August 2015 archive

One of the best parts of VMworld is checking out the Solutions Exchange which is your one stop shop for just about any product or solution for your virtual environment. Vendors bring their best and brightest people to these events so its a fantastic opportunity to learn more about the many great products available for vSphere. I’d thought I’d highlight a few of these vendors in a series of posts that you will not want to miss seeing at VMworld, first up: Turbonomic.

Turbonomic has been around since 2010 and offers a great virtualization management and monitoring tool with a twist. It analyzes your virtualization environment and instead of just reporting issues to you so you can intervene and resolve them, it attempts to resolve them for you. Think of it as instead of having a dumb computer inputting metrics and outputting reports and alerts, it’s like having an intelligent robotic admin in your virtual environment who is capable of making decisions to keep everything running smoothly.

You can visit Turbonomic at VMworld in the Solutions Exchange at Booth #505, besides learning about their great product don’t miss out on a chance to win a $10,000 dream vacation that they are giving away as a grand prize. They will also be doing on-going in-booth sessions on a variety of topics where you also have a chance to win a Pebble watch at each session. Finally if you are looking for something to do and unwind after a busy day at VMworld be sure and join Turbonomic at their VIP cocktail party at the Drake Hotel along with their partners Nutanix and Pure Storage.

To learn more about all the exciting things that Turbonomic has planned for VMworld be sure and visit their blog to find out all the details.

In vChat #38 Simon, Eric, and David talk about what they are using for their vSphere virtual labs (cloud, physical, and virtual), Simon’s new vVNX videos and how vVNX can be used for home labs, and other home lab vSphere storage options, and a VMworld 2015 pre-view (stay tuned to for our next episode where we will spend the whole show talking about VMworld). JOIN US to learn more!

The subject of one of the emails that I received this week from VirtualizationAdmin.com caught my eye:

[important]VMware vSphere ESX – Voted VirtualizationAdmin.com Readers’ Choice Award Winner – Hypervisors
Date: 20 Aug. 2015 | Author: The Editor
VMware vSphere ESX was selected the winner in the Hypervisors category of the VirtualizationAdmin.com Readers’ Choice Awards. Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer were runner-up and second runner-up respectively.[/important]

My first thought was: ESX? How could a hypervisor that was retired by VMware many years ago be selected today as the most popular hypervisor? If you remember your vSphere history the ESX hypervisor was dropped in vSphere 5.0 (2011) and ESX 4.1 Update 3 which was released on 8/30/2012 was the last version of ESX available. ESXi which was first introduced on 1/10/2008 with VI3 version 3.5 was the sole hypervisor available in vSphere 5.0 and onward.

I find it a bit humorous how many of us VMware old timers still cling to the past and use the ESX term to this day for the hypervisor thereby refusing to acknowledge the death of ESX after the birth of it’s successor, ESXi. I’ll admit I slip up and still use the term now and then as ESX is still roaming around in my head as the hypervisor that I grew up learning virtualization on. I even find it to this day in many documents and presentations from both VMware and its partners. There are even websites still named after it (Vladan 😉 and the landing page on VMware’s website for ESXi still has ESX in the URL.

These days I’m pretty careful to not use the old term in anything I publish either in on my blog or in the docs I publish and maintain at work as my urge to be technically correct overrides any desire to use the old term. So when I saw it pop-up in that virtualizationadmin.com survey I had to wonder what they were thinking using that old term. Either they were being ignorant (doubtful), not thorough with editing (possibly) or funny (maybe).

Who knows, either way long live ESX, the hypervisor that changed the data center and continues to rule it to this day!

VMworld is upon us and once again you must pick which sessions you want to try and see. With so many sessions (over 750+) and so few time slots (maybe 25 max) it becomes a real challenge to try and pick the sessions you want to see. In general I choose based on the topics that I’m interested in and more importantly who the speaker is. So below are my top picks, some of them may be full already but you can get on the waiting list or just show up and try and get in. You can also watch them online after VMworld once they are posted. One thing to note any session that has a SPO in the session number indicates a sponsor (paid) session that made it in outside the normal voting process.

Virtual Volumes sessions:

Virtual Volumes is VMware’s hot new storage architecture for external storage arrays and there are a lot of good sessions on this topic. Being slightly biased of course I have to start off with my session. Ken & Patrick are great VMware technical resources for VVols, Howard Marks is always worth a watch and I’m curious as to how backup vendors are integrating with VVols so the Symantec session sounds interesting.

• STO5888 – Top 10 Thing You MUST Know Before Implementing Virtual Volumes (VVols) – Eric Siebert – Thurs – 10:30-11:30
• STO5522 – Virtual Volumes Technical Panel- Ken Werneburg (VMware), Eric Siebert and others – Wed – 1:00-2:00
• STO5822 – Putting Virtual Volumes to Work — Storage Best Practices for vSphere 6 and Beyond – Howard Marks – Wed – 8:00-9:00
• STO4649 – Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive – Ken Werneburg, Patrick Dirks (VMware) – Wed – 11:30-12:30
• STO5844 – Benchmark Testing: Making Backups Better Than Ever Using Virtual Volumes – VMware/Symantec – Thurs – 10:30-11:30
• STO6552-GD – Meet the Virtual Volumes Engineering Team with Patrick Dirks – Wed – 9:30-10:30
• STO6553-GD – Meet the Virtual Volumes Product Team with Ken Werneburg and Ben Meadowcroft – Mon – 1:30-2:30

Virtual SAN sessions:

Virtual SAN has been around for a while now but there is some new stuff being announced that should be interesting. You can probably guess one of the new things from one of the session titles below. Cormac, Rawlinson and Duncan are great technical experts so the sessions should be very good.

• STO6050 – Virtual SAN: The Software-Defined Storage Platform of the Future- Rawlinson Rivera – Wed – 9:30-10:30
• STO5333 – Building a Stretched Cluster with Virtual SAN – Rawlinson Rivera/Duncan Epping – Tues – 11:00-12:00
• STO5336 – VMware Virtual SAN – Architecture Deep Dive – Rawlinson Rivera – Wed 3:30-4:30
• STO6228 – Monitoring and Troubleshooting Virtual SAN, Current and Future- Cormac Hogan – Wed 8:30-9:30

Other sessions:

A lot of these are based on people I know and enjoy seeing such as Chris Wolf, William Lam, Scott Lowe & Mike Foley. I also like deep dive technical sessions so the ones on vMotion and Compute/Memory look interesting. I’m also curious about the emerging container (cloud-native apps) space that should have a big focus at VMworld this year. I also noticed VMware plans on releasing a VM encryption solution so that should be an interesting one. I’m not much of a networking or VDI person so I tend to avoid those but there certainly looked like a number of great sessions in those areas as well.

• STO6631-SPO – GreyHairs on Storage – The Podcast Live on Stage – Howard Marks/Ray Lucchesi – Mon – 2:00-3:00
• INF4528 – vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks- William Lam – Mon – 5:00-6:00
• INF4936 – Insight Into vSphere 6 vMotion: Architecture, Features, Performance and Debugging – VMware – Wed – 2:30-3:30
• NET6606-GD – Container Challenges with Scott Lowe – Tues – 5:30-6:30
• INF4758 – vSphere 6 Security Update – Mike Foley – Tues – 12:30-1:30
• INF5177 – VMworld 2015 – vSphere Security – Fact .vs. Fiction – Mike Foley – Wed – 4:00-5:00
• INF5701 – Extreme Performance Series: vSphere Compute & Memory – VMware – Thurs – 10:30-11:30
• INF5093 – vSphere Web Client – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow – VMware – Wed – 11:00-12:00
• INF5339 – Protect your VM data with VM Encryption for vSphere and vCloud Air- VMware – Wed – 8:00-9:00
• CTO6121 – VMware and the ‘Internet-of-Things’ – Chris Wolf – Tues – 5:30-6:30
• CTO6455 – Future Meets Present: Insights from VMware Field CTOs – Chris Wolf, Paul Strong, Joe Baguley – Wed – 11:30-12:30
• CNA5698 – Building your Next Infrastructure Specifically for Cloud Native Apps – Eric Gray/Michael West – Tue – 5:30-6:30
• CNA6647-GD – Provisioning Containers to vSphere with Benjamin Corrie – Thurs 10:30-11:30
• CNA6649-S – Build and run Cloud Native Apps in your Software-Defined Data Center- Kit Colbert – Mon 3:00-4:00

If you’re attending VMworld this year come see my session to learn everything that you need to know about implementing VMware’s new Virtual Volume (VVol) storage architecture. Unfortunately they stuck me on the last day (Thursday @ 10:30am) so after you recover from your hangover from the VMworld party Wednesday evening come on by to my session. Right now I have over 450 people registered for it. My session also made the list of Virtualization Review’s top 5 VMworld sessions to attend. You can find it in the session catalog by searching on my name.

Also be sure and check out the VVols technical panel (STO5522) hosted by Ken Werneburg from VMware and featuring myself as a panelist along with representatives from Dell, NetApp, HDS, IBM & EMC on Wednesday at 1:00pm.