas.  Look carefully at the Paris sign, and you'll see what I think is the Windows login screen.  As someone who has had to do digital signage (albeit on a smaller scale), I'm sympathetic.

WWDC 2009 (San Francisco)

I'm in San Francisco this week for WWDC.

New camera

My new Canon 5D mark II arrived today, and I was luck to have some wonderful weather to go out and take some test shots.  Most recently I've been using my Canon d60 (circa 2002), and I have to say, we've come a long ways since then.  The controls have changed, and overall become much more complicated.  Lightroom is much much much much slower at dealing with the 21 megapixel images from the new camera vs. the 6 megapixel images from my old camera.

Windows 7 on Fusion

I decided to download the beta and give it a spin.  I thought I would try it under VMware Fusion.  I'm not sure if the problem is with the beta or Fusion, but it's too slow to be usable.  I'm actually holding out hope that Windows 7 will make a good virtual machine.  I've heard plenty of talk about targeting Windows 7 so it would work well on Netbooks.  To me that sounds promising for a virtual machine.  I guess for now, I'm sticking with XP.

VMware ESXi on Fusion

In both the VMware class I'm taking, and at work, we use the fulll version of VMware ESX.  I wanted to try out the relatively new and shiny ESXi and like many before me, didn't actually want to setup a server just to fool around with it.  So, as pictured above, I've installed it under VMware Fusion. I'm running their high end virtual server product under their Mac desktop version.  On a laptop.  Pretty cool.

VMware ESX has a customized version of Redhat Linux runing on top of the VMware kernel.  This interface can be used to manage the box from the command line, and run various management software.  More recently VMware has released ESXi which does not have this interface.  It results in a much smaller install (32MB), and is intended to be more secure and reliable.

Instructions on how to do this can be found at: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-6590

Geeking it out VMware style

I've been spending this week attending a class on VMware Virtual Infrastructure.  The class runs from 8am to 6pm, and has been making for some pretty long days.  One cool new find, the VI: Ops website.  Full of handy technical tips and best practices on actually using VMware VI3.

So far, the class has been 90% review.  But that last 10% is handy, and reinforcing the first 90% is a good thing.  I think the rest of the week is going to cover material I much less familiar with.

Since I had some questions on the iSCSI portions of the class, I did some Googling, and found an interesting blogs post on performance and using iSCSI with VMware.  What's particluarly neat, is that folks from VMware, NetApp, EqualLogic, EMC and Lefthand Networks all colaborated on it.  It's nice to see competitiors working together for the benift of their customers.

The class also fulfills half of the requirements to become a VMware Certified Professional. 

Back from SF