VMworld 2012 Day 1

So after the first day there are some very exciting things coming to vSphere 5.1 that I have heard so far. Some exciting news around vDS which adds management network rollback and recovery, very cool, so if you an issue comes up when migrating your management vmk to vDS it will roll back to the original configuration if vCenter loses communications to the host console. So this will make your comfort level much better when implementing vDS. Another cool feature is network health checking, this will monitor your network environment for misconfigurations such as network adapter teaming, VLAN misconfigurations and MTU settings. You can also now backup your vDS configurations which could be scripted and automated. Another feature is LACP will be supported on vDS if you want to use LACP. Read about more cool things around vDS here. In the keynote what caught my attention was the concept around VDC (Virtual Datacenter) which would include traditional virtualized workloads as well as storage, firewalls, of course network components, load balancers and etc. This will benefit greatly to those that want to host your private cloud and be able to burst to the Cloud and maintain all Layer2 and Layer3 stacks to be available. Or for instance your capacity in your local datacenter is at a max and you want to burst a set number of workloads to the Cloud, those workloads will be part of the same broadcast domain and etc. This is accomplished via an SSL vpn tunnel to the cloud provider. Very exciting. Vcloud Suite is the other major announcement, and from what I understood is that it is a free upgrade to those that already have Enterprise plus licensing. This suite also include VCOPS. Exciting stuff for those IAAS providers for sure as well as everyone else. Another thing to start looking at is VXLAN. This technology is already accepted by many network vendors including Cisco. So this technology will allow your Layer2 networks to float between different sites. I would say the highlight of my day today was listening to the ask the Expert vblogger session, which included Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Chad Sakac (Datacenter Boy), Frank Denneman and Rick Scherer. The brain power was unreal. I know I and for sure everyone else was amazed. I could listen to these guys for hours a day. So much knowledge to be heard. I will be attending another session if I can for sure.

Well this is the end of my post for now and as always stay tuned. I plan on blogging on some of these technologies and concepts in the months ahead as I go through and start testing and such.

See everyone tomorrow for Day 2.

And BTW…..NO MORE vRAM pricing. Per cpu pricing is back!!!