This session was a bit higher level and more common sense tips, so I split after 30 minutes and went to another session. The speakers had 8 best practice tips, and both of them were from Dell/Compellent. So they had a few minutes sales pitch before they started the meat...
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...
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...
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...
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 5.0Â vMotion saturate two 10Gbps links...
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...