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VMworld 2008 Pictures

Posted by Todd Muirhead Sep 22, 2008

I've posted all of the pictures I took during VMworld 2008 to our site. There are some great pictures including the party and hotel. Here is the link - - http://www.delltechcenter.com/album/46895/VMWorld+2008

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: vmworld, pictures, party, delltechcenter, vmworld08, vmworldparty
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After attending VMworld 08this past week, I was able to develop and document methods for attending the conference that are extremely effective. The intent is to avoid standing in line, avoid dull content, attend the best sessions, and know about the best after parties. Despite the fact that giving away this method may actually erode the advantage it gives me, I have outlined it below.

1. Arrive just a couple of minutes before doors open for the morning keynote. Follow the guidance of the ushers, but at the first chance you get go directly to the press / analyst area near the front and sit down. Get out notebook and begin looking as busy as possible, which usually means catching up on twitter.

2. Arrive about 5 to 10 minutes late for all breakout sessions. You won't have to stand in line and you can still get a great seatby just walking to front row. This also allows you to avoid the intro slides and get there just in time for the best content.

3. Use twitter constantly. This has lots of advantages. The biggest is that you can find out what the good sessionsare, so that when your session is a dud, you can go directly to a much better session.

4. The second benefit of twitter is that you will hear about all of the parties and dinners that people are attending AND hopefully get yourself invited. To get invited you will need to have done enough twitter posts that others know you are and are curious enough to want to see what you look like.

5. Wait until the last day to get trinkets and swag from the expo hall. None of the exhibitors want to take that stuff home and they will absolutely load you down with bouncy balls, t-shirts, and usb memory keys just to avoid having to pack it back up.

Just a having a little fun on Friday with this post! I hope that everybody enjoyed the conference as much as I did.

Todd

1 Comments Permalink Tags: twitter, delltechcenter, swag, schedule, vmworld08
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I just walked out of my last session for VMWorld 2008 and I've got just a few minutes to put up a quick blog post on my overall impression of the show - It was a great conference.

Some specifics -

VMware has outlined a very broad and forward looking vision of the future. This is in contrast to the past when they seemed to be much more focused on specific feature enhancements. I think that the talk of the vcloud may be a bit early, and there aren't any details yet, but it is a good vision.

The increased focus on building a platform with APIs for 3rd parties to add to the VMware solution is a big deal. This is probably highlighted by the announcement of the Cisco Virtual switch and the stuff coming with enhanced VCB capabilities.

Clients, clients, clients. I think that I am beginning to get the idea that VMware is really interested in doing more on the client. The demos during the keynote as well as the large amount of client related breakout sessions indicates the push. But perhaps most telling was Paul Maritz's comment during his keynote about how he felt that the client opportunity was at least as big as what VMware is today.

These are my impressions - so feel free to offer your own - I would love to hear other perspectives.

I'll be writing more blog posts here about what happened at the show, and also on my home site - www.delltechcenter.com.

Todd

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I have attended a couple of sessions on deploying Exchange 2007 on VMware Virtual Infrastructure and the big difference between these sessions and last year's Exchange sessions is the assumption that it's legit to do it. Last year running Exchange in a VM seemed to still be in doubt, but this year the discussion has shifted to more details about how to do it.

One key factor is the support that Microsoft now provides through the SVVP program that VMware joined and then used to certify ESX 3.5 update 2. I think that the other factor is that people are more comfortable with it and many more have actually tried it.

It's been fun to follow the acceptance of Exchange as a VM and I think that many other apps are following the same path (SQL, Oracle, SAP, etc....)

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: exchange, support, delltechcenter, vmworld08, vmworld07
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These are my notes from the VMWworld 2008 session KNVMWare earlier today that featured Paul Maritz the CEO of VMware. Stephen Herrod and another gentleman from VMware were also on hand to assist with questions.

This are my notes and all questions and answers have been paraphrased. I believe that I got the general intent and thought that those unable to attend might like the quick summary read. (I missed the first couple of questions). Hopefully they will post the audio of this session at some point.

Does he see open source as threat?
PM - Debate internally about whether to OpenSource ESX or not. See need to stay ahead of open source with innovation

Intel FLexmigration - Backward compatible?
SH - No

Will new technologies impact datacenter operations? How do I plan for the new stuff?
PM - Preview available in lab. Working with partners to build platform, chart roadmap

Are you working with AMD on any technologies?
SH - Yes - nested tables, and similar AMD version of flexmigration

Thumb drive for clients - Can it be encrypted / secured?
PM - Intent is to secure local data on thumb drive or local HD and it will be encrypted

vCloud initiative?
OtherGuy - SRM will be extended to work with VCloud federation

How is VDC-OS an OS?
PM - It abstracts away many datacenter details, similar to how OS does for hardware and software. It will have APIs, etc, and be similar to traditional OS, but isn't an OS. Hypervisor is a specific capability within the VDC-OS

Can you delineate the specifics of the Cisco partnership?
PM - Tune into Cisco keynote for details

VDI?
PM -Desktop opportunity is at least as big as VMware is today. Next 12 to 24 months

Multiple Datacenters - How to run VMware across them?
SH - working with partners to overcome limitations of VMotion

SMB, Educational Discounts Products?
PM - There is a program in place, no specific timeline for additional enhancements to existing program

Extension of VMware on MAC platform in future - ACE, Fusion?
PM - Details in ACE, Fusion sessions

Diversification of Hypervisor support? Esp with liability in terms of worm or security failure?
PM - Not today, but we are looking at it and are open to doing it. Issue a few weeks ago was "amateur hour" and it will not happen again

Mid-market opportunity for VMware?
PM - Any org that has a collection of 5 servers has the opp to use VMware with new vCloud. Smaller than that we have other products

In order to use VMware across entire datacenter - need time drift to be fixed?
SH - Challenges with some versions of linux. Move to paravirtualizaiton will alleviate this to great extent

Interested in customer feedback - Advisory council recommends federated Virtual Center for multiple datacenters? When? Need it now
PM - How to scale management across federated datacenters is difficult. 2009 for some, 2010 for more

Virtual Center client for MAC / LInux?
PM - I would love to release one. Need to make a platform independent client

Performance of I/O virtualization? How do you see this area progressing? Working with partners?
SH - Working with partners on accelerators - VMdirect Path, NetQueue - Breakouts on

Protection of data in the cloud?
PM - In general notions of Quality of Service will have to be better defined and included as part of the cloud. We have to evolve to get there - not there today.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: vmware, mac, opensource, intel, delltechcenter, maritz, cloud, vcloud, flexmigration, amd, ceo, vmworld08
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With the announcement from VMware todayit seems clear that VMworld 2008 is going to be about the vision VMware has for its future. This announcement centers around what they are calling a Virtual Data Center OS or VDC-OS. After reading through the press release it seems to be an extension of the things they have been doing in VMware Virtual Infrastucture. Taking virtual center and making it a management hub for more than just VMs. Increasing the intelligence of DRS with SLAs. Improving HA with additional options and features. I think that more details will be revealedin the keynote tomorrow, but it looks like they want to take the concept of cloud computing and allow it to be built on top of their x86 virtualization layer.

At a lower level I think that lots of people are going to be much more interested in running things like Exchange and SQL Server in VMs now that Microsoft and VMWare have worked together through the SVVP to get ESX supported for Microsoft applications. Part of running these mission critical apps can make performance and availability bigger concerns that weren't an issue when VMware was just hosting intranet web sites. I'm attending sessions on Exchange and SQL at VMworld as well as some on disaster recovery.

Of course the newly announced VDC-OS will address these very concerns in many ways. I think that the syncronized VMs feature (that was demoed last year at VMWorld) will be one of the enabling features of the VDC-OS. I am interested to see when it will be made available. Hopefully we will learn more in the next few days.

Todd

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I am scheduled to leave Austin tomorrow and fly through Houston on my way to Las Vegas. As of right now - My flight has not been canceled, but the Houston airport has been closed since Friday due to hurricane Ike. The Houston airport is reopening tomorrow, and hopefully my flight will depart Houston for Las Vegas as scheduled.

The alternatives are not very good. I can cancel my flight with full refund and rebook on another airline through another connecting city, but the cost of the new ticket would be at least 3 times what my flight is currently. So I think I'm going to re-evaluate very early in the morning. I hope that I don't end up traveling all day.

Todd

2 Comments Permalink Tags: vmworld, delltechcenter, travel, ike
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It seems A while back I volunteered to do some presentations the Dell booth and offered a few topics. Yesterday I got an email with the schedule for the sessionsin the Dell booth and it looks like I'm scheduled for Tues and Wed at 2:15! The topics are thing that I talk about all the time - but I need to pull together the slides for the presentations. The first one is about virtualization resources on the web (like www.delltechcenter.com ) and the second is about Exchange and SQL on VMware (which I did some work on earlier this year).

Looks like I will be working on the plane on the flight to vegas!

Todd

3 Comments Permalink Tags: dell, exchange, blog, twitter, delltechcenter, sql
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Getting Ready for VMWorld

Posted by Todd Muirhead Sep 10, 2008


I used the auto session builder thing on vmworld.com to put together my schedule for the conference. Tool works great. I went through and 55 sessions that I really wanted to attend, unfortunately the auto scheduler can only deal with 30, from which it helps you to resolve conflicts and schedule about 5 or 6 a day. This indicates to me just how good I think the conference will be this year. I plan to check out all of the sessions that I couldn't attend via the vmworld.com site after the show.

I also put together a very rough outline of blog posts and tweets I would like to do while at the show. I'm sure that this schedule will completely change once I get to Las Vegas, but the exercise was good to get me thinking about everything from a tweetand blog perspective. I'm looking forward to meeting many from twitter and delltechcenter.comthat will attending.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: dell, blog, twitter, delltechcenter
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Todd Muirhead

 Member since: Sep 10, 2007

A blog devoted to following virtualization from a geeky engineer perspective.

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