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Posts Tagged ‘vmworld2008’

This session was my last VMworld 2008 session on Tuesday 9.17. I must have missed it in my notebook Tuesday night, so I am posting my notes now. The session was hosted by Mike DePetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer at VMware. Mike did the entire session on one leg. If you saw one of Mike’s sessions or you know Mike you’ll understand that comment.

This session was designed for companies that are primarily Linux shops and have numerous virtual machines (VMs) on VMware virtual infrastructure. Mike provided general information about Linux as a guest OS as well as some best practices and performance tips for both the VMs and the ESX hosts. The rest of this post is my notes from the session.

Mike started out by talking about general recommendations for building Linux VMs.

Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you wondering if I had too good of a time a the VMworld 2008 Party last night to make my sessions today, that’s not the case at all! Unfortunately I missed the party completely so I look forward to all the other posts and pictures of those that did go to see what I missed. The VMworld Twitter stream from last night was certainly entertaining at times. Anyways, I am attending sessions and I will post my summaries later today.

I’ve already attended an interesting breakout about Symantec’s VCS in a VMware environment, and I was able to hear Brian Madden talk about the advantages and disadvantages of terminal services and VDI. I am also attending the Microsoft session this afternoon to hear about their virtualization strategy. Then I’ll catch Simon Crosby and have a listen to what Citrix has to say.

Look for these posts here later today

-Rich

This post is a summary of notes from the 1:30 pm VMworld 2008 session titled Managing ESX in a COS-less World. The discussion was about various options for managing ESXi without the Service Console OS (COS). The session was hosted by members of the ESXi team and contained forward looking statements about possible future directions. As always, the disclaimer was discussed with the audience before the presentation began. (Do I need to keep explaining this? Probably the safe thing to do.)

Scott Lowe apparently was in the same session so check his
TA2659: Managing ESX in a COS-less World post for a lot of additional information besides what I have recorded here.  Scott, my 3 finger “peck typing” doesn’t compare to your keyboard skills!

One of the first things mentioned was that the next major release of ESX/ESXi would be the last release of the two products together. I guess this means that ESXi kernel development will be independent of the ESX versions that provide the VDC-OS. We were told ESXi will continue without the COS and that ESX would include a stripped down COS.

There are several reasons VMware needed to remove the COS from ESX. Read the rest of this entry »

I attended the VMworld 2008 EMC Keynote session at 11:00 am today (Weds), but my battery was almost drained so I took manual notes. This post is a translation of those notes.

Chad Sakac, Senior Director and Mr. VMware at EMC, hosted this session titled Designing the Next Generation Data Center. The session was about how storage and networking vendors must work together to build upon the new features available in the new VDC-OS suite of technologies. Specifically, this session zeroed in on the vStorage group of features. Chad explained that EMC, Cisco, and VMware have been working together for a while and he would demo the results of this collaboration for us. Along with Chad onstage was Ed Bugnion, Cisco VP/CTO Virtualization, and Scott Davis, VMware Chief Architect.

Chad began by providing some opinion on how he felt vendors need to evolve their storage products for the next generation data center and the VMware VDC-OS. Some of the points he made were: Read the rest of this entry »

I had to miss my 9:30 am scheduled session because I was delayed finishing up the General Session post. Luckily VMworld has different sessions on the top and bottom of each hour this year. I think the staggered availability of sessions is a great idea, and it was perfect for my scenario this morning. I am actually more interested in VMware’s Linux strategy anyways. My power is low on my notebook, so this may start as a live blog but my battery might not make it.

Once again the legal disclaimer about forward technologies, but the presenter tells us he can’t give dates … hmmm.

VMware’s Linux strategy is focused along 2 vectors:

• Ensure it is the best platform for linux workloads
• Ensure customers have a wide variety of platform choices to deploy VMware

Here’s the Linux Initiatives at VMware Read the rest of this entry »

I am getting ready for the VMworld 2008 Day 2 General Session and sitting at the official bloggers table this morning. Thanks to John Troyer and the team over at VMTN and Planet v12n for getting this set up. We even have a solid wi fi connection so live blogging looks promising. Look for updates to this post every 15 minutes or so.

Lights are down and the opening video is rolling. Today promises to be more about the new technical features.

Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware, takes the stage and has started the session. Stephen confirms that his presentation will be about the technology behind the VDC-OS.

He is starting by going through the 3 infrastructure layers. Read the rest of this entry »

This session is moderated by Ron Oglesby, Service Director – Virtualization for Glass House Technologies. This is a Datadomain session that I anticipate to be a about the design and implementation issues faced by various Datadomain customers. No internet connection in this room so this will be a delayed post.

Like all the other sessions, the disclaimer slide is shown. I’ve learned from the last session not every session is going to have “forward looking” statements. Ron even commented that the slide was put in all the VMworld 2008 presentations by the VMware legal team.

Ron begins by discussing storage being the number one cost in a virtualization implementation. Snapshots, backups, and VM replication and cloning result in the need for large amounts of storage. Complicate this with the need for faster recovery, management automation, and increasing retention and compliance requirements help skyrocket the storage design footprint. Storage is implemented for virtualization too often as an afterthought.

Ron explains the session is about options for storing and replicating snapshots of VMs and the storage ramifications of server consolidation. The session will also illustrate how deduplication and virtualization complement each other.

The rest of the session was customer testimonials. The following are various comments from the customers that caught my attention. Read the rest of this entry »