One post, two parts. Not because they’re short, but because the days were so intense I only had a chance to jot down notes & start to expand on them now.

TL;DR – For those at the show, you’ll understand. For those that couldn’t make it… you’ll want to stay tuned to EMC & VMware… Big things coming.

Day 2 – Who Peed in Your Resource Pool

Day 2 was interesting on a number of accounts:

Keynote:

• It costs VMWare .06 per vm per hour to provision a VM.
• The hypervisor is no longer the secret sauce. That is now in management and orchestration
• Real time statistical analysis of your environment will help you identify the kid that peed in the resource pool.
• There are lots of new animals in the IT zoo (read: end user Devices)

VMWare End User Computing 2015

This one identified the state of things today, and how they’ll play out into the future. Unfortunately, I’ve still not made sense of my notes. I figure that’s because he iPad autocorrected them for me. Blah.

vLab – VSI

Boom! This lab was slick in that it walked you through installing, configuring & working with the EMC VSI plugin for vCenter. The plugin itself operated slowly, but this was more due to the nested VM nature of the lab.

Chad Sakac!

Chad did a “Social City” session after which I cornered him to ask about a BrownBag. I’ll have to work out some scheduling… but, expect some “face melting awesomesauce” coming to a BrownBag near you.

Day 3 – Hookah Smoking Caterpillars

A bit tired after yesterday, but some additional things talked about/covered that I came for.

PowerPath/VE Ask the Experts

This was a panel session, with a large number of folks from the PowerPath team. The questions were all over the place, so I’ll try to highlight a few that were interesting:

• Q: “I have customers who try to migrate either the quorum or MSCS volumes without taking the other node down, this makes pain. Is there a way to have the PowerPath migration tools notify the user of this pitfalls?” A: Crowd: “Wait what?” A: Panel: “Suggestion Taken”
• Q: “I have an issue when deploying PowerPath/VE to ESXi hosts that causes a PSOD. There is an open issue, but can you provide some perspective?” A: Engineering is working on it. The issue is a hard one to pin down as there don’t seem to be many consistencies with it, but they’re digging in.
• Q: “Does PowerPath/VE Support RDMs on Virtual Machines?” A: Yes… No… well, we’ll need to follow-up on that, here’s a card.

Virtual Storage Overview & Direction

I’m just going to leave these here and let you make of them what you will. I think you’ll find them curious indeed.

Disclaimer: EMC stated at the beginning of the session that well, these are “vision” slides. The future is uncertain, so take them with a grain of salt.

Nerd Herd

This was a “Social City” event put on / arranged by NerdBlurt (Luigi Danakos / @NerdBlurt). The panelists:

The conversation went round and round on the various bits of the show that each liked, thoughts on the vision, etc. I believe there will be a recording of the session here.

Summary:

On the whole, I didn’t get to a number of the sessions I was after, but still feel I got a huge amount of info from the ones I did make, as well as from the conversations with other expert folks at the show. The conversation with the PowerPath/VE engineers on deployment, FlexLM, and VUM told me quite a bit about what I rolled in there for. Additionally I got to corner any number of vSpecalists & other experts both VMware & EMC alike to get some direct questions addressed.

Further the show floor had any number of interesting things outside the typical key players. There was a small time SSD player with whom I had a great conversation (he wasn’t giving away an iPad2, so I got to talk to him for a bit). The storage/virt space is going to be interesting for a while to come & it’s good to see the small guys innovating also.

Pool Pee picture by this guy here.

The last one of these got quite a bit of mileage, so it may be worthwhile to repeat them on occasion. This week, while sitting in VMwares DSA (Deploy, Secure, Analyze) Class posting will be ‘interesting’ at best. So here it goes:

Virtu-al’s first Online VMUG was a success, with about 30-45 viewers. It’s been recorded if you missed it, and you can sign up for the next one from the site.

VMware released a bunch of the VMworld ‘08 & VMworld Europe ‘09 material for free online. Amongst these is “AD2764 – Managing VMware with PowerShell”. You knew that one was coming, didn’t you?

The 2TB problem. Virtual Geek actually did a better write up on this than the one I had sitting in my drafts folder. As with anything else he writes it’s a worthwhile read.

The VMware Coffee Talk on PowerShell happened. All and all an excellent presentation. The ‘Demo’ mode was interesting as was the remainder of the subject matter. I hope there is a follow up on some more specific topics.

VMware also release some new classes for vSphere that seem to be centered around job specific roles. Which may mean there are some interesting things to come certification wise.

Thanks for tuning in again! If you have any questions, or comments, leave me a note in the comments.

Sometimes you really can have too much of a good thing. Or is it?

I’ve had a few specific use cases come up (demos for Virtualization Congress) where running one virtualization platform, on another virtualization platform makes sense (There will be instructions released on doing this closer to the show). Suffice it to say the process is slow, mildly painful, and leaves you feeling rather unclean for days. Read: Not For Production.

I am however looking for cases where such may be used in production, and well, am not coming up with anything that holds water. Ghetto VDI? Not sure. Have you seen it in production? Share your stories in the comments.

There are now four, FOUR ATDG chapters available, HA ha ha!

http://www.vi3book.com/index.php/component/content/article/83

I can’t say this enough, but if Virtualization is the new Religion, this is it’s bible, and should be required reading all about.

I never thought of it this way, but alas, this weekend, a few folks have spent quite some time on it.

It started with Brenda at Virtual Gipsy:

Of the things I learned while studying anthropology, the one that stuck most was to always pay attention to that which stands out. Unexpected behavior, words that surprise you. The one thing that most caught my attention since I have been studying the (virtual) community of people that share an interest in virtualisation, is the use of religion-related words to describe virtualisation-related topics.

Words like guru, evangelist, high priests, cardinals, belief, followers, gospel, VMware-ism, atheist and disciples were all used several times in my (virtual or physical) presence. That struck me, since I had never before associated software with something ’soft’ like religion. I had always thought of it as scientific: mathematical, logical, measurable, and not as emotional, spiritual and intuitive. But hey, if they say so, and keep saying it, there has got to be something more to it right? I have divided these religion-related words into two groups: the ones that describe certain categories of people (guru, evangelist, high priest, cardinal, follower, atheist and disciple) and the ones that point at virtualisation as a whole (belief, gospel and VMware-ism

Rich at VM /Etc had this to add:

First, wikipedia describes religion in part as:

“… both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction. “Religion” is sometimes used interchangeably with “faith” or “belief system,”but it is more socially defined than personal convictions, and it entails specific behaviors, respectively.”

Using that aspect of the definition, it’s easy to see how virtualization, not to mention any widely adopted technology, can be compared to a religion. However, the prevalent popularity of virtualization today and the constant debate over which vendor offers the best data center salvation choice makes for a well defined congregation

It’s odd to think of it in this way, but when thought of loosely, the concepts seem to work both ways. Either way, it gives you a new way to look at things. If Virtualization is to be the new religion of the datacenter, I propose him as our religious leader:

Came across this in my RSS reader, and figured it was worth a mention. Project VRC (Virtual Reality Check) provides vendor neutral white papers on how to best configure Xen, Hyper-V, and VMware for different workloads.

Do you wonder about virtualization? Are you seeking for the best virtualization platform for your specific environment? Project VRC shows you the way!

Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is a joint venture of Log•in Consultants and PQR, who have researched the optimal configuration for the different available hypervisors (hardware virtualization layers). The project arises from the growing demand for a founded advice on how to virtualise Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads. Through a number of researches, Log•in Consultants and PQR show you the scaling possibilities for Terminal Server environments as well as Virtual Desktops

Go on along to their page, register, and pull down the white papers. Definitely a worthy read.

Edward Haletky, a regular on VMTN, and the VMTN round table podcasts, is starting his own spinoff, the “Virtualization Security Round Table Podcast”

The first show, scheduled for Thursday at 2:30p EST, is going to feature the following topics:

• Use of Virtualization in a DMZ.
• Review of security lockdown standards/benchmarks and tools
• Virtualization Security in shared and dedicated hosting environments
• Providing VaaS (VMware as a Service) securely to SMBs for DR.
• How virtualization security relates to cloud computing security
• Top 3 security issues
• Optimal Network configuration and design for security
• How to accommodate small / medium and home businesses
• Disaster recovery options – small, medium, large businesses
• VLANs as a Security measure with vSwitch Security
• many others…

This will be presented using Talkshoe

Virtualization.info provides a LOT of great virtualization related information and services. One of those services, for those of us social-networking inclined, is their Virtualization Vanguards. A Group on LinkedIn. I’m happy to announce that I’ve joined this group, and look forward to seeing what it will bring.

Found this on Roger Lund’s site

It seems that Edward L. Haletky has put together a wiki site with essential books and references for VMware Professionals. It’s pretty light so far, but he’s got an area for suggestions.

VMware

* Edward L. Haletky. VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers. Prentice Hall PTR; 1 edition (January 8, 2008). Available from InformIT.com (eBook Version)
* Ron Oglesby, Scott Herold, Mike Laverick. VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide & Advanced Operations Guide. The Brian Madden Company; Second edition edition (August 1, 2008).
* John Arrasjid, Karthik Balachandran, Daniel Conde, Gary Lamb, and Steve Kaplan. #18: Deploying the VMware Infrastructure. USENIX Association; 2008.
* David Marshall, Stephen S. Beaver, Jason McCarty. VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center. Auerbach Publications; 1 edition (August 25, 2008).
* Mitch Northcut. RapidApp’s Quick Start guide to ESX 3.0. Rapid Application Deployment Inc. 2007.

Virtualization, and Virtual are wonderful buzzwords now-a-day’s aren’t they? It seems with some format modification, webcasts have now become “Virtual Conferences” or “Virtual Seminars”. It’s a cool concept though, especially because I have an allergy for airplanes/travel.

Here are some coming up this month. (From Brian Madden)