Month: August 2012

VMworld 2012, Day 1 – Sessions

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After the opening keynote session, I immediately headed over to the Hang Space.  This is such a cool concept for the conference.  Great place to kick back, take a break, catch up with folks, meet new ones, watch the events on the big screen or catch the Cube and Community interviews and Tech Talks.  The Tech Talks are a fantastic idea.  The #vBrownBag crew (Cody Bunch, Josh Atwell, Alastair Cooke, Nick Marshall and Damian Karlson) have organized and powered the Tech Talks, part of which consist of the Lightening Talks.  This is an opportunity for anyone to take the stage to present their rejected VMworld session (or any VMware topic) in 15 minutes or less.  What a great idea!  I was able to catch a couple of these today and thought this was such a valuable addition to the whole VMworld experience this year.  Of course I grabbed my required #vBrownBag brown bag filled with all kinds of goodies including the coveted “USB Stick of Awesomeness”.  Sure to be one of the better pieces of swag this year.

I also managed to squeeze in a number of sessions today:

  • Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure (#INF-VSP1168) – Chris Colotti, David Hill, Aidan Dalgleish, Rawlinson Rivera, Duncan Epping

We’re new to the cloud computing space so this was a good session to get exposed to the design and architecture of a solid cloud infrastructure.  Much of this went over my head but great to hear advice straight from some of the giants of cloud infrastructure design.

  • How to Achieve Optimized and Virtualized Business  Critical Applications (#SPO3339) –Vaughn Stewart, David Korsunsky, Bart Falzarano

Being a NetApp customer, this was good for an overview on NetApp’s data efficiency solutions, along with its integration with VMware and a customer case study thrown in for good validation.

  • Ask the Expert vBloggers (#INF-VSP1504) – Rick Scherer, Chad Sakac, Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping and Scott Lowe

This was a fun session.  These guys are all well-known on the blogging scene – all but Rick have blogs in the top 5 according to Eric Siebert’s vsphere-land.com.  They were all very candid in their responses regarding the technical (even troubleshooting issues) as well as the non-technical (how has being a super blogger changed your life/career?).  Very informative and ever so entertaining.

  • Become a Rock Star with PowerCLI and vCenter Orchestrator (#INF-VSP1856) – Josh Atwell

Another informative and entertaining session with first-time VMworld speaker Josh Atwell.  He is incredibly active in the VMware and Cisco communities and is one of the driving forces behind the #vBrownBag community.  This session was great as it was a purely vendor neutral how-to session around automation using PowerCLI and vCenter Orchestrator.  Great tips with a bit of fun thrown in, including a proud Dad moment – taping the audience wishing his three year old son Happy Birthday.  How great is that!

  • vSphere 5 Storage Best Practices (#INF-STO2980) – Vaughn Stewart and Chad Sakac

Vaughn and Chad have been doing this session for the past several years and is a VMworld favorite.  Two great personalities from opposing vendors on one stage to discuss storage best practices in as vendor neutral manner as they can.  It’s always entertaining watching them tap dance and sometimes slip in their jabs at each other, but it’s all in good fun as the two highly respect each other . Very informative with such great information for me to carry back.  Will definitely review the session notes on this one!

After the sessions, I managed to make it to a couple vendor after-hours events and then back to the hotel for an early night.  I was feeling a little under the weather so this was a nice relief.  Back up early again tomorrow.

VMworld 2012, Day 1 – Keynote

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The opening act for VMworld was the usual keynote by Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod.  This being Paul Maritz’ last week as CEO of VMware, he took the opportunity to introduce the incoming CEO, Pat Gelsinger and officially hand the torch over to him.  Maritz is a man of incredible vision mixed with the business acumen to drive a multi-billion dollar company through some of wildest changes across the IT landscape.  Over the last five years as CEO, he gauged the direction of the industry, foresaw and articulated what most people couldn’t comprehend, and leveraged VMware’s existing solutions to  capitalize on this new paradigm.  VMware through their solutions has revolutionized cloud and we have Paul Maritz to thank for his incredible leadership.  And now a new leader is coming in – Pat Gelsinger.  Paul handed the torch to him with command, “Take good care of her.”

Pat Gelsinger then articulated the vision of the expanding cloud infrastructure.  He defined the Software-Defined Datacenter – “All infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of the datacenter is entirely automated by software.” He outlined the need to abstract, pool and automate all aspects of the data center and deliver the entire data center as a set of services.  This has already been done with Compute and Storage/Availability, but still needs to be done with Network/Security and Management.  The goal of the SDDC is to bring together one common platform to manage all aspects.  With this he introduced the vCloud Suite, one of the major announcements coming out of VMworld.

The vCloud Suite is the complete integrated solution to IT infrastructure management for the cloud.  It is built on the solid core foundation of vSphere and extends its reach with the following components:  vCloud Director, vCloud Connector, vCloud Networking and Security, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, vCenter Operations Management Suite and vFabric Application Director.

Along with this announcement came the release of vSphere 5.1, the newest version of the highest performing and most reliable hypervisor in the industry.  And with this release came the greater announcement, the music to everyone’s ears:  the abolishment of vRAM entitlements.  This reversal in their pricing was in direct response to the negative feedback from the community.  Future pricing would be one easy model – per CPU, per socket.  Hooray.

Steve Herrod then came to the stage and further explained the value of the vCloud Suite.  He dived down into each of the layers to show how we can now provision the entire virtualized data center just like we have been provisioning virtual machines.  So much has already been accomplished on the compute layer, but max capacity levels have increased.  Moster VMs have gone from max of 32 vCPUs to 64 vCPUs with up to 1 million IOPS per VM (up from 1 million per host).  On the storage layer, advances have been made to better integrate components such as storage pools, storage DRS and SRM into the management tools.  One big announcement around this layer is the introduction of Enhanced vMotion.  The software-defined data center should have no physical constructs with which to move around so the limitation of shared storage has been removed!  Finally on the network layer, great progress has been made to abstract the physical network.  So IDS, traffic management, firewalls, subnets and VLANS can now be abstracted and worked into the virtualized data center, allowing much faster and easier provisioning.  VXLAN technology has been expanded and we can now extend Layer 2 networks across the cloud.  We can burst a VM into a vCloud provider’s cloud without changing the IP or MAC address, seamlessly and easily.  Cool stuff.  All of these layers are pulled together into one management tool.  VMware has designed a more elegant user browser-based interface to manage everything from one place.  This UI seamlessly ties into other tools that customers are already working with and provides vCloud APIs to allow partners to build UIs on top of this to further extend the capabilities.

Steve showed off this technology using several cool demos.  Tomorrow he plans to continue his journey up the stack by outlining the advances around mobile access.  Looking forward to it!

VMworld 2012, Day 0

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Since VMworld scheduled events on Sunday this year, I felt compelled to fly out yesterday which allowed me some time to kill earlier today.  I ended up heading to the Golden Gate Bridge for a little sightseeing before registration opened.  That was awesome.  Ever since I was a little kid, I remembered being fascinated with modern marvels of engineering and how these incredible structures were built.  I recall reading about the Golden Gate Bridge and being so amazed.  During my two previous trips to San Francisco, I missed out on the opportunity of seeing the bridge since I never had enough time to head across town and was unable to see it from afar because of the fog.  Today was a beautiful day and I had the time and boy did I take advantage.  It was awesome.  Seeing the bridge for the first time was breathtaking.  I took the time to hike across, catch the view of the San Fran skyline and Alcatraz, hike up the hill to Battery Spencer in Sausalito for a stunning view and then make the return hike.  It was a lifelong dream fulfilled – to hike across the Golden Gate Bridge.  Very cool.

Then it was time to get serious… I had to get back to Moscone to hit registration and get rolling with the activities.  My plan was to register, then hit the Hands on Labs and then get to the Welcome Reception which was starting at 4PM.  Boy, it was exciting approaching the Moscone Center – I could feel the energy – excitement abounded for what was in store for the week.  Registration was easy, but by the time I got checked in and received my conference bag, the line for the Hands on Labs was a dreadful 3 hours long.  I figured that everyone else must have had the same idea and jumped in line since there were no other events going on.  What I did not realize at the time was that there were technical difficulties with the labs which caused quite a delay for most people who tried to get in that afternoon.  So, I figured I’d poke around a little and grab some food before heading back to enjoy the Welcome Reception.

The Welcome Reception was typical but fun.  I did have a chance to run into and chat with Chris Gebhardt from NetApp who introduced me to Nick Howell.  I also got to spend some time chatting with the folks at Commvault (and even walked away with a nice raffle prize!).  I made sure I also spent some time at the Dell, Cisco and Intel booths and of course, browsed the VMware booth.  I always love the opportunity to speak with their product experts and see quick demos of their solutions.

Once the Welcome Reception was over I hopped over to the labs again and managed to make it through half a lab before dropping out and running across the street to join the highly touted VMunderground party at Jillian’s.  This was the must-attend unofficial event organized by Theron Conrey, Sean Clark and Brian Knudtson.  This was the event that sold out in 7 minutes when tickets went on sale.  And this was the event attended by a veritable Who’s Who of the community:  Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman, Mike Laverick, John Troyer, Chris Kusek, Greg Shields, the vBrownbag crew, and many, many others.  Great time there, met a couple folks and finally got to say, I experienced the VMunderground.  Well done guys.

All in all it was a great warm up day to the official events that really get rolling tomorrow!

Cloudy trip to VMworld

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Here I am flying well above the cumulonimbus clouds over Nevada on my way to VMworld, the quintessential virtual and cloud conference of the year hosted by VMware.  Yes, the adventure is beginning and I intend for this week to be just that – an adventure.  I’ve been designing, building and managing virtual environments for about 5 years now, but I’m too often blown away by how much I have yet to learn.  VMware has done wonders for infrastructure management and data center design.  They have single-handedly revolutionized the industry.  Others have come and developed virtual infrastructure and cloud-enabling technologies, but VMware is the de-facto standard in the enterprise.  It was the pioneer and data centers are where they are today because of them.  Not one to stand still, it has evolved from its virtual pioneering days to become the cloud enabling giant it is today.

And here I am staring out at those clouds thinking I have so much to learn. VMware has built a set of technologies to enable businesses of all sizes tap into the cloud and change the way they manage systems.  My organization, although highly virtualized, is only beginning to scratch the surface of cloud.  I don’t even think we quite understand it yet.  We insist the lingo is great for marketing, but I have to believe it is so much more.  And that is why this week will be an adventure.  A week of discovery and exploration.  What can I bring back to my employer from the conference this week that will help us manage our virtual environment more efficiently, leverage our existing resources and optimize our systems management?  What technologies will we be able to implement that will help us move into the next stage of IT design and management, where we take hold of automation, fast provisioning, transparent monitoring, iron-clad availability and robust remote access?  We have to start thinking “cloud” in order to make this transition and better serve our customers:  our own employees and the untold numbers of families depending on our services.

So this week will be an adventure.  I’ll be landing soon at SFO and then heading downtown to Moscone where 20,000 other crazy passionate geeks will be converging over the next 5 days.  It’ll be awesome.  I hope to meet some new folks, try out some new technologies, be awed by the big announcements and the promises on the horizon, and learn, learn, learn.  The adventure awaits.  Let’s hit the ground running.