No more hiding in the server room

Report from VMworld

Lucky enough to be at VMworld this week in San Francisco. I'm learning a LOT. We currently have 10 VM's in production and will be ramping up to 60 by this time next year. I'm learning that there are some structural things I will go back and repair before moving forward and also learning about the new version 4 of VMWare which I will need to upgrade to before we move forward very farther.

Plus, there's a lot of fun going on. The booths are pretty good and lots of swag.

Anything you want me to find out?? I'll try to post a more detailed report when the conference concludes on Friday.

I'm attending a bunch of breakout sessions as well as some of the larger events. Right now, by big focus is on rebuilding our backup strategy and finding a good product that will do our file-level backups as well as be able to back up the VMDK images to backup the servers.

More later!!

--Chris

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Ayer on September 3, 2009 at 5:08pm

Hi, Chris! No specific questions from me, but I look forward to hearing what's new, what VMWare is currently pushing, what are the hot topics... and don't forget you can post pictures if you see anything interesting.

Thanks!

Elizabeth

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Chris Kamler on September 25, 2009 at 2:16pm

Finally have a little bit of time to give you my impressions of VMworld. As this was my first big tech conference, I can tell you that I was a little bit overwhelmed. I learned a LOT, however.

The biggest messages this year from VMworld were centered around private cloud computing. VMware is doing a lot through HA (High Availability) to make a truly sturdy private cloud for networks to operate in. There weren't a lot of structural changes to VMware in the past year (since the introduction of VSphere 4.0), so this conference was centered around the benefits of VMware from a CIO standpoint.

The other thing that struck me was centered around Thin Clients and Desktop Virtualization. My impression was that this is still a year or two away from becoming mainstream, but will probably be the next "big" thing in Virtualization. It certainly will be our focus in F11 as we will be having a ton of old computers just sitting there getting older (with my IT budget not growing to replace them...)

The technology used at the conference was pretty amazing. They had three full data centers. The first one was just a rack of equipment, and powered the VMware booth. The second rack ran the self-paced labs (which were the highlight of the conference for me... they had about 10 "labs" where you can go through and do different things...) Then the best thing of all was the full-sized datacenter which was HUGE!! You can see a youtube video of them assembling the iron here.

This year we are implementing a $500,000 VMware solution which will hopefully increase our VM's to 100 and cutting our power and cooling costs by half. Additionally, the benefit of knowing that we won't need to spend so much money on physical hardware.

The stuff I learned at VMworld will definitely help me towards this pursuit!!