As part of attending VMworld, I was asked to put together a trip report. I decided to make it into a blog post and share it with everybody who might be interested. I also was using twitter throughout the conference and a good way to see that version of events is through this twitter search.

I started the conference by attending a lunch with some customers. I was the SME for the Exchange table and we had a great discussion about virtualizing Exchange. Some customers had already virtualized Exchange and others were still in the planning phases. Two key points came out of the discussion: Make sure that your storage is sized properly and the move to virtual is a good opportunity to identify any issues with your Exchange environment and fix them. I pointed everybody to the VROOM! blog for lots of indepth info on performance of Exchange and other apps on vSphere.

On Monday night I participated in the VMworld fun run over the Golden Gate bridge. I've run a lot of places, but the golden gate bridge just before sunset was the best. It's difficult to describe the view of the sun setting behind the hills with the Pacific ocean on one side and the bay and the city of San Francisco in the late sunlight on the other. All I can say is that you should see it yourself.

I went to Paul Maritz's keynote on Tuesday morning and then attended several sessions. One was on the military's project to virtualize 750,000 Exchange mailboxes. There are lots of ways that their environment is not typical, but is was interesting to hear how they approached such a big project. I also went to a session on virtualizing SAP which included some cool results showing big performance gains with vSphere and Nehalem (Maybe not so surprising, but interesting none the less). Session on Oracle on vSphere was good and covered support, licensing, and performance (I wish the performance stuff had been first - but maybe I'm a bit biased).

I was one of the facilitators for the Birds of a Feather session on virtualizing databases. The session took place at 5 pm on Tue and Wed. The late timing thinned the crowd a bit, but the discussions we had were good. The first day we talked about performance, licensing, and storage. In storage we talked about how VMFS and RDM provided essentially the same performance, and the default choice should be VMFS. The second day we had a different set of people (including 5 VMware performance engineers) and had a discussion that included some of the same topics. Storage was once again a discussion point with Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS options. Although the BoF sessions were lightly attended, I feel that the people that attended really benefited. We need to figure out how to do a better job of making people aware of these sessions.

On Wed morning I presented Exchange Server 2007 Performance on vSphere as part of 90 minute session on Exchange on vSphere. We had a full room of about 700 and managed to finish on time with about 10 minutes for questions. I had a few questions: How the storage was configured for some of the tests? How would FT perform with more than one VM? and Where the tests done with 10G ethernet for iSCSI and NFS? After the official Q and A we had a group of about 20 come up for more questions and we talked until we were kicked out of the room. I thought that it went great. Thanks to co-presenters Dave Korusunsky, Charles Windom (VMware) and Terrance Chong (Marvell).

I also spent a lot of time at VMworld meeting with people that I normally only interact with over email and twitter. This was probably the most valuable aspect of the conference for me because I work out of the Austin office and don't get many chances to meet face to face. The funny part is that I probably ran into the most people during the big party on Wednesday night. (I thought about trying to list all of the twitterverse that I met, but decided it would take too much time and I would probably leave somebody out.)

Great conference and I look forward to next year.

Todd