Month: August 2011

Did you know about Cisco UCS Express?

Today while I was walking around the vendor expo at VMworld 2011, I saw a very interesting product from Cisco. I was familiar with the datacenter UCS product, but a mini version caught my attention. Called UCS Express this is a micro ESXi server that slides directly into their ISR G2...

BCO1946: Making vCenter highly available

vCenter is a business critical service that when it goes down can cause substantial chaos, although VMs will happily keep running while it is down. Using VDI? Forget spinning up new VMs, or rebooting VMs. Using vCD? Forget doing anything while it's down. HA? Yes that will keep working (for...

VSP1999: Advanced esxtop usage

This session was quite advanced and had a lot of troubleshooting examples which are hard to adequately capture without the slides, so I'll just touch on some of the counters he used during some troubleshooting examples. Maybe in future posts I'll focus on one subject like storage stats and recreate...

VSP3864: Best practices for virtualized networking

This session was a bit more high level and basic than I had hoped for, but here are the highlights: Virtual Port ID load balancing is the default option and the least complicated option. IP hasing is more advanced and requires Etherchannel to be configured on the switch VTS (virtual...

CIM1264: Private VMware vCloud Architecture Deep Dive

This was a pretty advanced session about the vCloud Director, which is a complex product. The speakers were very, very good, but given the advanced nature of the discussion it will be hard to recap the session in full and some of the concepts need more explanation than I can provide...

VSP2884: vSphere 5.0 Performance enhancements

This session covered some of the major performance enhancements in vSphere 5.0. The presenter flew through the slides at 100 MPH and didn't spend much time on the bullets so I wasn't able to capture all of the highlights. But here's what I did capture: 32-way vCPUs with 92-97% of...

BCO1269: SRM 5.0 What’s new and Recommendations

Unlike the last session I attended, this one was very good and had quite a bit of great technical material that went beyond common sense most IT guys have. SRM 5.0 is a major release that addressed many of the shortcomings of the 4.x releases. Highlights include: Customers need simple,...

SUP1010: Cisco and VMware Innovating Together

This session was a 'super session' which is basically a vendor touting their wares and how well they integrate with VMware. To that end Cisco went through a number of announcements and innovations that are really industry leading. High points of this session were: Policy based management is key to deploying...

VSP1700: vSphere 5.0 Storage Features

This session covered many of the new and cool storage features in vSphere 5.0. The speaker mentioned that if you think vSphere 4.0 was 'for networks' then vSphere 5.0 is 'for storage.' Many of the cool tools such as DRS that you are used to for compute/memory resources are now...

BCA1902: Virtualizing Exchange 2010

This session focused on virtualizing Exchange 2010 on vSphere 4.x or 5.x. Highlights of this session include: Bottom line there's no reason why you should be afraid of virtualizing Exchange 2010. Exchange 2010 now uses 32Kb I/O blocks, vs. 8K for previous versions. Exchange 2010 I/O is much more optimized than...

VSP2247: 10Gb and FCoE Real World Design

This was an excellent fire hose of a session..far too much data to try and write down. Highlights of this session include: Ten 1Gb links does not equal a single 10Gb link. With bursting you can more effectively us a single 10Gb link. With vSphere 5.0 vMotion saturate two 10Gbps links...

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