This morning I attended the keynote session by Dr. Stephen Herrod, the VMware CTO. Key points during his presentation were: It (hypervisors) should just work and work well. IT industry is moving away from servers to services and toward people, not devices. DUH: Devices, Universal access, High expectations We are...
Hot off the presses is a Cisco 'announcement' of a virtual ASA product that is in the works, although no details were released about pricing and availability. It will leverage the capabilities of the Nexus 1000v DVS, and is more for edge protection (North-South traffic), vice internal traffic (East-West) which...
Last week HP announced their new 3PAR P10000 array, which is the next generation virtualization array. It features a number of enhancements over their previous generation, released when 3PAR was still independent. Today at VMware vmworld HP had an unveiling of the P10000 and former 3PAR CEO David Scott was...
This afternoon was a keynote general session by Paul Martiz, the CEO of VMware. Some of the highlights from this session are: As of 2010 50% of all workloads are now virtualized. 20 million VMs run on vSphere. 68,000 VCPs. In 2014 80% of all internet connected devices will NOT...
Wow this session was a riot. The speaker (Greg Shields) could easily double as a stand-up comedian, much like Mark Minasi. Beyond the entertainment, the session was quite technical and had great content. I had a hard time writing everything down he was going so fast. Before he got into...
This session was pretty good and covered many use cases for long distance (metro) vMotion for DR/BC purposes. Highlights include: Planning for BC/DR is imperative and if you don't and a disaster strikes, statistically you could be out of business in less than a year. New technologies are enabling disaster avoidance,...
Contrary to the title of this session, I didn't think the content was too "advanced." The speaker covered typical SAN features such as snapshots and clones, and how you can leverage them for a virtual environment. Highlights include: Snapshots are an on-line and point-in-time. It could be of a datastore...
This session was a panel discussion with several industry experts and representatives. Panelists included Texiwill (Ed Haletky), the Catbird CTO, a VMware employee, and others. Topics of discussion included: There is no ETA on a DISA STIG for vSphere 4.x or 5.0. DISA is stating that they are relying on...
This session covered the future direction for Site Recovery Manager, known as SRM. SRM 5.0 has some major enhancements, and will ship "soon." Among the current and future enhancements are: Simple, reliable DR which replaces manual runbooks Array integration with a wide range of vendors, currently supporting 28 arrays SRM...
This session covered a product which is a result of an acquisition last year, and has since undergone some significant enhancements. vCenter Operations is a product that provides operations intelligence for your virtual infrastructure. Major points in this session: The speaker stated that 90% of performance problems for virtualized applications...
Here I am again at VMware VMworld, and I'll try to blog about as many sessions as I can. Unfortunately the way VMware has structured the schedule it's not very conducive to a lot of blogging but I'll do the best I can. This session was a very high level...
When building vSphere VM templates best practices would recommend that a number of security lockdowns be incorporated into the template. There are a variety of sources for recommended lockdowns, such as the VMware vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide. But what if you already have VMs in production that you need to lock down, or...