First Come…First Serve

I don’t know if this is an improvement over the old session system or not!!!

So far…the sessions have been a bit too marketing heavy for my taste. I’m an engineer…”where’s the beef!!!” In any case…here’s my thoughts on the sessions I’ve attended thus far:

SP9649 – Imagine Virtually Anything w/ NetApp, Cisco, and VMware: This was unfortunately not much more than hot air. Nothing of real substance here…only some drivel about how much one could save by utilizing such a system. Also…it was our first glance at what’s looking to be the main theme here…”IT as a service!!!” They completely glazed over some real deployment problems and security issues inherent with deploying vFilers in a cloud service provider environment.

SS1055 – Partner Track Super Session: A little more marketing here…but there were some tidbits to take from this session. One, and I’ve felt this way for a while, it’s clear to me that VMware is hot and heavy in their move toward acquiring the mindshare, resources, and capabilities to directly sell cloud computing to end users. Even if they might say this is not the case…I can’t shake the feeling that this is the case.

ALT3003 – VMware vSphere Performance and Tuning: This is the first non-marketing session that I’ve attended this year. Notes as follows: This session is based on Lab #24 in the Self-Paced labs area. Session begins by talking about Storage I/O control. Statement made that storage is best when <30ms of latency. Unfortunately… (lack of sleep is catching up to me in this session 🙂 ) SIOC control normalized latency. In vSphere 4.1 we can also set IOPs limits. Value is per disk. 2ms kernel latency should be the max you should see… "A little bit of a glitch"…can't display real-time stats for a VM…Yeah…little glitch…too bad I see it all of the time. Turn on Mem Compression Mem.MemZipEnable (Enabled by default on vSphere) They say to be mindful of NUMA…but they don't really elaborate… Swap in rate should be watched… Should force hardware assist on AMD 32-bit guests… They talk about dropping off in increasing vCPUs in VMs…but leave off the drop from 8 vCPUs. Nothing magical in the vCPU performance management… 2000ms is a problem according to this session.

VMworld Check In

Well, things didn’t start off so well today. First of all, although it’s great that this year VMware is running regular shuttles between the Moscone and the approved hotels in the area…we struggled trying to actually get on one. No less than three buses passed by the stop outside our hotel, even with the VMware guy trying to flag them down. Well…all of the members of my team were anxious to get registered, so we all decided to begin walking down to the Moscone on foot. Not a terrible walk from the hotel to the conference center…so not the end of the world.

Upon arriving at the Moscone, the line for registration was already quite long, but luckily it got moving pretty fast once the registration opened up. Once we received our badges we made our way down to the materials room to pick up our inevitable schwag bags. Welcome to line #2:

After waiting a few minutes to get in…I got to pick up my bag, but these yahoos didn’t have me down as being a VMUG member…which I most certainly am. Darn it!!! Oh well…hopefully the rest of the week turns out better!

VMworld 2009 Final Thoughts

(Sorry for the extreme lateness of this content…I had some pretty serious career changing activities lately that precluded posting…)

I left my heart in San Francisco!… Ok…yeah…I had to resort to the corny reference…I just couldn’t resist. I actually did have a great time in San Fran, and being my first time there…I can understand some of the attraction to the area.

On a scale of 1 to 10…with 1 being the most worthless waste of time my life’s ever seen and 10 being time so well spent that I would have sold my first born for it…I give VMworld 2009 a…

6

It was a valuable few days. Perhaps not for all of the reasons that I would have wished…but in general…the things that I felt were lacking were somewhat made up for by gains in areas that I’d not fully planned for.

Best of show:

• Solid, but not spectacular, instructor-led sessions.
  • I did not (nor did a HUGE number of other folks) get into all of the sessions that I wanted, but I got into quite a few. The sessions appeared generally well organized and for the most part hit on exactly what I expected out of them. I felt some of the sessions were a little light on high-level technical details even though they were listed as being for the advanced track, and many times they attempted to cover topics that they had no reason to believe could be given proper credence in the time allotted. You know…I can’t speak for everyone else…but I’d prefer if a conference would provide the option of letting you pick “quality” over “quantity” and would thereby offer “true” deep-dive type instruction on a few specific topics for once.
  • In the sessions that I attended, the stations were generally ready to go and there were not a lot of technical issues during the session, although I did hear from many other attendees about major issues in other sessions.
  • Marketing to Content ratio was hit and miss…some sessions were almost entirely marketing poo…while others were dead on technical. Generally speaking…the VMware-led sessions = Most Direct Content vs. the Third-party sessions = Majority Marketing Spin/Gibberish
• Superb Networking Opportunities
  • Met some great folks that I know will become lifelong contacts.
  • Super opportunity to interact with others from industries outside of your own to share and develop ideas and possibilities.
  • Super parties, tweetups, and other extra-curricular activities…Mucho props to J Troyer and co. For setting up several of the tweetups.
• Schwag, shcwag, and more schwag…
  • So many shirts…I think I could have flown into town with just shorts and slacks…and still come back with enough pairs to make the week plus some.
  • My kids greatly enjoyed the NetIQ flying monkey. I can’t say that I appreciated it much after listening to it for hours on end after I returned home…but at least it’s cheap entertainment right?

Overall, I had a good time and I felt it was a worthwhile experience. I agree with many other bloggers and commenters though…very anticlimactic in general and there was certainly no huge “Wow”-type moment. Oh well…here’s hoping next year will have enough of those types of moments to make this year’s VMworld a distant memory!

Official Day #1 In The Books

A good day today overall.

The keynote this morning was…interesting. I couldn’t stay for all of it because for some reason they overlapped it with the start of sessions! You’d think they wouldn’t do that.

Thoughts? Well…I really like the vCloud Express offering. I really think that will open up a huge new market for consultants, SMBs, and other smaller businesses…but it’s just not an “Enterprise” interesting feature. Really impressive power consumption numbers from the IBM demo…WOW! Major, major, major props to HP for the super tight integration of HP Insight Management into vCenter… (WHY OH WHY CAN’T DELL OPEN MANAGE DO THAT!!!) Otherwise…just more cloud propaganda and the like. Look…the cloud is important and I think it’s the only logical way that things can continue to progress…but it’s not sure thing that we’ll all be running VMware clouds only…and it is very true that VMware makes some major “lock-in” type moves which would sort of scare me if I were pulling the purse strings…but get real…name me one vendor that doesn’t try to “lock-in” its own customers and I’ll show you their bankruptcy filing.

Break-Out session thoughts???

Vizioncore Analyzation and Automation: Mostly a long commercial…but they’ve got some good products and I learned that they made their vConverter product free…so that was cool. I’ll certainly try it out when I get a chance soon. Can’t be any slower than vCenter Enterprise Converter 🙂

vCenter Mobile Access: My thoughts? WHY IN THE BLEEEEP AREN’T WE USING THIS ALREADY!!!! Another reason, although I hesitate to say it, to get a Blackberry. Not that the experience is any better…quite the contrary…but the setup is easier because your BES busts in through your firewall for you. Almost zero configuration. But really…for a free management tool…what a godsend! There’s almost nothing you couldn’t do through this tool as far as your virtual infrastructure is concerned.

Automated Disaster Recovery for Branch Offices: Pretty cool. They showed the upcoming vSphere SRM product and how you can protect multiple vCenters at a single SRM site. We should really be doing this already. We already have the basic infrastructure in place…all it would take would be a little capital investment…can’t be any worse than the check we write to our DR Host every year.

Hypervisor Competitive Differences: Very interesting and I thought very evenly presented and balanced. Ultimate outcome? VMware is still the clear leader and most ready for Enterprise level implementations…but the others are MUCH closer than ever before. I really think this is going to come down to a religious war in the end. Much like Apple and MS…there is no one that is clearly, certainly, without doubt better than the other, and each will have its own strengths and leanings. It’ll ultimately just be a matter of preference and feel. My money’s still on the leader for now though.

One other quick thing… it’s sickening and frightening the amount of MS plants at the conference and on the twitter feeds. You’d think that MS would be busy…I don’t know…like…maybe trying to fix the products that it already makes? I wonder how they’d react if VMware spent a chunk of money and showed up at WinHEC to show off their “virtual hardware”?

I’ve got lots of good pics and a complete video (in several parts) from the Hypervisor comparison breakout session. I’ll get them up as soon as I can…but for now…I’ve got to find something to eat…

Nice Dinner and Wayyy Too Late

Well…were do you eat in Downtown San Fran after 10PM? Not many places apparently. While at an impromptu Tweetup…I ran into one of the folks from Trainsignal. If you’re not familiar with them, they produce a wide variety of high quality training materials and programs for all sorts of current technologies. One of these good folks was Gary Eimerman with whom I also ran the VMworld 2009 “Save The Bay” Fun Run at the Golden Gate Bridge earlier in the afternoon. After the tweetup began to clear out several folks noted that they hadn’t eaten dinner and neither had I so the race was on to find where to go. We all eventually ended up at this place called Oola’s. I had a burger, which was pretty good…slightly pricey…but good, and we all shared some good conversation. Always good to speak and meet with people of like minds and techy backgrounds. But seriously…why aren’t there more restaurants open late in San Fran?

Overall, I think the day was good. I got a lot of good information from the VMworld Scripting Lab 12, and somewhat decent information from the vSphere best practices session…but I was very disappointed in how long it took to get into the Self-Paced labs…Unacceptable! I’ve got some more vids and stuff to post up …but I’m beat and it’ll have to wait til tomorrow. I’ve got to get to bed for the keynote in the morning @ 8AM!!!

Another Day…Another Video

I posted another vid on the VMworld 2009 page. I think it’s funny how they have this video and are proud about reducing deployment and delivery times down to 6 to 8 hours…but I have superiors that think that deployments should only take minutes now! Anyway…this is just a quick post to let everyone know that there is more to come tonight…I’ve got to get down to the Moscone and get on a bus to the Golden Gate for the VMworld 5k! Wish me luck!

New Vids Added!!!

Check out the newly added videos on the VMworld 2009 page from the toolbar above. …or you can click here if you’re just too lazy!!!

I’m sure they’ll be enlightening and entertaining…

Registered & Ready!!!

Well, I’m all checked in and I’ve received my attendee bag. Pretty nice bag and 2 T-shirts. Looking through the program guide everything looks very nicely laid out and organized. Mucho props to the VMware VMworld organizers. I’m going to upload a few pics and vids in just a moment. You should see the systems they’ve got setup as you make your way down the escalator into Moscone north…very impressive.

Massive Amount of really cool hardware (Actually not that massive for all it does come to think of it!)

Here’s where the keynote will be…wonder if they’ll throw down the Gauntlet on MS, Oracle, and Citrix (Are those really separate companies anyway?)

Shhhhhh… Don’t tell anyone…but the third blade from the bottom in this Cisco UCS already had a bang on it!!!

Getting Ready!!!

Well…I finally managed to get a seat reserved on the flight to San Fran.

Phew… I was worried that I’d be flying standby or get bumped to an even later flight. At least it looks like I got lucky and snagged an aisle seat.

I’m going to try to make it to the Moscone Center early and get registered on Sunday. I hear the lines and waits are pretty hectic on Monday, so I figure it’s worth it to get it all done early if available.

Here’s what’s on the agenda for Monday:

10:00 AM-12:00 PM	LAB12	Scripting VMware® Infrastructure (PowerShell/Perl Toolkits)
1:30 PM-2:30 PM	V11721	Best Practices for Successful VI Design
3:00 PM-4:00 PM	V12644	Designing a Virtualization Infrastructure for the Small Environment

I plan on hitting some of the vendor booths that day as well.  High on my list are, but in no certain order…

• Dell
• Akorri
• Hyper9
• EMC
• HP
• Symantec
• and many others

If someone has a suggestion or comment on my schedule or list of vendors to grill evaluate…by all means, please register and leave a comment! This is certainly meant to be an interactive communication method, and I appreciate and need feedback!

Wish me a good trip tomorrow!!!