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VMworld warmup and what can we expect?

VMworld 2019 Barcelona will officially start on Tuesday with the General session and lots of breakout sessions. But there’ll be activity on Sunday and Monday too. As usual we flew in early on Saturday to get a rest before a busy week and get ourselfes organized. The next few days will be a rush. My schedule looks like patchwork and it’s tight. Most of my appointments are related to community work like VMUG, VCI, official bloggers, vExpert, Inner Circle, 3rd party vendors etc. Breakout sessions not included. It’s good to know that sessions will be recorded and can be viewed or downloaded afterwards. This is really great about VMworld, because it’s literally impossible to attend all interesting sessions. I’ve downloaded some VMworld US sessions on my phone and watched them on the flight to Barcelona. My personal infotainment. 🙂

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Join the Odyssey Cup at VMworld

Do you like VMware Hands-on-Labs? I bet you do! If you’re coming to VMworld 2019 Barcelona you can prove your skills in an awesome competition and maybe become an Odyssey Champion.

Form a team with up to 3 members or join an existing team and compete with other teams in the VMware Odyssey Cup. There will be 24 teams all together and they have to complete tasks in Hands-on-Labs. Teams will be judged by accuracy and time to complete the tasks in the lab. There’ll be labs about vSphere, vSAN, Horizon and vRealize Automation. You’ll need some free time slots in your VMworld schedule on Tuesday and Wednesday and if you’re successful for the finals on Thursday.

  • Tuesday, November 5, 2019 | 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
  • Wednesday, November 6, 2019 | 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
  • Thursday, November 7, 2019 | 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Prizes

Members of the winning team will get a new MacbookPro. The second best team will get an OculusGo for each member and every participant will get a cool Odyssey jacket.

Tournament

Register

Interested? Then hurry up and register for VMware Odyssey by Hands-on Labs. It’s also possible to register on site at the Odyssey info desk on Monday.

Ich you have further questions, please email odyssey-support@vmware.com

Links

VMware HOL Blog

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Unclaim vSAN Disks in ESXi Host

While playing with the latest ESXi / vSAN beta, I ran into a problem. I was about to deploy a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) onto a single ESXi host, that was designated to become a vSAN Cluster. During initial configuration of vCenter something stalled. Needless to say that it’s been a DNS problem. 😉

That part of vCenter/vSAN deployment is delicate. If something goes wrong here, you have to start over again and deploy a new vCenter appliance. When you run the installer a second time (after you have fixed your DNS issues) you won’t see any disk devices to be claimed by vSAN. Where have they gone? Well, actually they are still there, but during the first deployment effort they were claimed by vSAN and now form a vSAN datastore. But a greenfield vSAN deployment on a first host needs disks that do not contain any vSAN or VMFS datastore.

How to release disks?

Usually you can remove Disk Groups in vCenter. But we don’t have a vCenter at this point. Looks like a chicken-and-egg problem. But we do have a host and a shell and esxcli. Start SSH service on the host and connect to the shell (e.g. Putty).

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Join VeeamON Virtual on November 20th 2019

Like in recent years, Veeam will kick off its VeeamON Virtual 2019 conference. It’ll take place on November 20th 2019 right on your desktop. Registration is free.

Agenda

Expect presentations by more than 20 speakers from the tracks Vision & Strategy, Implementation Best Practises, Cloud-Powered and Architecture & Design. More than 1000 Minutes of content that 5000+ visitors from all over the world can stream for 24 hours.

Ratmir Timashev (Co-Founder and Executive Vice President) and Dave Russell (Vice President, Enterprise Strategy) will open with their keynote with Veeam Predictions 2020.

Personally I’m very excited about technical sessions by Veeam’s leading technologists. They will give an outlook to the long exprected Veeam Version 10 and many more topics from the Veeam ecosphere.

Like last year and the year before ElasticSky.de will be official media partner of VeeamON Virtual and I will join the expert panel to answer questions about Veeam in the chat room.