Indianapolis VMUG (@IndyVMUG) is back in season again and it will be bigger than ever this year. If you've never been, it's one of the largest VMUG gatherings in the nation with a few thousand attendees. (register and see the schedule)

This year, there will be a dedicated User Content Track with a lightening talk format where all presentations are limited to 15 minutes. This is NOT in the Official VMUG Schedule so you will have to find it once you get there. If you have never been to a conference with <30min sessions, you are going to love it. With one hour sessions, people tend to start veering off into iDevice land around the 20 minute mark. These 15 minute sessions will allow you to get more out of the conference with lots of great information crammed in. This is being sponosored by the #vBrownBag folks so there will be NOTHING VENDOR RELATED!!!

I will present two lightening talks:

1. 11:00am - Riding The Next Wave: Docker Containers
2. 11:30am - Riding The Next Wave: Cloud Foundry

I am tentatively scheduled for an afternoon track unless all the slots are consumed and other people want to present other topics.

1. 2:30pm - Riding The Next Wave: Docker Containers
2. 2:45pm - Riding The Next Wave: Cloud Foundry

Yesterday I had some fun getting Vagrant + boot2docker working on my mac with VMware Fusion. It really wasn't all that hard but some people have had some issues so I'll document my steps. I chose to use VMware Fusion instead of VirtualBox for Vagrant because I don't need 2 products that essentially do the same thing. At the same time, Fusion has reported better consistency with experience and performance time and time again.

1. Install Vagrant

• Go to the Vagrant Website downloads and install the vagrant package. That should have been relatively simple

2. Create a Vagrant directory

• I created a Vagrant directory under my Documents folder. /Users/kcoleman/Documents/Vagrant
• You will use this directory to place vagrant files

Back again with another update. Day two started off strong. It was tough to choose, but I opted to do Getting Started with Go and Continuous Delivery. There were definitely some other cool tutorials I wish I could have done such as Zero to Cloud with @NetflixOSS.

A cool free e-book to download OSCON 2014 speaker interviews

Eagerly awaiting another year of open source wonders, the Opensource.com community caught up with a handful of notable OSCON speakers to gather behind-the-scenes stories about their passions for open source. This book collects the interviews we conducted.

On to becoming a Gopher.

Steve Francia of MongoDB talked about his origin and how he began using Go and his baby is Hugo -> http://hugo.spf13.com/. The slides and tutorial are all online and you can do everything at your own pace. This was an awesome session and Steve did a fantastic job explaining *why* we need Go, the problems it solves, and how to build our first application. If you do follow along with these slides, it could take you anywhere from 2-8 hours to do it. It's 250 slides and it was ALOT to take in. Everyone works at a different pace. Me, I was SLOWWWWW. I had GoClipse installed. I spent the first 15 minutes trying to get Go working correctly there. One of the guys from Google came over and said, never use Eclipse. So I jumped over to Sublime and worked furiously to catch up. First lesson learned. I'm going to supplement this with the Go tutorial on pluralsight.

It's Day 1 of OSCON and it's the first of the "tutorial days". It's similar to the few days leading up to VMworld where you can pay a little extra and go to the pre-conference bootcamps. You can look at the entire OSCON 2014 Schedule to see the list of tutorials and sessions.

The conference feel is unlike any of the big ones. There wasn't a single banner outside advertising the event and there were only a handful banners and signs inside that pointed where you needed to go. In fact, it took me about 10 minutes to figure out that OSCON was sharing the venue with 3 other Cons and I had to walk a quarter mile to get to the location.

As much as I really wanted to attend Get Started With the Arduino - A Hands-On Introductory Workshop, I figured it probably wasn't in my "career's" best interest. Maybe I'll do this tutorial next year since it's been going 4 years strong. So I opted to attend Getting Started with OpenStack: Hands on Tutorial with Egle Sigler & Cody Bunch, and Introduction to Docker: Containerization is the New Virtualization with James Turnbull.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a new fish (shawshank reference) when it comes to OpenStack and Docker. I've spent a good deal of time messing with the both, but I've never taken any formal training. It's the same thing as your boss telling you "Go install vCenter" when you have no idea about the underlying features and functions of ESXi. When messing with any new technology I believe you need to grasp the foundation before you start going crazy. There's only so much you can learn from self-discovery and reading documentation. This is why I opted to take these "introductory" courses so I can learn from the people who make the product.

I'm just throwing a quickie out there...

I originally wanted to create a small ruby or python script that collected the Active Number of View Sessions currently running for a small project we are running internally. Come to find out, there isn't an API available for VMware View (TBD documentation for Horizon 6) so I had to rely on Powershell to do this for me.

I'm sure there are PS gurus out there that will tell me they can condense this down to a single line, but that's not how my brain works.

Big thanks to Aaron Delp (@aarondelp) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely) for inviting me to be a guest on The Cloudcast episode #149. We discussed my time at Cloud Foundry Summit and what it means to enterprises out there. If you are bored with virtualization, you should listen and maybe start seeing the light... i know i did.

A Summary from the show (taken from thecloudcast.net)

I've lived in a world of VMs for the past few years and since I started learning Ruby on Rails last year, I've seen a whole new light. You hear all the time that software is eating the world but it's starting to really settle in for me. This is where PaaS and Docker start to shine. As applications become less monolithic, the need for VMs diminish. PaaS and Docker are a new frontier.

To put it in perspective, check out this slide below from the opening keynote. Software is disrupting every industry and one of the things that Andrew Clay Shafer (@littleidea) said at the end of his final keynote on Wednesday was "If you aren't creating a software company, then someone else is...and you will lose".

We're on to Part 3. In Part 1, we deployed MicroBOSH that enables us to deploy BOSH. In Part 2, we deployed BOSH which got us used to using manifest files. The manifest rules all. This is all adapted from the official documentation located at Deploying Cloud Foundry on vSphere.

This tutorial will go over the steps it takes to deploy Cloud Foundry on vSphere. Here are the proper steps:

Part 1 - How to install MicroBOSH
Part 2 - Deploy BOSH with MicroBOSH
Part 3 - Deploy Cloud Foundry with BOSH

NOTE: This final part has not been 100% verified. The deployment of this Cloud Foundry manifest requires the following infrastructure: 72 vCPUs, 200GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage. Of course, my home lab doesn't support this so I kept getting timeout errors during the deployment. My problem is that my vCenter server can't keep up with the deployment speed. My vCenter Server Virtual Appliance is only configured with 8GB of RAM but it needs something much beefier to be able to handle the amount of requests. I believe this is the case because my vSphere Web Client would lose connection for a few minutes and when the deployment stopped, the Web Client started responding again. If you do test out this manifest below, please confirm it by mentioning it in the comments below. I will hope to test this in a real lab environment soon.