The whitepaper that I finished recently was new for me on many levels. It was my first whitepaper here at VMware which meant that I learned the review and publishing process. ESX 4.0 was also still under development when I started, so I got to learn about how to get new builds and report bugs. Which was all pretty cool.

I also used a NetApp FAS6030 storage array for the testing. Prior to this work I didn't have much exposure to NetApp and I didn't know what to expect. There are a few things that I wanted to note here that were surprising to me in working with the NetApp array for the first time.

1. The snapshots work really well. I was impressed with how the aggregate level snaps worked and how well they performed.

2. NFS on the NetApp array is better than I expected. I didn't think that it would be as close as it ended up being to the FC results.

3. It is really easy to use NFS with ESX. I didn't realize how easy it use NFS as a data store for ESX until I had done the setup.

4. The NetApp people that I worked with were good and it has been cool to interact via twitterand blogs with them as well. OK - so this shouldn't be categorized as surprising.

These were just a few things that didn't really fit in the whitepaper and the type of general stuff I think makes for good blog posts (If you are into this kind of tech stuff).

Todd

My plan for VMworld this year was to get to present another session on a cool topic like virtualizing Exchange, virtualizing SQL Server, or why ESXi is so cool. All three ideas were rejected each with a a separate rejection email (although it was very nicely worded). So I was resolved to just be an attendee this year, and probably spend some time helping out in the Dell booth on the expo floor. Then somebody mentioned doing twitter from VMworld - which fits perfectly with what we are doing here on delltechcenter.com. The details are still being worked out, but Scott and I will both be doing live twitter posts and blogs from the show. So watch this space and our twitter account for what is going on at VMworld 2008.

For the conference, I'm flying in on Monday and leaving Thursday night. I don't get back to Austin until pretty late, but otherwise I got some really nice flight times. I managed to get into the host hotel, the Venetian, so it should be easy to get to and from the conference everyday. I would like to meet any DellTechCenter members that will be at the show and maybe we could even plan to all meet somewhere. Any suggestions?

Todd