Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

#VMworld Europe, here we come…

· ·

VMworld US has just been wrapped up and it is time to start looking at VMworld Europe already. I just checked the schedule builder and it looks that our session is scheduled on Thursday at 14:00 Wednesday at 15:00. Yes I would have definitely preferred a different time slot as well, but it is what it is and we will do our best to make the most out of it. Those who want to attend our session keep in mind it is a Q&A and our session can only be a success if you participate, please think about what you would like to ask and we will do our best to answer it. We will bring a couple of books again to give away during our session to those with the best questions.

There are a couple of sessions I want to plug as they were really successful during VMworld US and are worth attending in my opinion! Now mind most of these are not beginner sessions!

Session-ID Title Speaker(s)
VSP1682 vSphere Clustering Q&A Frank Denneman, Chris Colotti, Duncan Epping
VSP1700 VMware vSphere 5.0 Storage Features Cormac Hogan
VSP3067 Myth Busters Eric Sloof and Mattias Sundling
BCO2874 vSphere High Availability 5.0 and SMP Fault Tolerance – Technical Overview and Roadmap Keith Farkas, Jim Chow
VSP1882 Managing VMware ESXi with VMware vSphere PowerCLI Luc Dekens, Alan Renouf
BCO2479 Understanding VMware vSphere Stretched Clusters, Disaster Recovery and Planned Workload Mobility Lee Dilworth, Chad Sakac
EUC2866 View Troubleshooting: Looking Under the Hood John Dodge, Matt Coppinger
VSP1999 esxtop for Advanced Users Krishna Raj Raja
VSP3116 VMware vSphere 5.0 Resource Management Deep Dive Frank Denneman, Valentin Hamburger
BCO3334 Site Recovery Manager Future Product Directions: Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Nestor Dusko, Ashwin Kotian
CIM1264 Private VMware vCloud Architecture Technical Deep Dive Chris Colotti, David Hill
CIM2452 VMware vCenter Operations Technical Deepdive Kit Colbert
VSP1883 VMware vSphere PowerCLI Best Practices Luc Dekens, Alan Renouf
VSP1933 Storage I/O Control for Network-Attached Storage Datastores Ajay Gulati
VSP3205 Technology Preview: VMware vStorage APIs for VM and Application Granular Data Management Satyam Vaghani, Vijay Ramachandran
VSP2447 Understanding Virtualized Memory Performance Management YP Chien, Kit Colbert
VSP2894 Virtual Distributed Switch Best Practices Vyenkatesh Deshpande
CIM1600 VMware vCloud Networking Finally Explained Kamau Wanguhu
VSP2122 VMware vMotion in VMware vSphere 5.0: Architecture, Performance and Best Practices Sreekanth Setty, Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin
VSP3255 VMware Storage vMotion Deep Dive and Best Practices Min Cai, Ali Mashtizadeh
EUC2846 VMware View Enterprise Architecture Design and Implementation Best Practices Tommy Walker, John Dodge
VSP1823 VMware Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler Manish Lohani, Mustafa Uysal
VSP2376 Performance and Scalability Enhancements in VMware vStorage VMFS 5 Mostafa Khalil

Yes I know… a lot of great sessions and I probably missed out on a few. Considering my session is scheduled on Thursday I am hoping to attend some of these and possible live blog them. The “regular” show runs from Tuesday morning until Thursday 16:00. The Monday before is Partnerday / TAMday / Education-Instructor Day. So if you are a partner, TAM customer or a VMware certified instructor make you sure you sign up for these! Another thing I wanted to point out are the keynote sessions:

Tuesday – 15.30 – 17.00
Wednesday – 09.00 – 10.00
Thursday – 09.00 – 10.30

I’ve been told that Steve Herrod will be speaking on Tuesday this year… be prepared for some cool demos!

 

** update: time slot changed for our session **

VMworld Labs wrapup 2011 – Las Vegas

· ·

I bumped in to Mornay today who is on of the people behind the VMworld Labs. I asked him if he could share some numbers with me as I haven’t been involved with the labs this year. It was a very successful lab event again, with much great feedback from the attendees. In total 13415 labs have been taken by our attendees. Which has resulted in a total of 148138 virtual machines deployed. The top 5 of this year was:

  1. HOL-01 – Building your hybrid cloud
  2. HOL-10 – Advanced Troubleshooting and Performance
  3. HOL-05 – Datacenter Migration and Disaster Recovery Protection
  4. HOL-14 – vSphere Automation with PowerCLI
  5. HOL-07 – Using Virtual Distributed Switch and Network IO Control

Once again, great work by the VMworld Labs team… I know how much work it is, I have all respect in the world for the people organizing this every year and the people assisting every year!

VMworld 2011 – Las Vegas – Thanks!

· ·

What a great week… I’ve seen some great sessions and I met a lot of great people! The sessions I presented were all successful, at least in my opinion (please fill out the survey forms), and I especially loved the group discussions. Our book was literally sold out in 2.5 days and was the best-selling book at VMworld.

Once again, it was my pleasure to meet all of you. Thanks for your support, thanks for the compliments, thanks for the feedback and lets hope we will meet again next year! I plan to be there in 2012 – San Francisco. For those who will be attending VMworld EMEA, see you in Copenhagen!

Before I forget, The Killers were amazing! One of the best bands these days in my opinion. I think I partly lost my voice due to the shouting along with The Killers. I think they played every single song I love. One of the few European bands that would be able to top this show would be the Arctic Monkeys or Editors! I’ve seen Editors live, they rock and I guess I don’t need to say anything about Arctic Monkeys!

VMworld – Day 2

· ·

VMworld Day 2 started off with a great keynote by no one less than Dr Steve Herrod. Steve spoke about all the changes we introduced with the launch of the Cloud Infrastructure Suite and all the change which are coming up… including sneak peeks of not release products. I live blogged the session and I don’t want to blog just to blog, so for more details read it here. There are a couple of things though I want to stress which in my opinion stood out:

  • VMware Appblast –> New project which allows you to start any app in a HTML5 compatible browser on any device.
  • VXLAN –> Provides a Layer 2 abstraction to virtual machines, independent of where they are located. (quote from Steve’s article)
  • VMware Octopus –> Probably best described as an enterprise level “Dropbox” service

After the keynote I headed over to the VMware Storage Booth and introduced many attendees to the cool new storage features which are part of vSphere 5. There were a couple of things which stood out for me, everyone loved Storage DRS! Profile-Driven Storage is hot and the changes in VMFS-5 were very very welcome.

Next stop was the infamous #VSP1425 aka “Ask the Expert vBloggers”. We had roughly 200 attendees. The panel was formed as follows: Scott Lowe, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac and I. It was moderated by Rick Scherer (Thanks for buzzing out Chad :-)) and as we had an empty seat we decided to pull up a person from the audience… I forgot the name of this person (please identify yourself), but once again thanks for joining this session and thanks for your great contribution, much appreciated! This session did extremely well in my opinion. We had great questions from the audience but especially the interaction between the panel members worked great. Definitely something we will do again next year. (We scored 4.8 out of 5 on the survey.)

Next up was a meeting with Tintri. We met up with Kieran Harty and Pratik Wadher and got a demo of the current platform and discussed futures. I already discussed their product in-depth on my blog so I will not repeat our whole discussion or my thoughts. I just want to add that I was impressed by their UI now that we got to play around with it and I expect them to do really well in Europe due to the simplicity of the set up.

After having random chats with other vendors we (when I say we I mean Frank and I) headed over to my Group Discussion (#GD43). Now this was the first Group Discussion I ever hosted… I LOVED IT! This is the best format for a session and can I say thanks to Richard Garsthagen who came up with this excellent concept! I had prepared a couple of slides with questions around VMware Clustering solutions. These questions formed the basis of the discussion. The participation of the audience was excellent. Frank helped driving this session and one of our lead HA engineers, Keith Farkas, joined as well… Believe me when I say that Keith was happy with all the excellent feedback we received from the audience during this session. Next year, and in Copenhagen, I want to do more sessions like these… This is what VMworld should be like, small discussion sessions with lots of interaction with the audience!

Before I head out to breakfast there are a couple of things I would like to mention… Did everyone see PowerCLI-Man? I don’t know who he is or where he all of a sudden came from, but he is my new favorite super hero! What an amazing guy, dropping in on a session hosted by Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf while you know he is fighting operational wars on a day to day basis… amazing. (He even has Facebook?!)

I also forgot to mention VMworld TV in my “Day 1” report… Sorry Richard here you go. In all seriousness check the VMworld TV youtube channel and watch the great interviews and summaries that Richard and his team produced. It is a great way of getting an impression of what is going on at VMworld. Believe me, it is a madhouse.

Another day at VMworld about to start… hopefully I will have bit more time to watch some sessions myself today. If you are attending I would ask all of you to please fill out the session surveys. Keep in mind that all speakers, and the VMworld organizational, love to feedback on what worked well and what can be improved. Please provide constructive feedback, keep in mind that many of the people presenting at VMworld are just technical people like you and me and not professional “marketing” type speakers! My respect to each and everyone of you who does not do this on a day-to-day basis and presented a session at VMworld. I know it is a huge step and I know it is not easy to get up in front of literally hundreds of people!

General Session – Steve Herrod

· ·

General session is about to start…. Going to try to keep you up to date…

Dr Steve Herrod just started. Today is about the technology behind all the changes around cloud computing. The world is changing, we are moving from individual servers to service. We want to be thinking about people and not about devices. It is about getting Universal Access to our environment, this is what we expect from our IT environment.

It is not just about Windows applications… Enterprise apps and SaaS need to be accessible. There are three pillars which enable this:

Simplify: Extract from Silos.

Manage: Secure Apps, data, access.

Connect: My app, my data, my colleagues

How do we make this happen? View will simplify desktop services and Thinapp will make using your applications easier by exposing apps in a catalog. Data delivered as a service. A Unified Service Broker should connect these services based on policies and which should connect users and devices.

A demo is now shown where a pool of desktop is offered to new employees. ThinApp Factory is a new project. All applications part of the ThinApp Factory will be exposed through Horizon which also includes SaaS apps. ThinApp Factory scans the local device and allows you to ThinApp the applications and are candidates to be part of Horizon.

Project Octopus is a brand new initiative… I guess judging by Steve’s question Octopus will be a new offering that provides “dropbox” services to the enterprise. A solution that can be offered through the Public Cloud and the Private Cloud. During the demo Project Octopus is used to surface documents to the View Desktop and to his Android based phone.

Strategic partnership with LG and Samsung to bring Horizon Mobile to their devices.

Showing Project Octopus and Horizon on the iPad. A new product/project shown called VMware Appblast. Appblast allows you to start a Windows App on your iPad! Using standard HTML5 any app can be delivered to any HTML 5 client!

Next topic, the robust infrastructure required to enable end-user computing. Accessible Innovation. VMware go allows you to scan a network and reach out to a machine and install vSphere.

vSphere Storage Appliance is designed to get all the benefits of enterprise level virtualization features without the need for an expensive array. Using local storage as shared storage though a virtual appliance. If anything happens to a server the datastore will be remain available.

vSphere 5 adds the capability of running ESXi out of memory being booted over the network. Auto deploy is about compliant deployments of vSphere.

Talking performance right now…. *** how cool are these flashbacks! *** 32 vCPUs, 1TB of memory and 1,000,000. Mr Monster VM just came up on stage aka Melvin. :-). Performance is not about peaks, but about guarantees… satisfying the SLA/Contact using policies! Set and Forget! It is up to the intelligent infrastructure to guarantee this.

Performance guarantees can be realized using Storage DRS by pooling storage in to logical containers aka tiers. Using Profile-Driven Storage you can select where a VM should be place based on a policy instead of “guessing”. We are getting rid of the “storage administration” spreadsheets and providing policy driven storage solutions. Storage DRS will manage the environment and migrate virtual machines and disks when required.

Networking up next…. Separating identity from location. VXLAN! Encapsulationg Layer 2 in Layer 3 packets. Designed to remove limitations L2. Enabling to failover between datacenters without the need to re-ip! VXLAN has been developed by VMware, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Emulex and Intel and has been submitted to IETF!

Availability! Performance is great but availability is key! vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5. vSphere Replication enables you to replicate data between different types of arrays or offers replication to arrays which don’t offer this functionality. SRM 5 also offers automated failback. It allows you to fully test your DR process.

Security! Nosy Neighbor effect. We don’t want virtual machines peeking at data of other virtual machines. vShield helps preventing this. Endpoint protects what’s inside of the virtual machine. vShield App protects the outside of the VM. Allowing to create boundaries. vShield Edge is your border control device in your virtual datacenter.

Automation! What if your infrastructure can respond before you know there is a problem?! Monitoring is key in every environment. Sneak peek of where we are going with our management solutions. VMware vCenter Management. With new navigator technology we can discover which service are running in your virtual machines. These are discovered without the need to change the OS, no agents! We can also check how the virtual machines are related to each other. We can use this information to setup specific vShield rules if and when required. We can even see if all components are protected by SRM or not. This will allow you to quickly check compliancy. vCenter Operations sneak peak. New version will also show business metrics. More and more details than ever before.

Wrapping up:

It is about offering service to people! It is about your cloud!