1. All 2011 guidelines will remain in effect except for on change (see 2012 guidelines)

2. Matt Mancini though he now works for VMWare will remain an impartial leader of this group

3. Harold Wong has been nominated and has accepted a leadership role with in the Phoenix ATNGroup

4. All Leaders of the group will be made authors of the ATNGroup.com Blog

5. New membership invites will be sent out to frequent members who attendee meetings in 2011

Our next meeting should be 02/2012 main topic is Everything Storage

More information on our upcoming meeting will be posted up.

They will be updating us on all there advancements to their product line and we’ll so some open networking!

This presentation was very informational and gave us a deep insight of how virtualization works with MS Hyper V.

Not to mention Eric did a fantastic job presenting!

Great Job Eric!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plpkMmNaYv4  << No Audio just slides

http://vdestination.com/2011/03/23/xsigo-a-closer-look-at-virtual-io/

Please read below for more information…

Virtual I/O Meeting Notes…
 
Next meeting will be Late Feb or Early March
Topic Virtual I/O Day
Location – 7st & Dunlap or I10 & 143
Duration – 4 hours – 3PM till 7PM
 
Basic Agenda..
 
In advanced each Vendor will be given a technical problem (See below)
They will talk about their product offerings
Define the problem
Show their solution to the problem
Hands on Demo of their product solving as many parts of the problem they can
 
At the end of the meeting we will regroup and discuss their solutions
If time provides we talk a bit about ATNG and the April Meeting
 
 3PM till 430PM
Team One meets with Xsigo
Team Two meets with Virtensys
 
430PM till 6PM
Team One meets with Virtensys
Team Two meets with Xsigo
 
6PM till 7PM
Open discussion about the solutions
  

Technical Problem – The Customers Environment…
 
Company Scabtoe Software INC. (SSI) was founded in 1987 in Norfolk NE with the mission to deliver high quality software products for the Commodore 64
 
Flash forward to 2011..
Scabtoe Software INC. now a publicly traded company employs ~500
Of those 500 employees, 99% reside in Phoenix,  1% (Mainly C class executives) reside in Norfolk.
Phoenix houses a 500,000 Square foot facility with able office and administrate space.
It is perfect for the administrative and programmer types but insufficient for datacenter operations.
 
The Problem…
 
In Phoenix location of SSI recently purchased the adjacent building. 
This building was slated to become a new DC operations center and is ~95%.
However with a recent down turn in the economy the build was not completed and SSI picked the building as their new DC.
 
All SSI need do is purchase/install standard ~20 x 42U cabinets & inter-networking equipment.
 
Their current environment…
 
3 x c7000 Chassis with 16 Blades – Mainly BL460G1 and 6 x BL460G6
Each chassis breaks down to 4 Blades Running ESXi 4.1, 4 Blades running ESX 3.5, and 4 Blades running 2003 or 2008 server
Each Chassis are running pass through cards requiring 96 x CAT6 1Gbs Network drops, and 32 x 4gbs Fibre Drops
 
View 3 Environment
10 x HP DL380 G6 Servers running ESX 3.5, 8 x 1GBs NICs, and 2 Fibre HBA’s
 
Remaining environment…
~150 Physical servers mainly from HP and Dell (Most of them 5 years or older)  Most servers have Dual NICs and <1/2 have dual Fibre HBA’s
Mix and Match of Cisco based networking products mainly 1Gbs (Gear is aging about 5+ years or older)
EMC DMX3 Fibre Based SAN
Brocade 48000 Fibre Based Switches
 
 
The Solutions…
 
Based on the information above… propose 3 Solutions based on:
 
Solution 1 – MONEY is no Option (Rip and Replace?)
Solution 2 – Be conservative and cost conscious (Take what makes sense and toss the rest)
Solution 3 – Scrooge is your middle name (spend only when we have to and nothing more)

It was nice to go to an event where the topics stayed away from the marketing hype and got down to technical business.
This is not to say we were 100% free from marketing slides but our goal and group direction is to steer clear of it.

The 13 attendees comprised of Virtualization, Compute, Network, and Enterprise Architects from resellers, manufactures, and end user environment’s. This was a great mix of attendee as the questions ranged from firmware update and BIOS to VLANS, IOPS, and enterprise management. VERY COOL!

At the event we asked Virtensys and Xsigo to present their product line and present a solution to a problem we proposed (For more information on the event click here)

Kudos - to both Xsigo and Virtensys for presenting and to the ATNG members for their great feedback and dicussions!