VMworld 2008 - Day 1 (added full blog)

VMworld 2008 - Day 1 (added full blog)

So I've written this blog twice now, both times it failing to save and resulting in me loosing everything I wrote, which consumed the last hour of my night. I'll have to take some time to write it all again in the morning because I'm too drained to type it all out for a third time. Lots of information to write, the next time I'll type it out in word and paste it in here to make sure I don't lose it again.

Edit- Added full days blog

Ok so it's back to the drawing board for the Day 1 blog. Yesterday officially kicked off the VMworld event with a lot of big announcements. First off, there was a noticeable difference in the amount of people around compared to Monday. Since this is the 3rd time I've tried to write this blog with no avail I'm just going to dive right into the big announcements. A new datacenter management OS was unveiled with everything being named v(this) or v(that), a spinoff of Apple and their iTunes, iPhoto, i(whatever). The announcement that shocked me the most was the introduction to managed virtual switches. So as most know, when you build out ESX or add a new vSwitch into the host, you get a stock, base, non-configurable switch which just sits out there. Cisco is going to be the first one, but you can put a "Cisco Nexus 1000" in your ESX host which means you can log-in to the virtual switch just like you would to a physical Cisco switch. Telnet right into it and use commands just like you would when you console into a physical Cisco switch. I'm not going to go into all the details of it all because it is still a ways away but should do a lot of good and bridge the feud between networking and virtual folks. I saw a live demo up close and looked to be very slick.

I learned yesterday it isn't all about the sessions and packing your schedule so tight with them that your brain would fry. Not to mention you can just download 95% of all sessions/labs after the conference is over. I cut down my session load to rearrange time for other events but still managed to get into 3 sessions which I felt were very worth my time. The sessions were, Practical Security in a Virtual Infrastructure, ESXtop for Advanced Users, and Managing VMware with Powershell. Like I said all three of those sessions were extremely knowledgeable and brought a handful of things away from each one.

The session that I found the most interesting was the Practical Securing for Virtual Infrastructure. The first five minutes of the session was disclaimer talk and about how this almost didn't get put out there due to legality issues and conflicts with the marketing team since topics that were going to be referenced to haven't been released yet (including products from big time 3rd party vendors like Cisco). They referred to the lab as one done by the "Men in Black" because there was to be no recording, no photography, and there would be no published documentation or PowerPoint slides from the session, it never existed after that time slot. What they did was take a very large, experienced company that has around 300 ESX servers, and 1000's of virtual machines and took a snapshot picture of their infrastructure and made it into a Visio diagram then broke that into different sections, talked about each one. What made it good, what they didn't particularly like and what they would do to change it. A bit of the stuff that was talked about went right over my head, but that's because we don't use it like some of the big companies do but I was furiously writing down notes to keep as much of the information discussed available to myself. They were very personable but the downside of things were they mentioned some things that should, and I quote, never never never ever ever be done for security reasons, and realized, hey that's how our setup is configured... Looks like at some point we'll need to look at these issues and correct them.

ESXtop was very informative and was glad that they brought everyone up to speed so everyone could move forward on the same page. It turns out what we were taught in our VCP training class was just a scratch on the surface for what the ESXtop utility could do for performance monitoring of the ESX host. Not only can you customize the different CPU stats, but you can change the view, and break down performance for memory, disks (in 3.5), disk adapters (hba's), and network. That and you can save the performance stats into a CSV file, then turn around and import that CSV file into windows perfmon to view it in that interface. The speaker was somewhat hard to understand but was very informative, excited to be there and you could tell that he could go on for a day on the subject of ESXtop utility.

With the Managing VMware with Powershell it was, for me at least, a continuation of the Scripting with VI lab. I learned from this class a little more of a basis of why you would use the scripting and what could actually be done, which is just about everything, with a script. Granted scripting is based more for those with a lot of hosts, and tasks such as deploying 20-40 VM's at a time but there are some uses that I could incorporate into our environment. Things like writing a script with looks at all the VM's in the datacenter and displaying the names of VMs with a snapshot that is older than let's say, 1 month. Or you could search all the VM's in a folder and turn up the names that have less than 1GB of memory then turn around and increase the memory to 1GB for those VM's.

The rest of the day I spent with others in the community who are extremely smart within the virtual world. I'm just trying to spend as much time with them not only because they were a pretty laid back group and its good to network out with other people that you interact with on the forum boards, but their knowledge and their experience of being in the virtual field for 6-8+ years is just amazing. I'm just trying to soak in everything they say or explain. Listening to their insight on the new announcements and the changes coming (granted I didn't understand everything they were saying) was amazing. As the day was winding down, John Troyer asked our group to do a quick podcast talking about the first day of VMworld and what we thought of everything that was announced, what sessions you took and how they were. It was fun getting out on the set and just talking having a good time, even though I was last in line so just about everything was discussed in more detail than I could even begin to think of so I just kind of talked about some sessions and what not. Not quite sure when that short podcast will get put up but should be fun to listen to again and hear how it turned out. Since we're into Day 2 I don't want to bleed anything too much between blogs so I'm going to call it a wraps for this Day 1 blog. Bright note was the night of gambling at Treasure Island becoming the hot shooter of the night at the craps table and winning close to 600$ not to mention everyone else quite a bit more.

Here are a few pictures from a podcast which was done with some of the members (including a very short stint by me) of the VMTN boards (sbeaver, ken.cline, jasemccarty, texiwill, john troyer)

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