VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘Partner Exchange 2008’

I wanted to share some of my photos from my week in San Diego at VMware Partner Exchange 2008. I have some panoramic shots of San Diego by night and day, a shot from the bay of the Sheraton Hotel and Marina, as well as photos from the party at the Wavehouse. I took some time after the conference ended Thursday afternoon to take a harbor cruise. The San Diego Harbor Excursion offers 1 hour tours of both the North and South Bay, and luckily I had time to take the full tour.

I used Google’s Picasa to create a quick collage of some of my favorite shots of the week.

This post also has a short video of the surfers performing for us in the Bruticus Maximus wave machine at the event party. Enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

I am proud to announce that SearchVMware.com has invited me to become a contributer to the Virtualization Pro Blog. My first post was published earlier today.

“Maybe it’s because I just spent a week at the VMware Partner Exchange in San Diego and I am full of the VMware “Kool Aid”, but it appears to me that VMware has a pretty good strategy, focus and direction for staying ahead of the competition. While other vendors are still perfecting and marketing their hypervisor, VMware is talking about automation and management of the virtual data center with products like Site Recovery Manager, Lab Manager, Stage Manager, and Lifecycle Manager.”

Be sure to add this great virtualization site to your bookmarks and feed readers and look for future posts from me there!

Another session I attended at VMware’s Partner Exchange last week was titled ESX Log Analysis – Tech 207. I did not realize it when I signed up, but this was essentially the same session that I previously attended at VMWorld 2007 last September. I did a quick Google search on this topic to find the VMWorld slides and noticed that Scott Lowe live blogged from San Francisco while attending this very session. Then Searching on the VMWorld.com site I found that this was also a session at VMWorld Europe 2008 titled VI3 Advanced Log Analysis. You can get a copy of the .ppt used at the VMWorld Europe 2008 session on my Files Page.

There is nothing really too new about t-shooting ESX logs here, but the following are my notes from last week. On the other hand, there are some general notes directly related to ESXi logs and using Update Manager included.

I cleaned up my notes a little, but the following is still a raw outline. use These notes and the .ppt mentioned above to hopefully help educate yourself on this topic.

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One of the hands on labs I attended at VMware Partner Exchange was the Site Recovery Manager (SRM) lab. In the lab I was able to get a good understanding of the technical details of how the yet to be released product is configured. The lab then walked us through the fail over process and workflow. This post is a high level summary of what I learned. This post is not intended to be a detailed how to, but instead just a logical overview about what it will take to set up SRM.
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I ended up with a Toyota Prius as my rental car for the week in San Diego. I’ve never driven a Prius before, and honestly, I’ve never really had an interest in the car until now. Like most, I knew that the Prius uses a Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD) engine, but I had no idea about all the cool technology built into making the car so efficient. As a matter of fact, the Prius engine technology is in some ways similar to the Distributed Resource Scheduling and Power Management features of VI3 Enterprise.

According to wikipedia’s page about the HSD: Read the rest of this entry »

When I first started VM /ETC by live blogging from VMworld 2007 last September, I posted a few entries about what I call “ton of bricks” moments. This happens to me usually when I am talking to vendors or other engineers about virtualization technologies, strategies or designs and I learn something new that is so simple but so important that it hits me like a ton of bricks. VMware’s Partner Exchange 2008 first such moment happened not because of a single conversation or breakout session, but because of a collective of virtual infrastructure security discussions.

Virtual Infrastructure presents some unique security challenges to administrators. Sure, virtual machines are networked servers just like physical servers and traditional security monitoring and intrusion detection products and processes can be deployed as usual. However, consolidation of servers has changed the attack surface from physical networking to virtualized networks contained within virtualization hosts. If a hacker were to compromise one of your VMs could your current security monitoring alert you of any suspicious activity? What if the activity never reached the core network switch or even the physical NICs of the host server, but instead was kept internal to the host by only attempting to compromise the VMs that shared the virtual switches? What if an intruder brought his own VM and started it up on one of your virtualization hosts, would you know it ever happened?

I have talked with several vendors this week that have solutions to provide visibility and monitoring of the internal virtual network activity and inter-VM communications. These solutions Read the rest of this entry »

I am headed to San Diego today for VMware Partner Exchange 2008. It should be another great week of learning and networking. I am looking forward most to the hands on labs for Site Recovery Manager, ESXi, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and Lab Manager. There is also separate technical solution tracks for beginner, intermediate, and advanced breakout sessions. The exhibit pavillion, called the VMware Experience, sounds interesting too. Quoting the event website: Read the rest of this entry »