Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

Vendors to check out at VMworld…

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While I was making a list of companies to visit on the Solutions Exchange I figured I would share them. Cormac did so a week ago and it is an excellent list, make sure to read that one! My list is also mainly around storage, but includes some different types of solutions.

  • SimpliVity, one of the big players in the hyper-converged market… I always try to stop by, because what they deliver is a nice all-round solution. With CRN reporting that SimpliVity will start shipping on  Cisco gear soon I am guessing they will get a lot of traction!
  • Nimble, probably one of the most successful storage startups of the last 5 years… Worth looking into when you are considering investing in to new storage
  • Ravello, running nested workloads on top of AWS… who would have thought that a year or two ago?
  • Atlantis, rumor has it a new version of USX is coming out at some point in the near future and I am assuming they will demo it at VMworld…
  • Micron, seen tweets of them about an “all-flash VSAN solution” which got my attention instantly. For sure will be checking that one!
  • PernixData, well I always wanted to shake Frank Denneman’s hand ;-). Plus they just had a new major round of funding and announced great sales/growth numbers!
  • SolidFire, one of the most interesting scale-out storage solutions out there that offers end-to-end QoS!
  • Scality, object storage solution which seems to be getting good traction, want to see what it is about!
  • CloudPhysics, they always demo something exciting at VMworld. First year it was the HA simulator that blew people away… Last year they showcased a great cost comparison solution for vCHS / AWS and Azure. what will it be this year?
  • DataGravity, I have not been briefed by them… they were introduced to the world yesterday and will showcase their technology at VMworld. Recommend reading Steve Foskett’s update and visiting their booth!
  • ThousandEyes, a couple of months back someone dropped this name. I have not had much time yet to look at what they do extensively so maybe VMworld is the right time. It sounds interesting doing end-to-end monitoring of traffic from the end-user to the datacenter with all layers in between!
  • Platform9, recently came out of stealth… wrote an article on it, will want to see their demo on KVM / vSphere / Docker management.

That is it for this round, sure there are many many interesting companies on the show floor but these are just some that stood out to me for various reasons. If I have missed the name of your company please don’t feel offended, with a long list of hundreds of exhibitors I had to pick a couple.

Must attend VMworld sessions 2014

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Every year I do this post on the must attend VMworld sessions, and I just realized I had not done this for 2014 yet. So here it is, the list of sessions I feel are most definitely worth attending. I tend to focus on sessions which I know will have solid technical info and great presenters. Many of which over the years I have either seen presenting myself and respect very much. I tried to limit the list to 20 this year (edit: 21, 22), so of course it could be that your session (or your fav session) is missing, unfortunately I cannot list all as that would defeat the purpose.

Here we go:

  1. STO3008-SPO – Decoupled Storage: Practical Examples of Leveraging Server Flash in a Virtualized Datacenter by Satyam Vaghani and Frank Denneman. What more do I need to say? Both rock stars!
  2. STO1279 – Virtual SAN Architecture Deep Dive Christian and Christos were the leads on VSAN, who can tell you better than they can??
  3. SDDC1176 – Ask the Expert vBloggers featuring Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, William Lam, myself and moderated by Rick Scherer. This session has been a hit for the last years and will be one you cannot miss!
  4. STO2996-SPO – The vExpert Storage Game Show featuring Vaughn Steward, Cormac Hogan, Rawlinson Rivera and many others… It will be educational and entertaining for sure! Not the standard “death by powerpoint” session. If you do want “DBP”, this is not for you!
  5. STP3266 – Web-Scale Converged Infrastructure for Enterprise. Josh Odgers talking web scale for Enterprise organizations, are you still using legacy apps? Then this is a must attend.
  6. SDDC2492 – How the New Software-defined Paradigms Will Impact Your vSphere Design Forbes Guthrie and Scott Lowe talking vSphere Design, you bet you will learn something here!
  7. HBC2068 – vCloud Hybrid Service Networking Technical Deep Dive Want to know more about vCHS networking, I am sure David Hill is going to dive deep!
  8. NET2747 – VMware NSX: Software Defined Networking in the Real World Chris Wahl and Jason Nash talking networking, what is there not to like?
  9. BCO1893 – Site Recovery Manager and vCloud Automation Center: Self-service DR Protection for the Software-Defined Data Center My co-presenter Lee Dilworth for the previous 2 VMworlds, he knows what he is talking about! Co-hosting a DR session with one of the BC/DR PMs, Ben Meadowcroft. This will be good.
  10. NET1674 – Advanced Topics & Future Directions in Network Virtualization with NSX I have seen Bruce Davie present multiple times, always a pleasure and educational!
  11. STO2496 – vSphere Storage Best Practices: Next-Gen Storage Technologies Chad and Vaughn in one session… this will be good!
  12. BCO2629 – Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication: What’s New Technical Deep Dive Jeff Hunter and Ken Werneburg are the DR experts at VMware Tech Marketing, so worth attending for sure!
  13. HBC2638 – Ten Vital Best Practices for Effective Hybrid Cloud Security by Russel Callen and Matthew Probst… These guys are the vCHS architects, you can bet this will be useful!
  14. STO3162 – Software Defined Storage: Satisfy the Requirements of Your Application at the Granularity of a Virtual Disk with Virtual Volumes (VVols) Cormac Hogan talking VVOLs with Rochna from Nimble, this is one I would like to see!
  15. STO2480 – Software Defined Storage – The VCDX Way Part II : The Empire Strikes Back The title by itself is enough to attend this one… (Wade Holmes and Rolo Rivera)
  16. SDDC3281 – A DevOps Story: Unlocking the Power of Docker with the VMware platform and its ecosystem. You may not know these guys, but I do… Aaron and George are rock stars, and Docker seems to be the new buzzword. Find out what it is about!
  17. VAPP2979 – Advanced SQL Server on vSphere Techniques and Best Practices Scott and Jeff are the experts when it comes to virtualizing SQL, what more can I say?!
  18. STO2197 – Storage DRS: Deep Dive and Best Practices Mustafa Uysal is the lead on SDRS/SIOC, I am sure this session will contain some gems!
  19. HBC1534 – Recovery as a Service (RaaS) with vCloud Hybrid Service David Hill and Chris Colotti talking, always a pleasure to attend!
  20. MGT1876 – Troubleshooting With vCenter Operations Manager (Live Demo) Wondering why your VM is slow? Sam McBride and Praveen Kannan will show you live…
  21. INF1601 – Taking Reporting and Command Line Automation to the Next Level with PowerCLI with Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens, all I would like to know is if PowerCLI-man is going to be there or not?
  22. MGT1923 – vCloud Automation Center 6 and Storage Policy-Based Management Framework Integration with Rawlinson Rivera and Chen Wei… They are doing things with VCAC and SPBM which has never been seen before!

As stated, some of your fav sessions may be missing… feel free to leave a suggestion so that others know which sessions they should attend.

Where is that Yellow-Bricks dude hanging out during VMworld?

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Some people have been asking what my agenda looks like, when my sessions are and if there are any specific social events I am likely to attend… Well here you go:

My sessions / group discussions:

Social events I am may attend, and no… unfortunately I cannot get you tickets to these:

  • Sunday, Oct 13, evening: nothing planned
  • Monday, Oct 14, evening: VMUG party, VMware Ireland, Pernix Data
  • Tuesday, Oct 15, evening: CTO party, VMware Benelux, Veeam
  • Wednesday, Oct 16, evening: VMworld party

Hoping I will be able to attend the following sessions / discussion groups:

  • Wednesday, Oct 16, 12:30 – 13:30 – Hall 8.0, Room C1 – Group Discussion: Stretched Clusters with Lee Dilworth
  • Wednesday, Oct 16, 12:30 – 13:30 – Hall 8.0, Room F2 – Session: Performance and Capacity Management of DRS Clusters with Anne and Ganesha (both VMware engineers)
  • Wednesday, Oct 16, 14:00 – 15:00 – Hall 8.0, Room C2 – Group Discussion: VSAN with Cormac Hogan
  • Wednesday, Oct 16, 15:30 – 16:30 – Hall 8.0, Room C2 – Group Discussion: Disaster Recovery and Replication with Ken Wernerburg
  • Wednesday, Oct 16, 15:30 – 16:30 – Hall 8.0, Room D4 – Session: Storage DRS: Deep Dive and Best Practices to Suit Your Storage Environments with Mustafa and Sachin (both VMware engineers)
  • Wednesday, Oct 16, 17:00 – 18:00 – Hall 8.0, Room A3 – Session: Building a google-like infrastructure for the enterprise with Raymon Epping
  • Thursday, Oct 17, 9:00 – 10:00 – Hall 8.0, Room C1 – Group Discussion: Software Defined Storage with Rawlinson Rivera and Cormac Hogan
  • Thursday, Oct 17, 10:30 – 11:30 – Hall 8.0, Room G3 – Session: DRS: New Features, Best Practices and Future Directions (VMware engineer

My VMworld US 2013 schedule…

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It seems that the dust has finally settled, it is clear what my VMworld schedule will look like. Well for now at least, as I will expect some “one on one” slots to be added, as part of the Expert track. If one of the sessions fills up there might also be a repeat, who knows… I will use this blogpost though to keep track of my agenda, for those who care:

I had the question various times if there will be a chance to meet up. Typically my schedule is packed with various customer meetings, however as mentioned there are the “one on one” slots that can be signed up for during VMworld. Also, feel free to come up to me when you see me walking in the hallway / after my session / at a social event. Don’t be afraid, I love to talk to readers and understand what keeps you guys up at night. (No, I am not as grumpy/grouchy in real life as I sometimes seem to be on twitter.) Talking about Social Events, which seems to become a bigger and bigger part of VMworld every year, these are the ones I am aiming to attend:

  • Saturday: vBeers, Cheiftain
  • Sunday: VMworld Welcome Reception
  • Monday: Nimble Storage, VMUG Reception
  • Tuesday: PernixData, CloudPhysics, VMware CTO Event, Lightspeed, Veeam
  • Wednesday: VMworld Party AT&T Park

Yes, busy times ahead… Now lets see if I can finalize that presentation.

PS: If you don’t prefer using the VMworld.com website, there is an app for Android and iOS. I just installed the iOS app, you never know when you need it right!

Vendors to check out at VMworld

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Cormac just released his article about storage vendors to check out at VMworld, right when I was typing up this article. Make sure to read that one as well as it contains some great suggestions… I was looking at the list of vendors who have a booth at VMworld, there are a whole bunch I am going to try to check out this round. Of course some of the obvious ones are my friends over at Tintri, Nutanix and Pure Storage but lets try to list a few lesser known vendors. These are not all storage vendors by the way, but a mix of various types of startups from the VMware ecosystem. I have added my own oneliner to it, so you know what to expect.

  • Actifio – Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery solution that seems to be gaining traction, maybe I should say “Copy Data Management” solution instead, as that is ultimately what it is they do.
  • CloudPhysics – Monitoring / Analytics, the power of many! Or as I stated a while back: Where most monitoring solutions stop CloudPhysics continues.
  • Cumulus Networks – Linux Network Operating System is how they describe themselves, decoupling software from hardware is another way of looking at it… interesting company!
  • Infinio – Downloadable NFS performance enhancer! AKA memory caching solutions for NFS based infrastructures, check the intro article I wrote a while back…
  • Maxta – Software Defined Storage solution, virtual appliance based and hypervisor agnostic… Not spoken with them, or seen their solution yet
  • Panzura – A name that keeps popping up more and more often, a global distributed cloud storage solution. Haven’t dug in to it yet, but when I get the chance at VMworld I will…
  • PernixData – Came out of stealth this year, and as you all know is working on a write back flash caching solution… One of the few offering a clustered write back solution within the hypervisor
  • Plexxi – Networking done in a different way, SDN I would say.
  • SolidFire – SolidFire is definitely one cool scale-out storage solution to watch out for, one of the few which actually has a good answer to the question: do you offer Quality of Service? More details about what it is they do here… Not on the show floor, but outside of the expo.

Just a couple of companies which I feel are interesting and worth talking with.