VMworld 2012 Day 2

Day started off with another great keynote. I really liked the 4 minute challenge for each company to talk about new things they are working on. I thought the HP presentation was the best. Then Chad from EMC did a great job too on the backup solution integration, but he ran over 4 minutes, to be expected I guess. I then sat in on the vMSC session with Duncan Epping. What do you expect other than it was great stuff. This guy is a pure genius. I immediately left there and bought his and Frank Denneman’s new vSphere 5.1 clustering deepdive book. Cannot wait to read it and give feedback on that. I then went onto do some labs. I did the SRM HOL. It was a good lab. Seems the labs were a little slow, but it was just fine. Enough to look forward to doing some more POC testing and then get busy on getting this solution together. I plan on hitting the HOL again tomorrow and Thursday. I then spent a good amount of time talking to some of the VMware folks at the VMware booth. I was able to get some good conversations around PCI compliancy using vShield and vSphere VCM. Cannot wait to get into some good discussions on this. Flat networks for all internal networks, DMZ and PCI segments using this as a solution to fence in vm communications. I had tried vShield a few years ago and didn’t care much for the interface, but plan on checking this stuff out again. I then spoke to another VMware person and had great conversation with him on autodeploy, which uses PXE boot and host templates to deploy your ESXi hosts. I definitely will be doing some more testing on this and doing some write-ups on this. This lead into a few good side conversations with other engineers that were listening in and we were able to go over some similar setups and theories of how to do many different things now and going forward to the future. I again spread the work about Nexenta for a NAS solution. I cannot say enough about them. Also look at the community edition Nexentastor CE, which allows for 18TB of usable storage for you to get a POC together and then you can upgrade to the Enterprise edition when you are ready. And then I had a great time speaking with the guys from CloudPhysics. If you have not checked them out I highly recommend it. I spoke with several of the guys and they are brilliant. What a great view on how things should be heading in a virtualization world. I started using their cloudphysics app last week and it is still in beta, but there are some great things in the future for them. Several of them are former VMware guys and there are only 12 of them currently working for the company. I cannot wait to get back and do some more testing and provide much more feedback and submit some more vCards. Go check them out at the FusionIO booth.