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Cisco Data Centre User Group – Melbourne

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cisco next gen data center user group

Next month we’re starting a new user group for Cisco Data Center in Melbourne. This user group is being run by Cisco Champions, myself and Chris Partsenidis. Chris and I met up after the recent Cisco Live in Melbourne and got chatting about how there’s no real community around Cisco technology so we reached out to Lauren Friedman (@lauren). Lauren was super helpful and has supported the creation of Cisco Data Center User Group. This is something that Lauren is working on from a global perspective and we’re delighted to be laying the groundwork in Australia.

This user group is centered around Cisco Next-Generation Data Centers and is for anyone that uses Cisco technology or that of the extended ecosystem. Our meetup is a fantastic opportunity to get to know others in the community over some snacks and beers in a relaxed and social environment. While the group is supported by Cisco, don’t expect sales pitches. We’ll focus on enabling a local community for Cisco Data Center users to share experiences, network and to learn more about both technology and careers. We openly invite submissions for topics and presentations from any members.

Some of the topics we’re looking to cover in the coming months are:

  • Cisco HyperFlex
  • DevOps
  • Cisco Nexus Switching
  • Big Data Analytics
  • Data Center Storage
  • CCNA DC and beyond
  • Cisco ACI and Nexus 9000
  • Operations and Data Center Management
  • HomeLab setup
  • Exam Preparation and certification
  • Automation and Orchestration
  • We’re open to requests from the community for topics of interest

The user group will catch up on the first Tuesday of every month at The Crafty Squire at 127 Russell Street in Melbourne CBD. We’ll be located upstairs in Porter Place. Our first meeting will run be Tuesday June 7th and all meetings will take place between 5:30 and 7:30PM.

Crafty Squire Porter Place

More details about the regular meet ups can be found over at Cisco Data Center User Group page on Meetup.com. This page will be updated regularly with the meeting agendas and speakers. We look forward to seeing you there, please don’t be shy and come along to say hello. Welcome to the community.

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vMotion to vNotions

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vNotions Logo LargeThose that frequent the site regularly will have noticed quite a few changes recently. I’ve migrated the blog from wordpress.com to a hosted wordpress site and the name has also changed from virtualnotions to vNotions. I wanted to get more control of the site and be able to develop it over time into something else as it continues to grow and develop. WordPress.com is excellent as a free resource but I wanted to be able to customise more.

I really wasn’t sure what the best hosting solution would be as there are a number of options. There’s managed, managed hosted, virtual private server (VPS) and also the option of running wordpress in AWS. I turned to twitter to see if anyone had any recommendations for hosting wordpress. The first reply came from Mike Andrews (@trekintech) and I have to thank him for the recommendation. I had a look at a number of different providers and settled on DigitalOcean which was put forward by Mike. DigitalOcean have a strong community forum and supporting documentation so it was very easy to get everything set up. Each VPS in DigitalOcean is called a droplet and it’s very quick to deploy a new server instance. I stumbled across ServerPilot.io which allows quick deployment of apps on DigitalOcean VPS instances. ServerPilot takes a lot of hassle with setting up new apps and given that it’s also got a free option it’s very appealing. It also deployed WordPress using the Nginx engine so it’s considerably faster than just the LAMP stack with Apache. For quick reference check out this guide for installing wordpress on ubuntu and also this one one installing wordpress on DigitalOcean. There’s also a good guide on setting up wordpress on DigitalOcean over at MyBloggingThing. It was a straightforward process to set up a new instance of wordpress and migrate the content from the old wordpress.com site to the new vNotions.com site. Once the site was migrated and fully operational I enabled CDN using CloudFlare to improve speed accessing the site from disperse graphical locations. All in all, it was a relatively painless process.

Right now I’m tidying up the posts on the site to clear out any old posts that are no longer relevant. I’d like to thank Mike Andrews for his feedback that set the ball rolling. For anyone thinking of checking out DigitalOcean I’d definitely recommend jumping right in. The support team at DigitalOcean were also top class and replied very quickly to an issue I had (self-inflicted I might add). vNotions has vMotioned from VirtualNotions.