I am a community guy, I love getting involved with User Groups, talking to people about technology outside of my job, and generally just being part of the larger community.  I find myself writing more and more posts focused on that and less on specific tech, although I am working on a series of posts on designing my home lab, I just keep getting sidetracked by the rest of my life.

I have the opportunity to work with a number of “old school” marketing people.  In fairness, they are doing their job, and I respect them a great deal.  I just think their understanding of Return On Investment, ROI, is a little flawed.  I read too many books by Seth Godin and others on viral marketing.  It isn’t my fault, John Troyer got me hooked when he was running social media at VMware.

ROI from a marketing perspective used to be pretty easy to calculate, the cost of an event divided by the number of quality leads generated from an event which they were able to convert to sales.  A very old school marketing process in my opinion.  As I have looked at influence marketing, and observed some of the people I respect, I believe I am investing a piece of myself in the people and businesses I talk to.

While I am not world renown, I do have some influence in my own little corner of the world.  Most of what I talk about is where I think the industry is going.  I am no genius, but I think if we look at trends and pay attention, it is pretty straight forward.  I am also fortunate to work with some really smart people in my day job so I have access to some exceptional thought leaders.  I continue to work on building a reputation, and part of that is to shield friends and customers from marketing or sales people calling them to follow up on a conference.

The real ROI comes from building relationships and trust.  Building up our friends and customers careers, and helping them be successful.  Making it right every time, and going above and beyond to provide great service, not simply trying to measure how many sales we made from a conference or an event.

I wanted to share a slightly less technical post today.  Recently I returned from a week long mission trip in El Salvador, with a group of 12 people, including my sons ages 18 and 15, where we did some work at a church building there, and at the orphanage affiliated with the local church.  While my personal religious beliefs and my career are separate, it was refreshing to find a commonality in supporting communities locally and around the world.  The culture at VMware is one of giving back, encouraging employees to serve our communities.  I am very thankful to my manager, my sales team, and the entire company for inspiring me to do something that pushed me far beyond my comfort zone.

It all started with my wife, who took several teenagers on a mission trip to Puerto Rico a few years back.  Our oldest son had been planning to go on a mission trip for several years.  He had saved the money to pay his own way, which is impressive for a young man.  We worked with my middle son to do the same, and I intended to send them with the group, but I had no intention of going.  Finally after some discussion with my wife, the presentations during New Hire training last summer here at VMware, and some deep conversations with my co-workers during VMworld, I decided I was going to join them on the trip.  I was a little nervous, I hadn’t been on a trip like this before, and most of my time out of the U.S. was with the military, so a much different perspective.  Not knowing what to expect, I did my best to keep an open mind, and focus on my reason for going; to serve others.

When we arrived it was late in the evening.  The biggest shock was the heat and humidity. As a native Oregonian,  we are used to some pretty mild climates.  The country was beautiful as we drove to our hotel.  The hotel was a little run down by typical U.S. standards, but culturally simple and met our needs for the week.

Waking up the first day (the heat and humidity again greeted me) we went around surveying the work we needed to do and meeting the people we would be working with.  The first thing that caught my attention was the local people.  They were so happy to have us there, so gracious to us.  The entire week they were right alongside us, painting, cleaning, and taking part in improving the orphanage and church.

I spent most of my time doing random odd jobs, painting here or there, putting a toilet back together, planning for a shower installation, moving furniture, and even doing some physical security and IT consulting work.  I was amazed by the infrastructure, by our standards not up to code, but it certainly was effective, and I was on wifi for much of the trip for calls and messaging home.

Some of us started thinking about long term opportunities for this all girls orphanage.  What could we do to make a difference that goes beyond just giving money or repairing a building; how do we make a long term impact for the young ladies growing up here?  One idea that came up, something I am hoping to work on, is the idea of bringing additional education to the orphanage.  Imagine if we started to teach young girls in an orphanage in El Salvador about business and technology.  Imagine the change in their future if they were able to leave the orphanage and go on to great jobs.  Certainly many of them do currently, but increasing their odds of success is a tangible change that we can facilitate using what we have, something that goes on beyond just giving money or time, it is an investment in their future and in the future of their community.

Kevin Spacey famously said, “If you have done well in whatever business you are in, it is your duty to send the elevator back down and try to help bring up the next generation of undiscovered talent.”  Throughout the past few years I have been wondering why my life has been so blessed, why I have been given so much. I felt like there was something more I was could to be doing with the talents and skills I have been given.  Having worked in the orphanage, having spent time talking to girls and young ladies who are incredibly intelligent and need some guidance and support, I think that if I can help to show them some of the potential they possess through technology, maybe I can help make their world a brighter place.

This trip was life changing and I would encourage others to take advantage of service opportunities locally and abroad.  I was very blessed to be able to go on the trip.  There were many who helped make this possible, and I am so thankful I was able to be involved in service learning.  We all have something we can do to help those around us.  I think the best thing we can do is to use our talents to encourage and empower others.

I am trying to get back into blogging more, and recently I have been doing more with my home media server, so I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the cool things I have done with that.  This leads to my home lab series I have been wanting to do, but this is kind of the introduction, that lead me to the home lab idea.

As a disclaimer, I do not condone any illegal activities.  I am writing about using a media server for digital content I have purchased or created.  I am not going to write about the implementation of a home media server, lifehacker.com, and a number of other sites have some exceptional walkthroughs on that topic, this is focused more on the design, and ancillary applications.  As always, this is for my personal interest, which often leads to discussions with friends and customers as well as exploring new technologies and learning new skills around coding or integration.

The Research

So this all started when I was talking to a coworker about how he was watching movies on his iPad.  He seemed to have quite a bit of content.  To this point I had been purchasing off iTunes, and downloading on my iPad and streaming on my Apple TV.  We had been using Netflix and occasionally Hulu+, but from a home media perspective when we wanted to watch something not available digitally we were using DVD/Blu-Ray or similar.  I experimented with DLNA, and various other solutions, but the endpoint was always clunky and not user friendly for my family.

I was pretty skeptical about this, I had experimented with ripping DVD’s I had purchased previously, and it had not gone very well.  I went and started researching Plex and XMBC.  While I found both solutions quite impressive, the polished user friendly appearance of Plex won me over, mostly because my family doesn’t care how cool it is, they want a netflix style interface and I wanted it to give me enough functionality to add features like photos, home movies, music, TV Series, and Movies.

The Hardware

I am an unapologetic Apple Fanboy.  Ok that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I do love all things Apple for the most part since my first iPhone and my first MacBook Pro.  Most of our devices at home are Apple, so it made sense to go with a Mac Mini 2012 model with 16GB of Ram.  I opted for the extra ram for caching, I have found that I have very few buffering issues even when running multiple streams.  I did find that running over wireless tends to be a bit difficult, so I ended up using the 1GBe Nic.

For the storage I debated heavily on purchasing a NAS, and I was pretty close to picking up a Synology, but when I looked at the cost versus what I would use it for I changed my mind.  Since I use VSAN in my home lab, it was tough to justify the added cost of a NAS.  I thought a 4TB hard drive would be good.  I selected a WD My Cloud 4TB drive from Best Buy with USB 3.0.  This performed exceptionally well, so I bought another, and then a friend gave me a 4TB Toshiba 4TB USB 3.0 drive.  Recently I ordered a Toshiba 5TB USB 3.0 drive.  Now this is quite a lot of space, but I will explain more about that in a later section.  I opted not to use a software raid on the drives, selecting exFAT for for the file system for maximum compatibility between OS X, Linux, and Windows.

A late addition, which will become clear later was a Raspberry Pi B+.  This is used for monitoring and 3rd party plugins which I continue to experiment with.

Endpoints

Of course all this work would be no good if we had no way to watch.  The initial tests were done with a web browser.  Being a chrome user, I was impressed with the performance and the lack of plugins required to play.  It even worked well on my old Chromebook.

As we have two Apple TV’s, again, this was critical.  A friend told me about the Plex Connect project on GitHub.  A quick search and I was installing and configuring.  The basic premise is it forwards one of the apple TV Apps, in my case Trailers, to my Plex Server.  There are frequent updates and it is very simple, looking much like Netflix which served my family well.

I tested the XBOX 360 interface which worked well enough, but honestly it wasn’t as good as the Apple TV interface.  I also tested the Chromecast for a while, but that ended up in my travel bag since we have Apple TV’s on the TV’s that are using Plex.  Using the Chromecast in hotels has been exceptional, and enabled me to enjoy my home media while traveling using the Hotel Wifi.

3rd Party app integration

So as a geek, I decided just having the Plex server stood up was not quite enough.  I wanted to get some statistics on who was watching what on my Plex Server, and see what media was popular.  I found the PlexWatch and PlexWatchWeb projects on Git Hub, which were compelling.  I tried installing them on my Mac Mini thinking why not.  Going through the install it appeared I would need to install several pre-requisites, including MacPorts to get it to work.  Now I love my Mac, but I am not a fan of having to do such unnatural things to get software installed.

I loaded up Raspian on a Raspberry Pi B+ and did the install with no issues.  Pulling up the web interface I was impressed, it was skinned to look like Plex, with some very powerful data.  Now I am able to track my children’s viewing, trust but verify, and also look at statistics to determine what I might want to purchase next, or what types of movies are interesting.

That got me thinking about having more of a unified interface of my plex server.  I found the Marachino project for XMBC which had been ported for Plex.  I have to admit, it’s use is minimal, but a pretty dashboard does make it interesting.  I plan to look at the code behind it, the widget interface is compelling, and could prove to have many uses.

One final note on the Raspberry Pi, I did have some thoughts that I might need to access the media directly, not through the Plex interface.  Initially I thought NFS would be the easiest since it was linux and OS X, but I found that NFS doesn’t work with exFAT, or at least not easily.  I started to look at other options, when I realized the Mac can nativly share via SMB.  I configured the SMB shares and tested, but realized I didn’t need them.  I suspect this will come up in the future though, and remains in the back of my mind as something I will explore again.

So that’s it, my home media setup.  I do have a Roku3 on the way since we just added Sling TV to our cord cutting efforts.  That should be interesting, but I don’t suspect it will materially change things.  My next project will be a home lab, I plan to start with the design.  I hope to make it interesting, compelling, but mostly give some insight into the design process, and document my steps and the lessons learned through the design phases.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. These words of wisdom come from Henry Ford, someone who was all about disruption.

Looking at the tech industry, I sometimes think we are becoming more deeply divided than ever. When I started, it was very divided between developers and infrastructure. Developers wanted admin access to everything, for better or for worse, and infrastructure fought to keep developers from getting access to anything. Within infrastructure, we became siloed, typically separating critical infrastructure into something similar to storage, servers, and networking. Of course this varies, and smaller companies generally merged these out of necessity. This has created significant stagnation for many in the IT industry, both personally and as a group.

Within IT we can no longer afford to be siloed. I have talked about this in the past, but I can’t say this enough. We need to start creating disruption within our own teams. Cross functional teams are no longer just a good idea, they are the future of IT. Moving to the software defined datacenter, the policy driven datacenter, requires that a team be made up of all resources required to complete a project or support an application.

As we continue down the path of further automation and application driven infrastructure it is time to disrupt our teams, learn broader skill sets, and move to an agile architecture, engineering, administration, and support model. That or we can keep doing what we have always done, and keep sending our users to the public cloud since it is easier to get things done.

A couple months ago, I wrote a post about VMUG being community event, not a vendor fair. That sparked some discussion, but not the desired outcome of more community involvement. Long before I was a VMware employee, I was a member of the VMUG. Before that I was a member of the technical community. I write posts like this, show up to VMUG events, put this out on twitter, not because I am a VMware employee, not just because I think we have really cool technology, but because I believe the tech community is the reason for us being here, it is a part of us, and it is what I care about.

One of the greatest values in the community is comparing notes, asking questions, learning from each other. My challenge is to create micro community gatherings. Gatherings of similar companies. We are trying to create a healthcare community meetup, basically an opportunity for healthcare providers to discuss what works, or just hang out and meet their peers. I would also like to see other similar groups started, and I would love to come hang out and learn from all of you. It doesn’t have to be limited to companies who do the same thing as you, but similar sized companies are a great source of information.

Please come to the VMUG events, they are a great time, and I enjoy meeting those of you in my local area, but don’t let it end there. Small meetups are a great way to interact, after all, the IT community isn’t so large, and we all have something to contribute.

Just a quick note, we were able to secure a VMware vSphere design workshop in Kirkland, WA, January 20th – 22nd.  This is an interactive course on design best practices, generally geared at VMware, but the concepts translate well to IT Architecture in general.  This is a recommended course for the VCAP-DCD exam, so register here if you are interested.

As always contact me if you have questions and I can get you in touch with the right people if there are other questions.

Last week I completed the VMware NSX: Install, Configure, Manage [V6.0] course, so I wanted to share my thoughts on the training.  This is not an official VMware perspective, but my own personal thoughts on the class, the venue, and the instructors.

Venue:

I have taken a number of technical trainings both live in person, live online, and on demand recorded.  I have to say, the live online is my favorite for this type of trainings to attend since I can be in my own home office, and work on my own equipment which is always nice.  This time I was able to interact with a number of customers and fellow VMware employees not just in the U.S. but also in South America which was exciting.   The interaction was priceless, although I was a little outgunned.  I took the course to get myself up to speed on not just NSX but also on more advanced networking concepts, more on that later, but it turned out almost half the class were CCIE or close to that level.  Coming from a storage and virtualization background this was a little intimidating, but it gave us lots of good discussions and questions.

The labs were great, there were a few hiccups, but it seems like the lab team has really gone all out to fix the bugs, and this was one of the better lab environments I have seen for an online training.  It helped to demystify the product, much more so than simply going through the hands on labs, http://hol.vmware.com, which are great, but not always enough to get you to the point of being comfortable working on the product.

Instructors:

I won’t call out the instructors by name, but they were great.  A little cheesy sometimes as instructors tend to be, but very knowledgable.  I have noticed technical instructors can be hit or miss, but this time our instructors made it interesting.  One big bonus was the reviews.  Every segment we had to go back over what we had discussed, and they pushed us pretty hard to interact.  Not easy to do online, but they handled it well.

Content:

Not having a networking background, I wasn’t sure what to expect here.  I was not 100% sold on the NSX concept.  It was cool, but I didn’t have enough data to make an informed decision.  Going through the course really showed the value of software defined networking.  My take is that there is no desire to replace hardware networking and firewall vendors, just augment them.  There are some use cases that make sense, distributed firewalls, giving the networking team more insight into the virtual network, and even another perimeter to prevent attacks, but overall it was pretty clear, this is not going to replace the physical infrastructure.

Overall, this was a great course, and I recommend it even if you’re not interested in the certification.  The feedback from the CCIE levels in the class was that it was very helpful, and I think everyone was able to take something away.