Jae Ellers

VMware and Pearson Team Up to Offer VMware Press

Uncategorized, book, vmware No Responses »

May 202011

Pearson and VMware Announce the Creation of VMware Press

New Publishing Alliance to Provide Virtualization Learning and Certification Resources from VMware

Indianapolis, IN – May 19, 2011 – Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, and VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced VMware Press, a newly created technical imprint that will serve as VMware’s official publishing entity. The newly formed press will provide a suite of virtualization technology and certification products in multiple languages and formats.

News Facts

The newly formed press will focus on three types of content:

Technical books, ebooks and videos that concentrate on specific applications of virtualization.
Decision Maker books, ebooks and videos that focus on the business aspects of virtualization.
Official certification materials that support VMware’s complete certification program.

The majority of the new products will target VMware technology, primarily VMware vSphere®, VMware View™, VMware vCenter™ and VMware vCloud®, which comprise the basic platform for all of VMware’s products and services.

Expert authorities, IT professionals, and subject matter experts from VMware will author official VMware Press titles.

Working in conjunction with VMware, Pearson plans to leverage the user group community programs and social channels to further engage the VMware community and offer exclusive promotions and access to the certification and technology products endorsed by VMware.

Visit http://www.vmware.com/go/vmwarepress for a complete product listing of relevant materials for IT professionals.

Usable Quotes

“Pearson stands for accessible, engaging learning, and we look forward to working with VMware to create materials that help IT professionals master innovative technologies and prepare for career-building certifications,” said David Dusthimer, Associate Publisher for Cisco Press, Pearson IT Certification and the new VMware Press. “Through this partnership, we will work hard to make VMware Press synonymous with exceptional VMware learning.”

“Many qualified subject matter experts from our engineering and technical communities are already reputable authors,” said Andrea Eubanks de Jounge, Senior Director at VMware, “and the time is right for VMware, through our alliance with Pearson, to establish a publishing entity as an official source of books and certification preparatory materials.”

Additional Publisher Links

Facebook: VMware Press fan page

Twitter: @VMwarepress

About Pearson

Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, is home to such respected brands as Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Exam Cram, IBM Press, Prentice Hall Professional, Que, and Sams Publishing, which have as their online publishing arm, InformIT-The Trusted Technology Learning Source. In addition, Berkeley-based Peachpit, the publishing partner for Adobe Press, Apple Certified, and others, publishes best-selling books for creative design professionals. Pearson is also co-founder, with O’Reilly Media Inc., of Safari Books Online, the premier on-demand technology content library providing thousands of expert reference materials through a single point of contact, including expert technology, creative and design, industry and management resources in video, audio and written formats. Pearson Education is part of Pearson (NYSE: PSO), the international media company. Pearson’s other primary businesses include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group.

About VMware
VMware delivers virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. With the industry leading virtualization platform – VMware vSphere® – customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2010 revenues of $2.9 billion, more than 250,000 customers and 25,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization, which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com

Press Contacts

Jamie Adams, Senior Publicist
Pearson 317-428-3012
Jamie.adams@pearson.com / @Jamieadams76

Joan Stone, Global PR

650-224-8733

joanstone@VMware.com

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VMware, VMware vCenter, VMware View, VMware vCloud and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

Keywords: VMware, VCP, Pearson IT Certification, Pearson, Certification, IT, Virtualization, vSphere, VCAP, VCDX, storage, technology, virtual, vmwarepress

Life at VCE

VCE No Responses »

Feb 082011

Thanks to some of the good friends I’ve made at VCE, I expect a bit of click-through. It wouldn’t do to leave my blog with content left-over from September if that’s going to happen. Given the interest in VCE and what we’re doing I wanted to post an update about VCE and what I’m doing here.

The Back Story

I’ve been working with virtualization since 2002. I’m here at VCE fresh from the startup environment, where I worked as a Systems Engineer for a virtualization storage startup in the Valley. I’ve worked as a virtualization and server consultant with a reseller, and in the past at a long stint in a big company where I got my start with VMware and server engineering.

The VCE Experience

I think the startup experience was amazingly valuable as we’re living and breathing that attitude daily here at VCE. Every day brings new projects and challenges as the Vblock message resonates in the industry and we see huge demand from partners and customers.

My Work

The team I work in is the Service Provider and Vertical Solutions group. I am a Principal Solutions vArchitect.

The Team

Our group is composed of several lab teams that work to develop and test Vblock solutions. We work with software vendors and service providers to identify leading products that fit in various vertical solutions. A project typically consists of optimizing the architecture of these products’ implementation to take advantage of Vblock’s native scalability and integration.

Solutions vArchitect

My role is to find the software vendors and solution providers who can benefit from running on a Vblock, then to turn that into business value. We work through a process to bring these projects into the lab and define how we build up a solution based on the products and Vblock capabilities. There are often opportunities to add value with other products and tools that can improve the operation and security of the end product.

Once our solution has been developed, I also work with customers, partners, and the vendors to spread the word to evangelize these solutions. Part of this is collateral development, some involves working at tradeshows, and some is based on educating partners and customers on these solutions.

So Far, So Amazing

The people here really do make an enormous difference. From working with some of the well known bloggers and leaders in the vSpecialists’ teams to meeting many of the lab staff behind many of the familiar whitepapers and solutions out there, this team is second to none.

I’ve given myself some leeway here to gush about the fantastic opportunities and amazing teams that I work with daily. I expect I will need to do this once in a while as it’s been such an amazing journey so far. The reality is that I get to work with cutting edge technology and products daily and my blog will also delve deeply into how that is constructed and operates as well. Expect more of the technical aspects of Vblock products and operation coming soon.

VMworld 2010 Lab Tour

VMworld 2 Responses »

Aug 302010

John Troyer offered to take us on a tour of the VMworld Lab facilities on Sunday. It was great to get a preview of the Labs, but what was more interesting to me was the underlying technology that VMware has implemented to make this happen.

Fun Lab Facts:

480 Concurrent Sessions
150 Subject Matter Experts assisting with the lab
8-11 VMs in a Lab Pod (the environment you connect to and interface with)
Pods consume up to 27GB of RAM each (so called Sandbox aka “Kitchen Sink” lab)
100′s of TB of EMC & NetApp storage at each site
HP & Cisco blades for compute
12 Lab Manager instances running in parallel, controlled by “Lab Cloud” custom integration

The Facilities

All the labs are in Moscone West this year in one large room. Here’s a shot of the basic layout:

Figure 1: VMworld Labs

The setup includes a Wyse thin client with two displays. The idea here is that one display shows the lab manual and the other is the remote session used to access the labs.

You can see the GbE cable bundles at the end of the table. These are aggregated in central areas on stacks of Cisco 3750s.

Figure 2: GbE aggregation points

The GbE links are aggregated to 10G and connected to Cisco Nexus 5k Switches in the DC area, which we didn’t get to see.

Hybrid Lab Systems

Another interesting and cutting edge component of the labs is the use of multiple redundant remote datacenters to provide some of the capacity. There is a third of the physical capacity onsite, with another third in Ashburn, VA, and the final third in Miami, FL. There are two 45Mb pipes to these remote DCs.

This provides redundancy in case there are issues with any of these datacenters. It also reduces the overhead for setup for Copenhagen as the plan is to swing this capacity across transatlantic links to drive the labs there. This is a very clever design that gives the Labs great resiliency and redundancy.

Content Delivery

Here’s a shot of the basic setup with the thin client and displays.

Figure 3: Thin Client setup

On arriving at the lab you will need a proctor to log you in. Once logged in you’ll see the following:

Figure 4: Lab Track selection

The screen on the right allows you to select the Lab Track you want to pursue. This is necessary as there are so many Lab Sessions there needs to be an extra interface at this level or things get cluttered. As it is, there are still plenty of choices for each track.

Figure 5: Technology & Architecture lab offerins

Here are the labs offered in the Technology and Architecture track. Once a session is selected it will either connect to a prepopulated lab environment or the environment will be loaded on demand. This is one of the tunables that the Lab staff will be working to balance over time. The more popular sessions will have prepop pools that are available. The rest will load on demand in 5-7 minutes, so be prepared for a delay for some of the labs.

Figure 6: VMworld 2010 Lab Manual interface

Here you see the lab session on the left and the manual screen on the right. There’s a countdown timer that shows how much time you have left to finish your session. If the labs are not full you can add time. This is another tunable that the staff will use to manage traffic. There’s also a Get Help button which will get the staffs’ attention so someone can come by and assist you.

This is an amazing piece of technology on display. Remember, the user with the most completed labs will win a pass for VMworld 2011. Please take advantage of this opportunity and stop by the labs early and often.

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