VMware PEX2010: Night of Nines and Saturday Random Thoughts
February 7th, 2010 | 
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Saturday was my travel day to VMware Partner Exchange 2010 in Las Vegas, NV. I left Atlanta at 1:30 pm EST and finally checked into my room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel around 4:30 pm PST. All it took was a couple of tweets and I was able to make plans with Theron Conrey for dinner. Like Theron, several others were already in town for the 3 day Virtual Infrastructure Design Boot Camp. So, in about 90 minutes we had a group of nine headed over to the Nine Fine Irishmen at the New York, New York Hotel & Casino. I did not realize last night’s “Night of Nines” until writing about it just now.
Memorable pre-conference tweet ups tend to happen around Theron, and although this one was small in scale compared to his VMworld 2009 party, I had a great time.
Theron tweeted a couple photos of the group, and I used Windows Live Photo to make the above panoramic stitch (an easy to use and free photo editor if you haven’t tried it BTW!). Loosely moving from left to right (not everyone uses twitter?!) in the photo are @bknudtson @vConsult @wolfbrthr @ryancoates, and myself. Not shown is @theronconrey because he was taking the pics.
As always, the conversation was fast, funny, and informative. These informal gatherings are invaluable to me personally and professionally, but they sort of remind me of a Nascar race at Bristol Motor Speedway. For those readers that are “South Eastern U.S.” challenged, imagine a .5 mile race track crammed into a stadium that holds 100,000 people.There is so much happening that you have to force yourself to focus on a driver or two. Out of the corner of your eye the bumping and banging of another group of cars catches your attention, and then you watch that group for a while. By the end your neck hurts!
Although I’m sure I missed a lot, here are a few of the random virtualization related conversations that stuck out for me last night.
vCenter 4 in a VM is a best practice
According to the VI Design Boot Camp the guys are attending, VMware is now endorsing installing vCenter 4 in a VM as a best practice . It is still recommended that the vCenter database be separated from the virtualized vCenter Server, however. Although VMware supported but never seemed to take definitive sides on a virtual versus a physical VirtualCenter 2.x in the past, it is interesting to me that a best practice has now been declared. I’m not against doing it. Providing high availability from an ESX Cluster configuration alone makes a strong case to do so. It’s just different to officially hear it as a best practice for me.
Secure Multi Tenancy and vBlock Champions Needed
I’ve struggled understanding how the recently announced SMT alliance and reference architecture from NetApp, Cisco, and VMware would work in a private data center. It just seemed like the perfect solution for hosting providers to me, and although I can generalize internal IT scenarios such as distributed administration in a centralized datacenter, I’ve wondered if that could model could really work and if customers are really demanding it.
Last night, the table conversation both supported my view and helped clear things up a bit. The general realization is that SMT makes complete sense to consultants and administrators, but the real challenge to making it actually happen is not a technical one, but it’s a political one. That is, an internal champion for SMT with enough clout to tell all involved “this is what we are doing” and then enough drive to make sure everyone works it out will be desperately needed. It’s one of those things that everyone might not “get” at the start, but the infrastructure cost savings and ROI should make everyone happy in the end. Arguably, that internal champion will engage in the SMT battle as one of the many skirmishes associated with building an internal cloud.
Internal vBlock architecture from EMC, Cisco, and VMware can be lumped in the “who’s your champion?” category too.
Virtualization Tweeps are not the real customer base
There is no doubt a core group of several thousand IT professionals are social networking active and make up the virtualization community all over the world. This online community is a great sounding board for vendors to gauge product interest, acceptance, and change. However, the ultimate business success of a company’s product depends on the millions of people who aren’t in this small loop.
The point of this relatively quick conversation focused around scripting. The v12n community loves scripting, and any administrator responsible for a large environment needs to learn how to automate his tasks via scripts. Free tools are available to help you both create new scripts or run those readily available from others. However, does this create a false premise that all customers will have a large environment, be easily able to pick up popular scripting, or even be interested in doing so? The general point is that in some rare cases the online community can be a false positive for vendors and products because the technical experience may be further advanced than the real, everyday customer base.
That was just some of my Saturday night! The actual conference doesn’t even start until Tuesday ….
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Posted in events, partner, virtualization, vmware | 
Tags: partner, partner exchange 2010, pex2010, vmware, vmwarepex
Looks like you guys had a great time. Be prepared for another blowout of a party at VMWorld 2010.
Have fun this week.
Cheers
Michael
Thanks Mr Keen. Looking forward to VMworld already!
Sent from my iPod
This link doesn't really seem to endorse vCenter in a VM as a best practice. Just says that it is fully supported. And the KB article links to a VMTN page, which links to a PDF file that was actually written for VirtualCenter 2.x.
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/10087
Do you have another reference that mentions the best practice, support, and technical details for vCenter 4 in a VM?
Thanks!
Quick,
My intent was to point out that VC as a VM was not endorsed by VMware as a
best practice. In fact, it has been referred to as a “religious debate” in
the past – supported by not a firm best practice. Sorry that was not made as
clearly as possible.
No I do not have a link where VMware states it is now a best practice. In
fact, last night was the first I heard that is the case. Believe me, when I
have a link and can point to a VMware KB, .pdf, or blog post I will dedicate
a post to it here on VM /ETC
Ahh, ok. I think I was confused by the placement of the link, which indicated to me that the link was a reference to the endorsement of vCenter in a VM as a best practice.