A busy October and November

Looks like I did not manage to write a single entry for the 2nd half of October and the whole of November.

Here's a quick recap of the stuff I've been up to:

1. HP-Intel EDA Seminar 2008 - It was a fruitful trip up to Penang. We were greatful for HP's invitation and we are happy to share the High-Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities and leading marketshare position with our target audience. Did you know that 6 out of the TOP 10 supercomputers in 2008 are using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server?
• Links to the presentation and photos (Day 1, Day 2)
2. VMware Virtualization Forum 2008 - Showed off Platespin products with our Platespin colleagues and business parter at Singapore's Suntec City Convention Centre.
3. Dell APJ Enterprise Summit 2008 - Attended the one at Kuala Lumpur and it was a very fruitful trip. I had a good interactive time presenting the entire Novell Virtualization/Automation solution suite. The only challenging bit was to do this 1 hour session 6 times over 2 days. It was worth it though as the audience understood Novell's value proposition and how we can GTM very well together.
4. IBM NEDC Summit 2008 - Attended both the Kuala Lumpur and Singapore event. Spoke to IBMers and their customers on the value of SUSE Linux Enterprise and our ability to have a common code base across the commodity System x to the industry proven and very resilient System z (mainframe).

I've been working on a few projects with customers and partners... and hope to share what I've learnt on this blog later this month... and I can't wait for openSUSE 11.1 and the next big leap forward of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

IDC Green IT Conference in Malaysia & Singapore

IDC's Green IT Conference is doing its round in Asia and I had the privilege to speak at the Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) and Singapore event last week.

Update (20th Aug 2008): Found another blog entry that summarizes the KL event. I'm very delighted to see the key messages of my session have been communicated and captured by an attendee. There is even a link to my entire presentation online. Thank you Brandon.

The agenda for my session:

• The Push for Green IT
• SUSE Linux Enterprise as the Hypervisor
• The Stages of Virtualization
• Summary & Customer References

I've upgraded my Live Migration of Windows Server 2008 demo... to use OCFS2/iSCSI instead of NFS. Now I'm able to live migrate with more confidence. Will probably post this setup in more detail at a later time... stay tuned.

Some photos from these 2 events:



The Penguins & Geeko setup at the Novell booth... they told everyone to drop their business card and stand a chance to go home with one of these endangered animals... saving the planet... . The next picture is Novell and their partners at work talking to prospective clients and finally, the main hall where the conference takes place... nice green theme... feels right at home for SUSE.



The event in Singapore has a similar green theme... that's me working hard to setup my 2 Thinkpad demo before the crowd comes in, the crowd listening to my presentation/demo and yours truly on stage talking about Green IT, power consumption, floor space, virtualization... blah blah blah...

Certified Platespin Analyst (CPSA)

Yes! Proud to announce that I passed the exam this morning and I'm now a Certified Platespin Analyst (CPSA).

Many Thanks to Lewis for running an excellent Platespin workshop at the Novell Partner Academy last week in Singapore.

Looking forward in using PowerRecon to help customers with their virtualization assessments, PowerConvert to migrate and protect their workloads. Can't wait to get my hands on the Forge too.

Novell's Virtualization Suite in Action (Invitrogen)

It doesn't get any better than having a customer, industry analyst and a 3rd-party technology writer to all concur and give a thumbs up to your solution and strategy.

Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise (with VMWare VMI support) and Platespin making the headlines today at SearchEnterpriseLinux ( http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid39_gci1321810,00.html )

Excerpts below:

Invitrogen Corp., a $1.3 billion life sciences firm based in Carlsbad, Calif., decided to adopt Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise as its platform of choice.

John Merritt said: "This conversion to SUSE isn't because we love open source. It's not about what's cool. It's because it's the right thing to do for the company."

SUSE allows unlimited virtualization, either on Citrix Systems Inc.'s Xen or VMware Inc., he said. This became an important differentiator for Novell. Red Hat was 40% more expensive than SUSE; in fact, it was more expensive than Windows...

Another advantage of Novell was Novell's March acquisition of PlateSpin ... Merritt said is the only tool that will perform physical-to-virtual migrations on Linux.

Burton Group's Jones said the two top open source rivals have adopted fundamentally different market strategies, with Red Hat committed to all-open source products and Novell adopting a best-of-breed, open or proprietary philosophy that focuses on whatever's best for the customer.

Xen in Thailand

Had the pleasure of speaking and teaching a SLES XEN Virtualization workshop at the IBM System x Technical University in Bangkok on Thursday(10/7) and Friday(11/7).

It was raining outside and a traffic jam was building up... so glad to be indoors.

The class has about 20 notebooks from Dell, Compaq and Lenovo.

My setup with the Geeko skinned Thinkpad T61p and a whole lot of Geeko souvenirs and FREE SLES/SLED 10 SP1 (both 32 & 64 bit) DVDs to give away. Feels good giving away software and knowing that I'm not a pirate. Gotta love it.

Acknowledgement & Thanks to Ross Brunson and his team for creating the baseline enablement materials. I customized it a little to include Platespin into the presentation and did live demos of Win2003 & Win2008 virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 with ZENworks Orchestrator and a little sneak peak at Platespin PowerRecon and PowerConvert. Boy... that was a mouthful.

Class photos for Day 1 and 2.


Overall, a good and fruitful trip.